Law and Order: Organized Crime; "Whipping Post" (Wolf Entertainment. Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired November 17, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

For once the Law and Order: Organized Crime episode which closed the evening was considerably less of a let-down than most of them have been. The episode begins with an officious bitch from “One P.P.” (short for “One Police Plaza,” headquarters of the New York Police Department)( coming to the head of the Organized Crime Control Bureau, Sergeant. Ayanna Bell (Danielle Moné Truitt), to tell her that within a week the NYPD is dissolving the unit and its cases will be reassigned to other departments. We’re not told why, but it’s not hard to guess: influential mega-developer Robert Silas, who is building Manhattan’s first full-service gambling casino and is prepared to let nothing stand in his way no matter how many people he has to have killed, is pulling strings to get the NYPD brass to shut down the Organized Crime Control Bureau becuse they’re busting too many of his Mafia connections. The main intrigue in this episode is the near-death of Silas’s daughter-in-law Pearl Serrano (Camilla Belle) from a scarf laced with belladonna poison, which was secretly given to her by Silas’s hired hit-man Luca Bellucci (Gian-Murray Gianino). Needless to say, Pearl’s husband Teddy Silas (Gus Halper( is shocked, shocked! to find that his dad ordered a hit on his wife, which seems to have been motivated by the old man’s fear that Pearl’s pregnancy could lead to the Serrano family claiming a part-interest on the mega-casino. It’s a pretty predictable story of how the super-rich can literally get away with it (and I’m sure that Dick Wolf’s writers were a least in part thinking of the Trumps when they invented the Silases). There’s also an interesting frustrated-romance subplot between Detective Elliott Stabler (Christopher Meloni, older and more grizzled than he was during his Law and Order: Special Victims Unit days but still a welcome sight and the main reason I watched this show regularly) and Interpol officer Tia Leonardi (Ayelet Zurer), with whom he worked in Italy during his 12-year sojourn there (which is how Wolf’s writers covered his missing years from the Law and Order franchise – years during which Meloni should have been playing Jack Reacher in the films of Lee Child’s novels, since he was just the right type for the part and Tom Cruise, who eventually got it, was completely miscast),but to whom he apparently never actually made love, either in Italy (when his wife Kathy, who was killed off in the first episode of Organized Crime, was still alive) oir this time around (after he became a widower and was therefore still single). It seems they got to spend one night together when she came to his apartment, but he slept on the couch and she heard him calling a woman’s name as he slept, though we’re not told whose name. Was it Kathy, or someone else?