Law and Order: Organized Crime: "Punch Drunk" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired February 2, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Third and last in the cycle was Law and Order: Organized Crine, an episode called “Punch Drunk” whose main intrigue was a staged professional fistfight between representatives of Eamonn Murphy’s (Timothy V. Murphy) gang and the Italian-Americans he’s trying to take over from, led by Michael Amato (Don DiPetta,which frankly sounds like a better name than the milquetoast “Michael Friend” they actually called his character!). Though the bout is referred to as “bare-knuckled fighting,” when it actually takes place both fighters are wearing boxing gloves. This one features Eamonn Murphy feeding Jack, his pet bulldog, a human hand for dinner – though both my husband Charnes and I thought it was one of the3 phoniest-looking props we’d ever seen – and demanding that Elliott Stabler (Christopher Meloni) turn over 80 percent of the profits from the bar he supposedly owns as “protection” money. Stabler manages to talk him down to 50 percent. The most intriguing plot line deals with Detective Jet Slootmaekers (Ainsley Seiger), who’s gone undercover to date Murphy’s second-in-command, Seamus O’Meara (Michael Malarkey), and the understandable concern of her superior officer,Sergeant Ayanna Bell (Danielle Moné Truitt) as to where her loyalties truly are.

Is she genuinely in love with Seamus or just putting on an act? There’s also a subplot involving Bell being the target of a vendetta from her superior officer because she didn’t take the promotion that was offered her in a previous episode. She didn’t want to get entangled in the inner politics of One Police Plaza (the grandiloquent address of the real New York Police Department, but that decision and her desire to continue with the Organized Crime Control Bureau (which her higher-ups wanted to disband) has not set well with the police bosses, and so they’re out to get her. In the end Jet gets “outed” when, thanks to a spectacularly ill-timed call from Sgt. Bell, she’s “outed” by Seamus as a police officer and he overpowers her and locks her in the trunk of his car, then drives off. That’s the cliffhanger ending, and to make it even more annoying we’re going to have to wait two weeks instead of the usual one to learn how it all tu9rns out. I guess Dick Wolf resisted worshiping at the shrone of the Great God SERIAL as long as he could, but even he couldn’t resist the siren call of modern-day audience who actually like these annoying continuous plot lines; I’ll never forget the comment of one of the presenters at a ConDor science-fiction convention Charles and I attended in which he said younger audiences couldn’t relate to the original late-1960’s Star Trek episodes because of the very fact I like about them: each episode was a complete story in itself without any of those infuriating cliffhangers and continuous plot lines!