Law and Order: Organized Crime: "The Wild and the Innocent" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired February 23, 2023)

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

The Law and Order: Organized Crime episode that followed, “The Wild and the Innocent,” was a good deal better than this show usually is, basically because ot broke its usual allegiance to the Great God SERIAL and instead told a story that was complete in one episode. (Thank you to Dock Wolf and his staff of writers and show runners for doing that and not creating a cliffhanger that we’d have to wait for a whole month to see resolved.) The story opens with a young couple being dropped off a few blocks from home after a dinner date, only as soon as they get our of their ride-share car they’re both assaulted by gang members driving both motorcycles and cars. He’s killed and she’s kidnapped. It turns out that she’s Janelle Carver (Brnadi Bravo), daughter of “Sins of Satan” motorcycle-gang leader David Carver (Michael Biehn, a name I’ve actually heard of elsewhere). David is an old Marine buddy of Detective Elliott Stabler (series star Christopher Meloni), and the kidnapping of his daughter was part of a plot by a much nastier rival motorcycle-gang leader, Peter Grimes (Ronnie Gene Blevins) to get the Sins of Satan gang involved in a plot to sell untraceable plastic “ghost guns” to a Latino drug cartel. Only various other agencies get involved on both the good and bad sides of the ledger; on the good side (more or less) are a squad of agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, who interrupt the proceedings just when the New York ccops have set up a controlled drug buy, and on the definitely bad side there’s the leader of the drug cartel, who decides he doesn’t need the Anglo middlemen anymore and enters the action with the intent of knocking off both cops and fellow crooks and grabbing the ghost guns for himself.

There’s one of the engagingly quirky characters this show is known for, Julius Hayes (Ethan Dubin), who’s made the ghost guns and used a special kind of polymer so they can be fired repeatedly without melting under the heat of real bullets he way most plastic guns do. One of the Organized Crime Control Bureau’s officers is assigned the task of impersonating Julius, since no one on the cartel or the gang brokering the gun deal has actually met him. The cops also take over the actual manufacture of the guns and deliberately disable the firing pins son they won’t risk flooding the criminal world of New York City and elsewhere with working models of untraceable guns. That seemed unnecessarily risky to me, given the likelihood that one of the crooks involved in buying the guns – either the cartel leader orthe motorcycle gang – would test-fire at least one of the guns to make sure it worked. Certainly it would have made more sense for the cops to leave a few guns operational in the mix and put those on top. But at least this episode ended powerfully, with David Carver confronting Peter Grimes (did they deliberately grab the name “Peter Grimes” from the prtagonist of Benjamin Britten’s second, and most commercially successful, opera?) and having a crisis of conscience: shoot the man who kidnapped his daughter and killed her fiancé, or let the cops arrest him instead?