Law and Order: Organized Crime: "Deliver Us from Evil" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal, NBC-TV, aired January 25, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Fortunately, the next show in the Law and Order cycle, a Law and Order: Organized Crime episode called “Deliver Us from Evil,” about a New York mosque which is bombed to cover up the deliberate and targeted assassination of the mosque’s imam (a spiritual leader of a Muslim congregation the way a minister is in a Christian church or a rabbi is in a Jewish synagogue), was better. It begins with a graffiti artist spray-painting the outside of the mosque with a slogan, “DIE MUSLIM PIGS,” but it turns out the artist, Asher Klein (Ben Heineman) – obviously Dick Wolf and his show runner were leading us up the garden path by making the graffitist Jewish and thereby hinting it had something to do with the conflict in Gaza – was hired to do it by two mysterious men. Unfortunately Klein is put in a hospital, where a blond man who presumably is one of the two men who hired him mugs a cop, steals his uniform, infiltrates the hospital and kills Klein by injecting a toxic drug into his IV. The main characters are Detective Elliott Stabler (Christopher Meloni) and a Muslim police officer named Samir Bashir (Abubakr Ali), who’s married a white woman named Stacy (Gaby Slape). Stacy had converted to Islam and the two had had a child, with another on the way. Stacy was at the mosque the morning it was bombed, but luckily she was in another room and survived.

Officer Bashir volunteered to be part of the investigation by the New York Police Department’s hate-crimes unit, headed by Captain Nazanin Shah (Nicole Shalhoub), but she turned him down because his wife was a potential victim. So he goes to the Organized Crime Control Bureau and tries to get them to investigate, and inveterate rule-breaker Stabler joins him. The two ultimately recover a bullet slug from the wall of the ruined mosque, confirming Stabler’s and Bashir’s hunch that the imam was shot and killed before the bomb went off. The episode also features a reunion between Stabler and his long-lost brother Randall (Dean Norris, who doesn’t look that much like Christopher Meloni but is enough in the ballpark that he’s at least faintly credible). Their mother Bernadette (Ellen Burstyn, an old pro who’s still giving the youngsters lessons in what acting is all about) wanted Randall but, suffering from some sort of age-related dementia, isn’t sure who he is when he finally shows up. Randall, it seems, has spent the last 20 years or so living in Florida; writers Will Tyler and Bridget Pascoe drop hints that he’s been making his living in something unseemly if not downright criminal, but they don’t specify what it is. Stabler’s immediate boss at OCCB, Black Lesbian Sargeant Ayanna Bell (Danielle Moné Truitt), has long-term “issues” with Captain Shah, mostly turf wars over whose unit has jurisdiction over various cases. It’s a better than average Organized Crime episode, partly because the villains are pretty ordinary human beings without the extraordinary levels of sophistication and partly because it comes to at least some sort of resolution, even though the finish is pretty open-ended in the fashion of this show’s worship (which Dick Wolf’s other Law and Order shows have blessedly avoided) of the Great God SERIAL.