Law and Order: Organized Crime: "End of Innocence" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired February 1, 2024)

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

The Law and Order: Organized Crime episode that followed seemed to me to be the weakest of the three shows run last night, though it had its moments. It was a continuation of the immediately previous episode in which we were told that the imam of a local New York mosque was killed by a Dutch-born hit person identified in the imdb.com cast list only as “The Blond Man” (Myles Delahunty) who wasn’t on the radar of any U.S. police database but was wanted by Interpol for his activities in several European countries. The reason the bad guys in this story wanted the imam killed was because he was about to blow the whistle on a gang that was using people to smuggle stolen jewels into the U.S. by building pouches in their actual bodies. The idea was that the gang’s payroll included a surgeon who would open the wounds, extract the jewels, and give them to the gang – only the cops cotton to this when at least two of the unwilling “mules” get sepsis from the unclean conditions in which the doctor has to perform the operations and subsequently die. One of the victims gets the shit beaten out of him by out-of-control Detective Bobby Reyes (Rick Gonzalez), who’s on the thin edge of a nervous breakdown after his girlfriend, fellow NYPD Detective Jet Slootmaekers (Ainsley Seiger), dumps him, presumably for the Organized Crime Control Bureau’s artificial intelligence consultant, Dr. Kyle Vargas (Tate Ellington).

The show hasn’t come right out and said that Jet and Dr. Vargas are lovers, or on their way to becoming same, but it’s broadly hinted that she’s attracted to him because, even though he’s older and considerably less sexy than Reyes, he’s a fabulously rich tech entrepreneur and he’s also got a high-tech background in state-of-the-art computing while Reyes is just a hot-tempered officer who also happens to be a hot stud. (Reyes is also supposed to be married, so his affair with Jet was extra-relational.) In the end the head of the Organized Crime Control Bureau, Sgt. Ayanna Bell (Danielle Moné Truitt), a Black Lesbian cop (though she broke up with her girlfriend about a year and a half ago and we haven’t seen her romantically or sexually involved with anyone since), sends Reyes to her own psychiatrist so he can get help without it going on his official police record that he’s in therapy. And Our Hero, Detective Elliott Stabler (Christopher Meloni), shoots and kills the blond Dutch hit man in a gun battle atop a tall building, taking him out surprisingly easily given that half the police forces in the European Union have been after him for years. There’s also a Chinese woman, Ji-Ann Youn (Cindy Chang), who has a curio shop that’s a front for renting guns to various people who want to commit crimes with untraceable firearms, whom Jet busts in the final scenes. Maybe it was because my husband Charles came home from work relatively early during this show and caught me filling in the character names on my copy of the imdb.com page on my computer, but this Organized Crime episode wasn’t holding my attention all that well even though Christopher Meloni is still one of the men of my dreams and Rick Gonzalez has become another one!