Law and Order: Organized Crime: "The Last Supper" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired February 8, 2024)

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

Afterwards NBC showed a Law and Order: Organized Crime episode that, in line with the decision of Dick Wolf and his writers and show runners to make this the one show in Wolf’s series franchise that worships at the shrine of the Great God SERIAL, followed up on the previous week’s show in which the detectives of the Organized Crime Control Bureau raided the mobile lab of “Los Santos,” a Latino gang that (at least according to the premises of this show) control all the fentanyl distribution on the east coast and concoct the stuff inside a mobile lab. Previously Detective Elliott Stabler (Christopher Meloni) had infiltrated the gang as an undercover agent and nearly persuaded its leader to turn himself in and turn state’s evidence against the rest of the gang – only during the police raid on the truck that contained the lab, he was exposed to a fatal overdose of fentanyl and died. His brother, Carlo Pescador (Jimmy Gonzalez) – I wonder if giving this family a last name that’s the Spanish for “fisherman” was supposed to be symbolic of something – is determined to take over the gang and also to keep his former sister-in-law Bryanna Pescador (Natalie Ceballos) from ratting out the gang. In a scene that sounds positively (or negatively) Trumpian, Carlo confronts Bryanna and demands her “loyalty” to him and the gang. Bryanna is actually determined to testify and bring down the gang, and her son Lucas (Isaac Arellanes) is O.K. with that, but her daughter Kiki (Isa Yamileth) is secretly in touch with Carlo. She’s reluctant to go into the Witness Protection Program after her mom testifies, meaning that she’d have to start a whole new location and cut herself off from contact with her boyfriend, her school friends and everyone she knows.

The cops confiscate the family’s cell phones, but Kiki gets in touch with Carlo anyway through a burner phone she’s bought for this purpose, and in the final scene Carlo sends a hit squad to Bryanna’s home intent on killing her so she doesn’t testify. She escapes, as does Kiki, but Lucas is fatally shot and so is Kiki’s boyfriend, who just happened to pick the wrong time to try to see her. I didn’t care for this episode for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that writers John Shoban and Liz Segal made one of the big mistakes the SVU writers used to make when Meloni was on that show, too: they went too far into the complications of Stabler’s personal life to the point where the show turned into Law and Order: The Soap Opera. Not only have they introduced the thoroughly obnoxious character of Stabler’s older brother Randall (Dean Norris, a Danny DeVito type), they’ve brought back Stabler’s ne’er-do-well son Richard (Jeffrey Scaperotta), who got a dishonorable discharge from the U.S. Army (where he enlisted against dad’s wishes because he hoped it would “make a man” of him) because when he was stationed in Afghanistan he stole some trinkets that turned out to be historically important artifacts. The various generations of Stablers are together to arrange for Stabler’s crazy mother Bernadette (Ellen Burstyn, who’s a welcome sight but not in this annoying role) to move into “assisted living” (i.e., a nursing home), and in the crucial scene Randall steals Elliott’s cell phone so Elliott doesn’t get the warning about the assault on Bryanna Pescador until it’s too late. The show ends with Elliott being suspended from the police force for assaulting Kiki Pescador’s boyfriend and his immediate superior, Black Lesbian Sergeant Ayanna Bell (Danielle Moné Truitt) in the hospital with a bullet wound sustained during the shoot-out. Though she and her wife broke up about a year before, her ex gets the call when Bell is near death in the hospital. It was an O.K. episode but a major come-down after the quality of the previous shows on last night’s run!