Law and Order: Organized Crime: "Missing Persons" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired February 22, 2024)

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

The Law and Order: Organized Crime episode that followed, “Missing Persons,” was also moving despite a rather slow opening in which Detective Elliott Stabler (Christopher Meloni, older and more grizzled than he was in his SVU days but still hot) is already suspended from the New York Police Department and being hounded by agent of the department’s Internal Affairs Bureau. Stabler is also on the prowl for a missing young girl, though this time the victim he’s seeking is Romanian émigré Rita Lasku (Izabela Vidovic), who was lured by human traffickers to the U.S. with promises of well-paying work and was turned out as a prostitute. Stabler had thought he got Rita out of that life, and as a symbol of her liberation he gave her a public-domain copy of Alexandre Dumas père’s The Count of Monte Cristo (also a story about a prisoner who escaped against all odds and found wealth and justice). Only Rita disappeared again, and though he’s suspended from the police force and therefore has no more authority than any other ordinary citizen, Stabler investigates. He traces her to a party hosted by corrupt Long Island district attorney Noah Cahill (Reed Diamond), who lures teenage hookers to his “do’s,” forces them to “entertain” his horndog male guests, and ultimately kills them.

In the course of his illegal investigation Stabler stumbles upon another missing girl, Christine Olston (Christina Leonardi), who started turning tricks after she decided she wanted to go to her high-school prom in a fancy dress which her parents Collin (Ric Sechrest) and Journey (Amy Lynn Stewart) told her they couldn’t afford to buy her. Collin said she could have the dress if she could earn the money for it herself, and so she set out to do just that – only she worked one of Cahill’s parties, and Cahill kidnapped her and held her hostage in a concrete bunker along the beach left over from World War II. Apparently the U.S. military during World War II was sufficiently concerned that the Germans would attempt an amphibious invasion along the Atlantic that they installed these fortifications just in case they were needed to repel one. Cahill initially has the support of the hard-edged woman who’s the chief of the Long Island police, Captain Nazanin Shah (Nicole Shalhoub, who according to Google is not related to actor Tony Shalhoub), but eventually she comes around to Stabler’s side when he rescues Christine Olston alive and, alas, finds Rita Lasku dead and buried in a shallow grave on the beach. Stabler also recruits the help of the Organized Crime Control Bureau’s outside consultant, computer whiz Dr. Kyle Vargas (Tate Ellington), who seems put out when Stabler tells him he’s not an official part of the force and therefore can help him with information without risking repercussions, including disciplinary proceedings against him. The reason seemed obvious to me: as a consultant, Vargas is not subject to police discipline and therefore could assist a disgraced, suspended officer freely without suffering any consequences.

There’s also a subplot involving both Stabler’s older brother Randall (Dean Norris) but his younger brother Eli (Nicky Torchia), who after a life on the outskirts of the law seems finally to have found gainful and legitimate employment as a wine distributor – he even sends a bottle of his stock to the Stabler family reunion. Only Stabler finds a folded piece of aluminum foil Eli left behind at the reunion party with some sort of chemical residue on it. We’re not sure exactly what it is, but it’s clearly some sort of illegal psychochemical substance and its appearance among Eli’s effects gives the lie to his assertion that he’s now on the straight and narrow. It’s one of those annoying hints Dick Wolf’s writers (here, Amy Berg) like to drop these days now that Organized Crime, unlike the other shows in Wolf’s Law and Order franchise, worships at the shrine of the Great God SERIAL, which is neither developed nor resolved but simply deposited in the Writers’ Cliché Bank for future withdrawal. I thought Berg had done well enough setting up the story arc of the corrupt D.A. who’s also a serial killer – they find three more bodies besides Rita’s on that stretch of beach and realize Cahill is a psychopathic multiple murderer – but no-o-o-o-o, like a lot of Lifetime writers she didn’t know when to stop. Still, this was one of the better Organized Crime episodes, and one which offered Christopher Meloni the chance to play warmth and pathos instead of being just the implacable revenge machine we’re used to seeing him do.