Law and Order: Organized Crime: "Beyond the Sea" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired February 29, 2024)

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

The Law and Order: Organized Crime episode that followed SVU February 29 was called “Beyond the Sea” (not to be confused with the great French ballad by Charles Trenet that became a U.S. hit for Bobby Darin) and, in the only Law and Order franchise show in which Dick Wolf worships at the shrine of the Great God SERIAL, it was both a continuation of the previous week’s show, “Missing Persons,” and a setup for the next one, “Original Sin” – which in one of the maddening hiatuses (hiati?) that have beset these series in the season of the writers’ and actors’ strikes we won’t get to see until March 14, almost two weeks from now. The continuing story revolves around Romanian expatriate Rita Lasku (Izabela Vidovic), whom Detective Elliott Stabler (Christopher Meloni) thought he had successfully rescued from human traffickers who had turned her out as a prostitute, only she somehow got back into “the life” and two years later ended up dead and buried on the beach outside the town of Westbrook in Long Island. Westbrook is ruled as a private fiefdom by retired judge Clayton Bonner (Keith Carradine, who played the President of the United States in the CBS-TV series Madam Secretary from 2014 to 2019 and therefore has some experience portraying an imposing authority figure. Judge Bonner has installed his daughter Meredith (Jennifer Ehle) as Westbrook’s police chief, and his response to the discovery of nine bodies of young women, including Rita’s, buried on his town’s beach is to tell Meredith that it’s more important for her to maintain the town’s upbeat and tourist-safe image than to solve the crime.

In addition to Meredith, Clayton Bonner has a scapegrace son, Eric (Will Janowitz), whom the writers (John Shiban and Will Pascoe) seem to be setting up as a prime suspect. Until midway through this episode, it seemed like the serial killer would turn out to be the local district attorney, Noah Cahill (Reed Diamond), who regularly hosted parties featuring underage female prostitutes whom he essentially offered as party favors for his middle-aged horndog-male “guests.” Then midway through the show Stabler, who’s not only out of his jurisdiction but is under suspension by the New York Police Department’s Internal Affairs Bureau and is grilled by a male African-American officer who seems eager to get rid of him and his troublesome ways of stretching the law if not outright breaking it in the interests of justice, and Chief Bonner go to Cahill’s home and discover him dead, shot on the glass roof of his living room. (Were the writers thinking Jeffrey Epstein here?) This run of Organized Crime episodes has been a bit more interesting than usual for this series; these scripts are giving Christopher Meloni the chance to play the same sort of edgy character he was on SVU for its first 12 seasons and the show is a lot more fascinating when the bad guys are white people with money than scrungy-looking people of color without much of it (though in its earlier years Organized Crime did some effective story arcs about corrupt upper-class African-Americans that proved that corruption doesn’t discriminate by race).