Law and Order: Organized Crime: "Original Sin" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired March 14, 2024)

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

The Law and Order: Organized Crime episode that followed, “Original Sin,” was as usual the weakest of the three, though Dick Wolf’s writers (here, Liz Sagal and Bridget Tyler) also came up with a quite powerful and unusually interesting villain. The bad guy is Eric Bonner (Will Janowitz), son of retired judge Clay Bonner (Keith Carradine, playing a small-town boss but something of a comedown after he was President of the United States on the sorely missed TV series Madam Secretary) and brother of police chief Meredith Bonner (Jennifer Ehle) in the small town of Westbrook on Long Island. “Original Sin” continued and wrapped up (more or less) a story arc we’ve been watching for several episodes in which Wolf’s writers and show runners have been paying obeisance to the Great God SERIAL and making the shows’ stories continuous (a recent TV trend I frankly loathe). Bonner and Elliott Stabler (Christopher Meloni) are investigating the murders of young female prostitutes hired to “entertain” the guests at parties given by the local D.A., who was our initial prime suspect, but ultimately the finger points to Eric and in the big climax he kidnaps Stabler and takes him to a church he’s remodeling (which is what he does for a living). It turns out Eric is a religious freak who kidnaps prostitutes and essentially crucifies them in order to redeem their souls and make them atone for their sins so after he dispatches them they’ll go to heaven instead of hell. Ultimately Stabler’s colleagues at the Organized Crime Control Bureau hunt him down and it turns out he walked out on a psychiatric evaluation ordered by a Black Internal Affairs officer who blames Stabler and his father for disgracing his father’s ex-partner, who sponsored the Internal Affairs guy’s police career and later committed suicide (he “ate his gun,” as the slang term goes), so he’s determined to ruin Stabler at all costs. It’s an O.K. story and it does give us a few nice glimpses of Christopher Meloni’s jeans-clad crotch (maybe he’s more grizzled than he was in his SVU days but his basket is as impressive as ever), but as usual it’s the least of the three remaining shows in Dick Wolf’s Law and Order franchise.