Law and Order: Organized Crime: "Sins of Our Fathers" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired March 21, 2024)

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

Afterwards the Dick Wolf night continued with a Law and Order: Organized Crime episode that, as usual, wasn’t as good as the Law and Order and SVU shows that preceded it but had its points. It was basically a continuation of the earlier run of episodes that were kicked off by the discovery of women’s bodies on the beaches outside the fictional (I presume) Long Island town of “Westbrook,” and the overall role played by the town’s political and social boss, retired judge Clay Bonner (Keith Carradine), in covering up a series of serial murders of real or suspected prostitutes by Bonner’s son Eric (Will Janowitz). In the last episode, “Original Sin,” Eric was caught in the act of torturing and preparing to murder New York police detective Elliot Stabler (Christopher Meloni) when his sister, Westbrook police chief Meredith Bonner (Jennifer Ehle), burst in and shot him dead to protect Stabler and save his life. This episode was called “Sins of Our Fathers” and centers around Meredith Bonner’s growing realization that her mother, Karen Bonner (Patricia Hurley), whose remains were found on the same beach as all of Eric’s victims, was killed not by her brother but by her dad. Officially Karen just left the family and disappeared for parts unknown – at least that’s what Clay told both his kids, though later we learn that Eric actually saw his dad dispose of his mom’s body on That Beach and that’s what gave him the psychological compulsion to kill supposedly “loose” women and bury them in similar fashion.

The longer this episode ran the more I noticed the similarities between this storyline and Edgar G. Ulmer’s 1944 film Bluebeard, which starred John Carradine – Keith Carradine’s father – in a similar tale of an outwardly good and even charming young man who is a serial killer laboring under a similar psychological compulsion. In Bluebeard John Carradine’s character was an artist and puppeteer, Gaston Morel; in this Organized Crime story ark Eric was a woodworker who made his living restoring old churches, Both characters singled out their victims out of an obsession with fear, guilt and religious mania; Morel killed his models after learning that the woman who’d posed for his portrait of Joan of Arc was a prostitute, and Eric tortured his victims, all prostitutes hired to service the party guests of the Westbrook prosecuting attorney (his dad’s good friend), to death inside the churches he was hired to restore before bringing them home and burying them on the beach. And the 1944 Bluebeard featured both of Keith Carradine’s parents; not only was his dad the star but his mom, John Carradine’s then-wife Sonia Sorel, was in the film in a small role. (Keith’s late older brother David was John Carradine’s son by a previous wife, Ardelle McCool.) In “Sins of Our Fathers” we learn that Clay Bonner was the mastermind of a private-prison investment scheme that enriched himself and his friends; by controlling both the Westbrook prosecutor’s office and its judicial system, Clay Bonner ensured that there would be a steady stream of inmates for the network of private for-profit prisons he and his business partners were building in the neighborhood. Meredith Bonner and Elliot Stabler learn all this through a prisoner named Logan (Jon Collin Barclay) who 20 years before had been convicted of murdering a Westbrook police officer. He’s been insisting all along he was framed, and it turned out Clay Bonner killed two birds with one stone, so to speak: he had the cop who was on the point of uncovering his own corruption killed and framed Logan for the crime.

Meanwhile there’s a considerably less interesting subplot involving Stabler’s investigation by the New York Police Department’s Internal Affairs Bureau, led by a Black cop named Moses Warren (Malcolm Goodwin) who blames Stabler for the recent suicide of his mentor on the force, who had formerly been Stabler’s father’s police partner until both of them were busted from the force for being “dirty.” This part of the show features the welcome return of Dann Florek as Daniel Craigin, who was the captain of the Manhattan Special Victims Unit during Meloni’s SVU tenure and for a season or two thereafter, who luckily talks Stabler into cooperating with the Internal Affairs investigation against him instead of trying to blow it off, and who ultimately talks Warren out of his vendetta against Stabler by persuading it’s O.K. to let bygones be bygones and not keep nursing old wounds. Though in general I don’t like Organized Crime as much as its companion shows, at least in part because in Organized Crime Dick Wolf and his writers and show runners are paying obeisance to the Great God SERIAL instead of making each episode a complete and discrete story in itself (I know that’s what modern-day viewers expect, but I’m sufficiently old-school I don’t like it), this story arc was unusually powerful and it ends with Clay Bonner massacring everyone else in his crime ring because he got word that the others were about to freeze him out and make him the fall guy for their corrupt enterprise. The episode climaxes with daughter Meredith coming on her dad as he’s just turned his gun on himself and is about to commit suicide, only she talks him out of it and arrests him instead.