Law and Order: Organized Crime: "He Was a Stabler" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, streamed June 12, 2025; aired November 20, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After The American Revolution episode “The Soul of All America,” I watched a Law and Order: Organized Crime episode called “He Was a Stabler” that rehabilitated the memory of Elliot Stabler’s (Christopher Meloni) scapegrace brother Joey (Michael Trotter), who’d been killed at the end of the previous week’s episode, “Off the Books,” by Julian Emery (Tom Payne), British-born psychopath and leader of a smuggling operation linked to a drug cartel from Syria. The Syrians are planning to fly in a shipment of a new, highly dangerous drug (were writers Edgar Castillo and Matt Olmstead thinking of the so-called “C-Fentanyl,” even more deadly than original fentanyl, here?) on a plane and are counting on Emery’s organization to be their American distributors. At the end of “Off the Books” Stabler and another cop skating on the thin edge of the law, Stabler’s old Police Academy buddy Detective Tim McKenna (Jason Patric), captured one of Emery’s right-hand men, Vincent Mathis (Paul Gorvin). They quickly debated whether to turn him in to their superiors for proper booking or kidnap him and subject him to what the George W. Bush administration called “enhanced interrogation” – i.e., torture. At the beginning of “He Was a Stabler” they hold him in a secret location and Elliott pours lighter fluid over him and threatens to set him on fire if he doesn’t reveal the secret locations where Emery might be hiding. Mathis gets scared enough to give Elliott a list of 21 possible locations where Emery might be staying, and then Elliott turns that list over to his colleagues at the Organized Crime Control Bureau. They’re able to whittle it down to one, but when the police raid it Emery had left just 15 minutes before – they can tell because he ordered a dinner delivered and then fled while it was still warm, and the delivery bag contained a receipt with a time stamp. There’s an odd scene in which Elliott visited his wife and child in New York and threatened to have the child taken away from them if she didn’t yield up Emery’s whereabouts, and needless to say she’s upset, calls his bluff, and throws him out of her apartment. Ultimately the police finally capture Emery after a gun battle between the cops on one side and Emery, his associates, and the Syrians on the other at the airport where the Syrians have flown in their drug cargo.

Elliott is ready to shoot down Emery on sight, but his nominal superior, Sergeant Ayanna Bell (Danielle Moné Truitt), an African-American (in the earlier episodes she was established as an “out” Lesbian, but we haven’t seen her romantically involved with anybody since her wife broke up with her in the second or third season, I forget which), talked him out of it and allowed Emery to be arrested normally instead. Then Emery boasts that he’ll be able to retire to his estate in Devonshire, England after his arrest, and an FBI agent comes in and announces that the federal anti-terrorism unit has cut a deal with Emery. In exchange for information that will allow the U.S. and its Israeli allies to bust the three top leaders of the Lebanon-based terrorist group Hezbollah, he’ll be allowed to return to England and serve out his sentence, whatever it is, under house arrest at, you guessed it, his estate in Devonshire. Elliott is predictably mega-upset at this turn in the case, and fortunately he’s able to stop it from happening via evidence in the form of a flash drive his brother Joey mailed to his family’s home before Emery killed him. The writing in “Off the Books” had made it seem like Joey had gone permanently to the Dark Side and been lured by Emery into taking part in his drug enterprise, but it turns out at the end of “He Was a Stabler” (explaining the rather clunky episode title) that he remained on the side of law and order after all. In fact, among Joey’s effects Elliott finds an uncompleted application to join the New York Police Department just like his big brother, which Joey abandoned when he realized his history of drug abuse would disqualify him. But he also carefully collected enough damning evidence against Emery that the FBI abandons its sweetheart deal with him (though we never find out just what the evidence is or why it’s so terrible the feds agree to let Emery be punished by New York’s authorities instead of protecting him), and in the end Emery is marched off to the untender mercies of New York’s criminal justice system and his story arc blessedly ends. I still don’t like the way the writers of Law and Order: Organized Crime have moved Elliott Stabler’s character from one willing to skirt the thin edge of the law to one whose quest for revenge (for the killing of his wife in the very first episode of Organized Crime to the killing of his younger brother in “Off the Books”) leads him to break it outright. Overall, though, this was a good episode and benefited from an especially sleazy and at the same time powerfully understated villain.