Here we go. Hey, it’s been a while, hasn’t it? By my count I have not added to the Law & Ordocki canon in over 12 months. The reason for this is simple: I pretty much stopped watching the franchise. SVU irritated me, Organized Crime bored me. I did watch all of Season 21 of Law & Order, but you know what? Not really worth writing about. Episodes reached a height of a “B” to the low of maybe “C” or “C+”, and passable entertainment isn’t much fun to write about. I was weary of Mariska Hargitay’s condescending whispering and Christopher Meloni ripping off other, better crime stories. It would take a lot to pull me back in. Well, “Gimme Shelter” is pretty fucking big. It is the first time the franchise has ever had a three part one night crossover. Sure, they’ve done two parters, but the last time there was opportunity for a three parter was spring 2007. After that Criminal Intent moved to USA and Dick Wolf never had three shows running at the same time. Until now. This actually isn’t the first attempt at the menage a trois; back in 2001, Wolf planned a Law & Order/Special Victims Unit/Criminal Intent smorgasbord that would unite the squads in foiling a terrorist attack. Then a rarity happened: the headlines ripped back, and the crossover was summarily kiboshed for reasons of “taste”. With the creation of Organized Crime and the revival of the original Law & Order, the stars aligned once more for Dick Wolf to pull it off. Did he? Well, yes. If nothing else, you can say “Gimme Shelter” inhabits three hours of NBC’s programming lineup. By any other metric I don’t know how you can make the case it’s a success.
What? Am I having a stroke?
We begin with Organized Crime, even though it’s mostly about Jeffrey Donovan from Law & Order. We open in Bacha, Ukraine—yes, really–with a firefight between armies and a family caught in the crossfire. It seems to me Dick Wolf wanted to show off and blow as much money as possible on a fake war scene that feels vaguely disrespectful. I’m curious what a Ukrainian national would think of the invasion of their nation being a backdrop for Jeffrey Donovan and Christopher Meloni trading banter. A girl from this battle scene transitions to escaping somewhere from a man who’s been abusing her. Meanwhile, Detective Frank Cosgrove (Jeffrey Donovan, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2) is arguing with his traddaughter’s desire to be homeschooled. I do like that Cosgrove’s immediate concern is homeschooling would make his daughter “weird”. Just as Frank is telling his daughter that the chance of her experiencing violence firsthand is miniscule, the Ukrainian girl runs past and I groaned. It’s a stupid contrivance, like how in sitcoms a character will insist they won’t ever do something, then there’s a cut and they’re doing it. Girl gets hit by a car and Cosgrove does the Lassie routine to her. Is there trouble, girl? Were you being abused? Is Timmy trapped in a well? He steps away for a second and a guy wearing a baseball cap and a COVID mask plugs her. Therein crop up Wolf’s reactionary politics. Y’see! Criminals will just use masks to conceal their identity! Also, they don’t stop COVID and neither do the Nazi vaccines Adolf Biden are mandating… I mean come on, Dick Wolf absolutely is an anti-vaxxer. The only counterargument to that is he’s so fucking old he came of age during polio.
She makes the daughter on Bosch look like Valerie Solanas.
Cosgrove is joined by Law & Order newcomer Jalen Shaw, a recent transfer from narcotics who has to be shown the ropes of homicide investigations. He’s portrayed by Mehcad Brooks, who was Jimmy Olsen on Supergirl and Jax in Mortal Kombat. I’m not sure which is more embarrassing; at the very least, this role impresses upon the fact that he was unsuited to play Jimmy Olsen on account of him looking like he could kick Superman’s ass. Frank walks through his new partner through his first notification and his first trip to the morgue. With the former he’s slapped by the deceased’s aunt that bemoans the police did nothing to find her missing niece. I don’t know how long she’s been in America but she should know by now that cops are excellent at shooting unarmed black men and questionable on everything else. The morgue leads them to the harbor (the girl had caviar and salt water on her) whereupon Cosgrove shows Shaw you don’t need things like a “warrant” as long as you yell at a poor bald guy long enough into complying. Shaw points out threatening people can compromise the case in court and he knows that because he used to be a lawyer. I like how “threatening people for information is bad” is something only somebody who went to law school would know. Seems Shaw went the reverse Carisi route, also known as the forward motion Alfred Molina on Law & Order: Los Angeles route, but no one remembers that second one so let’s go with reverse Carisi. Dick Wolf is obsessed with cop turned lawyers and lawyers turned cops. There’s no way he hasn’t pitched a show about a guy who’s simultaneously a detective an an ADA, only to be told by the fucking suits that “that premise is impossible, illegal and insane”. A trip to SVU has Benson (Mariska Hargitay, Seinfeld) gifting the pair of detectives some insider information that NYPD has cameras all over the piers and adjacent parking lots because the piers’ cameras so often seem to “not work”. Chalk up another win for the surveillance state!
Because viewers of Law & Order think if detectives are yelling at each other there’s a chance they might somehow kiss.
The camera footage twigs them to Beau Knapp (Run All Night) playing goateed supervillain Mark Sirenko, whom Elliot Stabler (Christopher Meloni, Wet Hot American Summer) is also investigating. This leads to what I deemed “City Stabler meets Country Stabler”, because it’s a pitifully long scene of Meloni and Donovan trying to out alpha the other. “The son of a bitch killed a 15 year old girl!” Cosgrove bellows, checkmating Stabler. Rule #1 of being a poorly written alpha on Law & Order: dead kids take precedence. Yet Stabler still insists the case is his, which doesn’t sit well with Ol’ Horseteeth. It becomes an argument over whether it’s better to get Sirenko on murder or his entire organization on drugs. Cosgrove tells Stabler he was there at the murder, he looked into the girl’s eyes, even forces a photo of her dead body into Stabler’s line of sight. Still he says no. It’s only when Cosgrove plays the “you used to be cool” card does Stabler acquiesce and decide to go with the murder charge. It goes to show that you can take the boy out of Special Victims, but you can’t take Special Victims out of the boy. Who cares about the integrity of a case that could wipe out an entire crime organization when there’s a pretty white girl on a slab to contend with?
Computer Magic Pixie Dream Girl is dressing too normally these days. I can only give her a “3” on the quirk scale. I also like how Dick Wolf is 15 years behind the times and thinks modern police shows still need an unconventional hacker girl who may or may not be on the autism spectrum. Next he’ll give Meloni a powdered wig and instigate a storyline about the Teapot Dome scandal.
Elliot has a CI within Sirenko’s outfit, and said CI is introduced bare knuckle boxing behind a bar. I have a feeling when Stabler tells him to “be smart” he’s not going to take that seriously. After a semi-thrilling scene in a nightclub wherein Vince the CI narrowly clones Sirenko’s phone, the squad gets footage from the yacht that shows another trafficked girl and perhaps an older Ghaislene Maxwell type. It takes all of 30 seconds for SVU to find the identity of the latter. I’m not kidding, it’s literally 30 seconds. She’s white, so that explains why she survives after firing multiple shots at the police when they raid her home. Cosgrove pushes a knife wielding girl against the wall, telling her she’s safe while she wails “just shoot me, I’d rather die”. That’s how the first hour ends.
This is Olivia Benson’s equivalent of the penance stare; in her case it forces victims to testify.
Back at a precinct (the 2-7? SVU? I don’t know anymore), the girl—Nicole—is resolute that she won’t betray the confidence of her madam. Olivia then takes her to look in at the madam’s interrogation where she basically says “I don’t care about any of those girls”. Benson then does her whispering thing, imploring Nicole to “help Ava, help your friend”. I’m not against a Season 24 retcon that posits Olivia Benson whispering has the same effect as the Purple Man, because that would make a fair amount of sense. More than anything in this shit at least. It’s at this point, when they’re raiding Sirenko’s estate, that I seriously considered pulling the plug, eating the thousand or so words I had already written and moving on with my life, because they find bomb making materials in his basement. So a drug dealing sex trafficker also builds bombs. Personally. He builds them in his own house. That’s like if Gus Fring built the superlab underneath his house, and then he cooked the meth on his own. It’s fucking stupid. Dick Wolf, I know I watch your shows, but that doesn’t give you license to think me a mental midget.
Man, talk about especially heinous… Boundaries, Cosgrove, boundaries!
At a meeting that involves both the head of an FBI joint task force and the deputy mayor, Stabler storms out saying “I’m gonna find that bomb”. White man to the rescue! He plans to do so by using Vince the CI to act all squirrelly to Sirenko in the hopes he’ll reveal something. Vince might as well be wearing a red shirt. True to form, he’s shot and killed amidst the police storming the place (a basement where they’re pouring concrete for a new foundation) and Stabler has yet another person to avenge. “He was just a kid”, intones Meloni to his autistic hacker girl who looks like a member of Kittie sidekick, almost acting like he gives a shit about this dumbass we knew for 20 minutes. I guess you need to add a personal element so Stabler feels motivated to stop a terrorist attack. Like, before a city block of New York City blowing up was “eh”. He’d stop it, but he wouldn’t be excited about it.
Since when the fuck are there more than four people working at SVU? Who are these people?
So when the deputy mayor comes in hot, yelling about a wild goose chase that ended in just a dead C.I., you better believe Stabler will beat the shit out of him if not for Benson holding him back. At least, the classic SVU dynamic of the rage beast and the one woman who can soothe him. “You do not get to come in here and question our tactics, that’s not how this works” Benson tells the deputy mayor. I’m pretty sure civilian control over the police force is exactly how that works, provided Olivia doesn’t want to arrange a coup that sees Eric Adams eating his gun like Allende in 1973. Thankfully, Jet the Organized Crime quirky hacker uses some computer magic to discern a Sirenko van visited a house in Queens rented out to a hotel employee being blackmailed. Long story short, the hotel is hosting a NATO conference. A ha! The target revealed. I’m really glad Dick Wolf is tackling in these season premieres a preeminent problem facing America today: (guys born in California pretending to be) Russian terrorism. It’s not enough we’re forking over billions to Ukraine while American cities have tap water with Captain Planet levels of pollution, we also need to worry about garden variety Slavic reprobates getting radicalized by nationalism and attacking such beloved, beneficial American institutions as NATO.
EVERYBODY OUT OF THE CHUNNEL!
While all of our beloved main characters are evacuating the hotel, Cosgrove notices Sirenko using a clever disguise of a baseball cap and sunglasses and chases after him. The bomb going off lets him escape. It’s at this point it impressed upon me how much budget Dick Wolf was wasting on this crossover, so much so that like half of SVU Season 24 must be Mariska Hargitay in an interrogation room acting out a sexual assault case with a battery and a scorpion. “Stingy, you knew Battery was only 16 years old!” “Gimme Shelter” has things we’ve missed on these shows for years, such as special effects, extras, having to block off multiple streets for shooting purposes. No wonder Kelli Giddish is getting let go this season; Wolf spent the Rollins money on Adobe flame effects. Sirenko ends up holding some women hostage in a clothing store and despite having Benson on the line as hostage negotiator (Mariska Hargitay can do any job, she’s been on the force for 48 years) the whole thing devolves into an alley shootout that ends with a 61 year old man (Christopher Meloni) routing a 33 year old (Beau Knapp). He goads Sirenko into picking up his gun so he can justifiably shoot him, and this whole scene unfolds in front of Cosgrove and Shaw. “Ease down”, Cosgrove tells Stabler. The two exchange thank yous, knowing each stopped the other from committing premeditated murder. That’s why cop shows are great: it’s the only procedural where you are congratulating characters for not killing people. I don’t think on Grey’s Anatomy people are always telling Ellen Pompeo how great she is for not jamming a scalpel into a patient’s throat. Then again, I don’t watch the show, maybe that’s a regular occurrence.
Look, man, he’s white enough, so cut the suspense. We know he’ll be taken in alive and be given Burger King on the way to the precinct.
As we enter the third hour, Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy, Basic Instinct 2: Risk Addiction), Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi, Black Adam) and Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston, The Killing Fields) discuss the case. Three people weren’t evacuated from the hotel at the time the bomb went off, so Sirenko’s body count now rests at five (three dead in hotel + Ava + Vince). So the Oklahoma City bombing, which this is clearly patterned after, killed 168, whereas this one killed 3. Dick Wolf is saying OKC needed Stabler and Benson to sort that shit out. X-Files: Fight the Future did fake Oklahoma City bombing better, by the way. Watching this I felt like Costanza about the Andrea Doria. “How many people does a hotel lose on average per week? 15? 20?” There’s a reason no one cares about the Boston Marathon Bombing and it being Boston is only part of it. The other, bigger reason is the low body count. They’re all fake people, Dick, why not up the stakes a smidge.
C+ crazyboard, honestly. Carrie Mathison did it much better.
Price asks why Sirenko would bomb a hotel of NATO representatives, to which Maroun points out he is from Chechnya and sympathetic to Russia. It makes a lot of sense, like saying “well, he’s from Palestine and therefore sympathetic to Israel”. I don’t expect much from the fossilized remains that are the Law & Order writers, but I expect a little more than this. Price spends about five minutes asking why the hell this plot is happening, and Maroun brushes aside his concerns, as though he just asked how to get the wizard’s key in the Itchy & Scratchy CD rom game. I do appreciate no one even hints at asking ADA Carisi to collaborate on this case. Everybody knows he’s a pepto chugging simpleton, a flopsweat nepotism hire unsuited for the high stakes game of world diplomacy and international intrigue. If your entire frame of reference was this crossover, you’d think Peter Scanavino was playing “that blonde detective’s boyfriend”.
“Maroun” changes to “Moron” so easily you wonder if it’s an in-joke.
They take a run at Nicole the underage prostitute and she speaks of another Russian guy with a star-shaped medal. There’s only one guy at a Russian embassy party with a military medal, so they find Daniel Rublev (Pasha D. Lychnikoff, actually a Russian man), “senior liaison to the President of Russia”. Maroun, whose job is to ask dumb questions and look pretty, asks what that means. McCoy responds “he’s friends with Putin”. I’d have preferred if he went into a whole thing, like “Webster’s defines ‘liaison’ as…”. Stupid questions deserve snappy answers, as Alfred E. Neuman taught me. Price thinks Rublev ordered Sirenko to do it. There’s no “evidence”, but it would explain why an apolitical gangster would turn international terrorist. Well, not really, but it’s the third hour and things are basically just running on vibes now. Stabler picks up one of Sirenko’s lieutenants with one of those really cool “don’t call your lawyer, come with me now or I’ll tell your friends you’re an informant and thereby mark you for death” maneuvers only completely awesome peace officers do. I mean, it’s one thing when Vic Mackey does it. Dick Wolf is impressing upon me that Elliot Stabler isn’t a piece of shit authority abusing psycho. Man, the Strike Team was probably less corrupt than the cops in the Wolfiverse. At least crime went down in Farmington…
“I am having fun pretending to play genuine A+ #1 American video game.”
Said lieutenant offers up Ava’s phone in which she’s recorded for some reason Rublev bragging to underage prostitutes of a terrorist attack that will put Russia on the map. It’s shot like a porn video. Very strange. This is incontrovertible evidence Rublev at least knew about the bombing, so of course in the next scene it’s thrown out of court because Rublev’s villainously unattractive lawyer points out the DA’s office can’t prove its authenticity. It could be a deepfake for all we know! Price wants Nicole to testify despite Benson’s worries. Shaw and Rollins try to move Nicole from the safe house but assassins know their location and plug Rollins in the gut. Now, outside the show, I know Kelli Giddish is being fired off SVU this season but she’s still in the first eight or nine episodes, so I know she’s not going to bleed out here and now. I also know that this is what happened to Kat Tamin in the Season 23 premiere. She got shot, survived and decided to reevaluate her life and leave PD. If Rollins follows suit it will prove Dickory Wolf is such a hack he writes out female characters the exact same way a mere year apart. “I keep telling you, Dick, you can’t have her leave the force because an imbalance in her humors.”
“This is what you get for wearing white after Labor Day!”
There’s a pretty bad scene between Benson and Carisi, who of course rushes to the scene, where the former says “if anyone can survive a gunshot wound, we both know that she can”. Is this alluding to Rollins surviving a gunshot wound in Season 14 or is this absolute gibberish or both? Thank god they cut it out for syndication, to the chagrin of all the deranged “shippers” out there. To answer the question of how the Russians found out: Nicole was texting somebody and that’s how the Russian hitmen found her location. Olivia doesn’t blame her; it would have been funny if she had, going “Rollins’ life is in your hands!”. It seems dirty pool to blame a 15 year old girl, but “no texting while in a safe house scenario” seems like a no brainer. Benson states “nothing is more important than getting this little girl a semblance of a normal, happy life”, when I’m pretty sure proving the Russian state tacitly approved a terrorist bombing on American soil is slightly more important as far as the world goes than a white girl achieving a loving home. I have a feeling Benson puts pretty white victims over, like, the risk of nuclear war. Last shot of the final episode of SVU is Mariska Hargitay riding a bomb like Slim Pickens. It’s with this vigor that Benson tells the DA’s office that Nicole can’t testify because she shipped her off to Canada to a farm where she’ll be a lot happier.
Oh yeah, definitely a “cell phone video”.
As you can imagine, the DA characters aren’t happy. Nicole was integral to their case, and so what if “in real life” she could’ve given closed circuit testimony. In this world she needs to be in open court so somebody named Boris can smuggle in a handgun and hit her twice in the chest while Mariska Hargitay makes her “I’m not really going to even get nominated for an Emmy but what the hell” face. With both their key piece of evidence and their key witness out of play, Maroun suggests cutting a deal with Sirenko to get to Rublev. McCoy establishes that the target is Rublev, and if you have to give Sirenko a sweetheart deal to get to him, then fine. “How you convict him, I don’t really care”, McCoy says, which I think is probably a Sam Waterston ad libbed line. Waterston has been pretty wooden since his return and you definitely wish he had some of that scenery chewing energy in him from the classic years of the show. After having seen 11 episodes of the revival, I think I’ve crystallized what I dislike about the “order” portion of Law & Order: it’s trying too hard. Hugh Dancy is a red setter bounding after a tennis ball and I never buy him as an ADA particularly. With this case, it is an exercise in seeing which character can be more reactionary, to vent what is meant to be the viewer’s horror at what Sirenko and Rublev have done. “Maybe we’ll get lucky and he’ll get stabbed in prison. I’m not joking” Maroun says to Price. You can tell the franchise has gone woke because she doesn’t throw in the hope that he’s raped in prison. Classic SVU would’ve done that. “Gimme Shelter” isn’t classic anything, though. Sirenko gets 20 years for 5 murders—4 years per murder—in exchange for informing on his boss.
“Welcome to the Law & Order, Dancy–hope your career survives the experience!”
Nobody likes it, least of all Stabler. Contender for the worst scene in the crossover is when Stabler confronts Price and jaws at him about his dead CI, as if it trumps getting a Putin advisor dead to rights for masterminding a terrorist attack. “Tell all this to his mother!” Meloni shouts. Look, Vince was probably one of the better red shirts Law & Order has produced in the last few years, but he’s just that: a red shirt. You meet him and within 20 minutes he’s dead to really impress upon the mortal danger Kirk and Spock and sometimes Bones face. It’s an embarrassing scene that reduces Meloni’s character to a cartoonish hothead. Which, to be fair, he is, but I thought the entire purpose of Organized Crime was to give him a second dimension, possibly a third. Rublev comes to the prosecution in search of a deal, offering state secrets in exchange for some degree of immunity, which they do not want to take. Price is indignant that the State Department might want pertinent information from Putin’s buddy about the inner workings of the next Hitler. “Call the President, I don’t care!” Price says in Hugh Dancy’s ill-fated attempt to give his character a presence he’s thus far lacked. Price and Maldoun are about to leave until Rublev drops the magic word: family. We know from the Oscar nominated film Fast Five that family is everything, so it’s almost enough to get the DA’s office to blink.
“Why aren’t you taking my concerns seriously? Oh, I get it. It’s my big ears, isn’t it? Well, Mr. DA, I can’t help that! [sobs]”
Before that can happen, Rublev is being transferred back to jail and a bike messenger stops up and shoots him. Man, think of a world power extrajudicially killing people in other countries. Who does Russia think they are, us? I like how Price hesitates before trying to stop the bleeding from Rublev’s neck. Okay, Rublev! You got me! I guess I’ll try futilely to save your damn life. Futile it is, as Rublev bleeds out and Sirenko will only serve 20 years for blowing up a hotel in the middle of New York Fucking City. The reporters really roast Price for this at the press conference. The crossover bookends with one of those classic Cosgrove daddy-daughter lunches during which Lily bemoans the shittiness of “Gimme Shelter”’s outcome and basically asks her father why they don’t live in a police state wherein all crime is punishable by death. “Why isn’t America Singapore?” is a good question on the tip of the tongue of the nation’s youth. Cosgrove gives a long, incoherent speech which lays over a montage of the other characters doing what they do; most distressingly, Benson and Nicole are in some New York City park hanging out. Wait, what? Who the hell is looking after Nicole if she’s not actually with some relative in Canada? Where is Benson’s son, Noah? Did she sit him with the nanny so she could gallivant around with some teenage sex trafficking victim? The montage distracts from the fact that Cosgrove’s monologue is utter trash, total nonsense, a lot of words signifying nothing. I have transcribed the last exchange between traddaughter and him for your “enjoyment”:
After a long day of work, it’s back to the ol’ ball and chain…his daughter.
“There must be some way to punish these people so we feel safe.”
“I wish there was, sweetie, I wish there was. But it’s impossible. There’s no magic wand I could wave or speech I could give, so we do the things we can do. Like rescuing victims and helping them feel safe, whole. It’s not always easy or possible, but we try. If we do our best to arrest the criminals and predators so they can’t hurt anyone else. But there’s still a lot of good in this world so we need to focus on that. All those simple, priceless moments we seem to overlook. Like right now, you and me, having lunch, or watching the sun set, or the view of Manhattan late at night from the 59th street bridge. The world isn’t perfect, Lily, but it’s still beautiful.”
Not since Daredevil Season 2’s closing Karen Page editorial voiceover have I been so confused. So there’s no way to punish these people, it’s impossible, so our best is doing our job of arresting criminals and rescuing victims. Then it just devolves into some rah rah New Yorker bullshit these shows have to have to stay on the air. The 59th street bridge, remember that one, kids? Well, it’s still there!
Well, it explains why Part 3 of “Gimme Shelter” is subtitled “Benson Makes A Friend”.
Of all the hours, the last one is by far the worst: the combination of bad writing and a lack of compelling characters sinks it. It’s also an excuse to impotently rattle the saber at Russia, as though someone will be swayed by three hours of Dick Wolf propaganda. “Time to pour my Russian vodka down the drain cause Dick Wolf said so!” The righteous indignation from all parties designed to impress upon the gravity of the crimes we just witnessed becomes smothering. For instance, when Sirenko is telling the attorneys the specifics of his various crimes, Maldoun gets incensed when he refers to Ava as a hooker. “Don’t you dare call that little girl a hooker” she proclaims, as if killing five people is nothing compared to using improper nomenclature. Price gets like five of these moments expressing disgust at, indirectly or directly, the Russians and none of it has any bite. He calls Rublev a “pig” like he’s telling his parents he doesn’t want any damn vegetables. How about the fact that it takes 45 minutes into the third hour to get to the first trial scene? The “order” in Law & Order should be printed in smaller font size. There’s nothing to this scene, a mere elocution by Sirenko, which does bring us the hilarious line “just because I’ve killed people doesn’t mean I’m a liar”, which Rublev’s lawyer seizes upon with aplomb. Otherwise it suffers from what last season of Law & Order suffered from: the courtroom doesn’t “feel” real, it feels like overqualified high schoolers play acting. Next week: Hugh Dancy in The Crucible!
Dick Wolf under fire for allegations of elder abuse
As a story I think I’ve done more than enough to list and articulate my grievances. As a crossover I think “Gimme Shelter” also falls flat. Part of this is really outside of Wolf et al’s control in that they’re doing this at a time at which the franchise isn’t too healthy. SVU and OC have crossovers all the time already, so there’s no novelty in Benson and Stabler sharing a scene. The Law & Order is barely situated, so it’s not like “finally! We get to see Kate Dixon lock horns with Elliot Stabler!” Who cares? In 2001 this would have been something, whereas now it’s practically nothing. It’s been too long and the shows aren’t good enough. In the time between 2001 and 2022 we’ve also seen a propagation of TV universes, be it the Arrowverse or the Chicago programs, so a crossover of this length and breadth is no longer the novelty it once was. The rationale for this particular crossover is half-assed as hell. It’s like they took 5 minutes to think of it. “What’s in the news? Russians… what if it’s Russians who are committing sexually based offenses AND organized crime!” It ties in all three precincts, yes, but it’s a transparently shitty job.
Dick Wolf saw an episode of SEAL Team and said “I can do that”.
Also, what the fuck did the War in Ukraine have to do with anything? Was it a Dick Wolf cautionary tale, like, you might leave a war zone for the relative safety of the Big Apple but you might still get shot in the street after becoming an underage victim of sex trafficking? It seems like unnecessary extravagance for a franchise that is cutting financial corners wherever possible. You could have had a Russian national masterminding a terrorist attack to fool Lloyd Braun or whatever his motive was without the protracted scene in Ukraine or even the Ukrainian sex trafficking victim. Look, man, you’re on network TV in 2022. No matter how hard you try, you’re not going to be “relevant”, so cut it with the exploiting real world events for cheap thrills bullshit.
A quick perusal of Reddit indicates they’re as normal as ever.
I do think it’s interesting to analyze the advertising vs. what ultimately transpired. If you look at the ad on the top of this article, you’ll see Danielle Mone Truitt and Ice-T prominently featured, yet they’re so inconsequential to the plot I don’t think this article has mentioned them until now. They’re on the banner to give the impression that the Dick Wolf universe is more diverse than it is actually is, Wolf having fired two actors of color last season on SVU among other things. If anything, Hugh Dancy deserves to be on there, but he’d make the advert too white. Maybe “Gimme Shelter” should have actually given Sgt. Bell or Ice-T something to do besides deliver a bit of exposition if their inclusion was to be warranted, but it’s pretty obvious Wolf wanted Benson and Stabler to pump up his fledgling revived Law & Order. That’s why Cosgrove opens the crossover, why his new partner is introduced in an episode of Organized Crime, and why they drive the action in the first two halves. Wolf could’ve spent money on better writers instead of staging explosions and the show would be a lot better off.
I’m not really sure that’s “trivia”, IMDB.
I don’t know if I’ll be doing a next column for Law & Ordocki; this shitshow of a crossover so discouraged me I can barely look at anything Law & Order-related without retching. It’s three hours of my time I’ll never get back, plus god knows how many hours I spent writing this article. Not saying my time is a premium, but usually when I watch TV I get something out of it, be it enjoyment or information or Alan Tudyk speaking in an alien language to a baby alien. This? Nothing. I feel dumber for having seen it, because now my nuanced viewpoint of Russian aggression in Ukraine is tempered by alarmist MSNBC conspiracy theory nonsense about Russians being on every corner, ready to sap me of my precious bodily fluids. The only nice thing I can say about “Gimme Shelter”—which what the fuck does this have to do with a Rolling Stones song by the way?—is that Mehcad Brooks makes a decent first impression. I didn’t hate him at least. But otherwise, yeah, it’s a ham-fisted effort to instill paranoia in people who are already paranoid. “Gimme Shelter” is the nadir of the franchise, which is saying something.
I would pointedly refuse to board any bus with this on its side.
Law & Ordocki #46: The Law & Orgy: Dick Wolf’s Procedural Centipede
Here we go. Hey, it’s been a while, hasn’t it? By my count I have not added to the Law & Ordocki canon in over 12 months. The reason for this is simple: I pretty much stopped watching the franchise. SVU irritated me, Organized Crime bored me. I did watch all of Season 21 of Law & Order, but you know what? Not really worth writing about. Episodes reached a height of a “B” to the low of maybe “C” or “C+”, and passable entertainment isn’t much fun to write about. I was weary of Mariska Hargitay’s condescending whispering and Christopher Meloni ripping off other, better crime stories. It would take a lot to pull me back in. Well, “Gimme Shelter” is pretty fucking big. It is the first time the franchise has ever had a three part one night crossover. Sure, they’ve done two parters, but the last time there was opportunity for a three parter was spring 2007. After that Criminal Intent moved to USA and Dick Wolf never had three shows running at the same time. Until now. This actually isn’t the first attempt at the menage a trois; back in 2001, Wolf planned a Law & Order/Special Victims Unit/Criminal Intent smorgasbord that would unite the squads in foiling a terrorist attack. Then a rarity happened: the headlines ripped back, and the crossover was summarily kiboshed for reasons of “taste”. With the creation of Organized Crime and the revival of the original Law & Order, the stars aligned once more for Dick Wolf to pull it off. Did he? Well, yes. If nothing else, you can say “Gimme Shelter” inhabits three hours of NBC’s programming lineup. By any other metric I don’t know how you can make the case it’s a success.
What? Am I having a stroke?
We begin with Organized Crime, even though it’s mostly about Jeffrey Donovan from Law & Order. We open in Bacha, Ukraine—yes, really–with a firefight between armies and a family caught in the crossfire. It seems to me Dick Wolf wanted to show off and blow as much money as possible on a fake war scene that feels vaguely disrespectful. I’m curious what a Ukrainian national would think of the invasion of their nation being a backdrop for Jeffrey Donovan and Christopher Meloni trading banter. A girl from this battle scene transitions to escaping somewhere from a man who’s been abusing her. Meanwhile, Detective Frank Cosgrove (Jeffrey Donovan, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2) is arguing with his traddaughter’s desire to be homeschooled. I do like that Cosgrove’s immediate concern is homeschooling would make his daughter “weird”. Just as Frank is telling his daughter that the chance of her experiencing violence firsthand is miniscule, the Ukrainian girl runs past and I groaned. It’s a stupid contrivance, like how in sitcoms a character will insist they won’t ever do something, then there’s a cut and they’re doing it. Girl gets hit by a car and Cosgrove does the Lassie routine to her. Is there trouble, girl? Were you being abused? Is Timmy trapped in a well? He steps away for a second and a guy wearing a baseball cap and a COVID mask plugs her. Therein crop up Wolf’s reactionary politics. Y’see! Criminals will just use masks to conceal their identity! Also, they don’t stop COVID and neither do the Nazi vaccines Adolf Biden are mandating… I mean come on, Dick Wolf absolutely is an anti-vaxxer. The only counterargument to that is he’s so fucking old he came of age during polio.
She makes the daughter on Bosch look like Valerie Solanas.
Cosgrove is joined by Law & Order newcomer Jalen Shaw, a recent transfer from narcotics who has to be shown the ropes of homicide investigations. He’s portrayed by Mehcad Brooks, who was Jimmy Olsen on Supergirl and Jax in Mortal Kombat. I’m not sure which is more embarrassing; at the very least, this role impresses upon the fact that he was unsuited to play Jimmy Olsen on account of him looking like he could kick Superman’s ass. Frank walks through his new partner through his first notification and his first trip to the morgue. With the former he’s slapped by the deceased’s aunt that bemoans the police did nothing to find her missing niece. I don’t know how long she’s been in America but she should know by now that cops are excellent at shooting unarmed black men and questionable on everything else. The morgue leads them to the harbor (the girl had caviar and salt water on her) whereupon Cosgrove shows Shaw you don’t need things like a “warrant” as long as you yell at a poor bald guy long enough into complying. Shaw points out threatening people can compromise the case in court and he knows that because he used to be a lawyer. I like how “threatening people for information is bad” is something only somebody who went to law school would know. Seems Shaw went the reverse Carisi route, also known as the forward motion Alfred Molina on Law & Order: Los Angeles route, but no one remembers that second one so let’s go with reverse Carisi. Dick Wolf is obsessed with cop turned lawyers and lawyers turned cops. There’s no way he hasn’t pitched a show about a guy who’s simultaneously a detective an an ADA, only to be told by the fucking suits that “that premise is impossible, illegal and insane”. A trip to SVU has Benson (Mariska Hargitay, Seinfeld) gifting the pair of detectives some insider information that NYPD has cameras all over the piers and adjacent parking lots because the piers’ cameras so often seem to “not work”. Chalk up another win for the surveillance state!
Because viewers of Law & Order think if detectives are yelling at each other there’s a chance they might somehow kiss.
The camera footage twigs them to Beau Knapp (Run All Night) playing goateed supervillain Mark Sirenko, whom Elliot Stabler (Christopher Meloni, Wet Hot American Summer) is also investigating. This leads to what I deemed “City Stabler meets Country Stabler”, because it’s a pitifully long scene of Meloni and Donovan trying to out alpha the other. “The son of a bitch killed a 15 year old girl!” Cosgrove bellows, checkmating Stabler. Rule #1 of being a poorly written alpha on Law & Order: dead kids take precedence. Yet Stabler still insists the case is his, which doesn’t sit well with Ol’ Horseteeth. It becomes an argument over whether it’s better to get Sirenko on murder or his entire organization on drugs. Cosgrove tells Stabler he was there at the murder, he looked into the girl’s eyes, even forces a photo of her dead body into Stabler’s line of sight. Still he says no. It’s only when Cosgrove plays the “you used to be cool” card does Stabler acquiesce and decide to go with the murder charge. It goes to show that you can take the boy out of Special Victims, but you can’t take Special Victims out of the boy. Who cares about the integrity of a case that could wipe out an entire crime organization when there’s a pretty white girl on a slab to contend with?
Computer Magic Pixie Dream Girl is dressing too normally these days. I can only give her a “3” on the quirk scale. I also like how Dick Wolf is 15 years behind the times and thinks modern police shows still need an unconventional hacker girl who may or may not be on the autism spectrum. Next he’ll give Meloni a powdered wig and instigate a storyline about the Teapot Dome scandal.
Elliot has a CI within Sirenko’s outfit, and said CI is introduced bare knuckle boxing behind a bar. I have a feeling when Stabler tells him to “be smart” he’s not going to take that seriously. After a semi-thrilling scene in a nightclub wherein Vince the CI narrowly clones Sirenko’s phone, the squad gets footage from the yacht that shows another trafficked girl and perhaps an older Ghaislene Maxwell type. It takes all of 30 seconds for SVU to find the identity of the latter. I’m not kidding, it’s literally 30 seconds. She’s white, so that explains why she survives after firing multiple shots at the police when they raid her home. Cosgrove pushes a knife wielding girl against the wall, telling her she’s safe while she wails “just shoot me, I’d rather die”. That’s how the first hour ends.
This is Olivia Benson’s equivalent of the penance stare; in her case it forces victims to testify.
Back at a precinct (the 2-7? SVU? I don’t know anymore), the girl—Nicole—is resolute that she won’t betray the confidence of her madam. Olivia then takes her to look in at the madam’s interrogation where she basically says “I don’t care about any of those girls”. Benson then does her whispering thing, imploring Nicole to “help Ava, help your friend”. I’m not against a Season 24 retcon that posits Olivia Benson whispering has the same effect as the Purple Man, because that would make a fair amount of sense. More than anything in this shit at least. It’s at this point, when they’re raiding Sirenko’s estate, that I seriously considered pulling the plug, eating the thousand or so words I had already written and moving on with my life, because they find bomb making materials in his basement. So a drug dealing sex trafficker also builds bombs. Personally. He builds them in his own house. That’s like if Gus Fring built the superlab underneath his house, and then he cooked the meth on his own. It’s fucking stupid. Dick Wolf, I know I watch your shows, but that doesn’t give you license to think me a mental midget.
Man, talk about especially heinous… Boundaries, Cosgrove, boundaries!
At a meeting that involves both the head of an FBI joint task force and the deputy mayor, Stabler storms out saying “I’m gonna find that bomb”. White man to the rescue! He plans to do so by using Vince the CI to act all squirrelly to Sirenko in the hopes he’ll reveal something. Vince might as well be wearing a red shirt. True to form, he’s shot and killed amidst the police storming the place (a basement where they’re pouring concrete for a new foundation) and Stabler has yet another person to avenge. “He was just a kid”, intones Meloni to his autistic hacker girl who looks like a member of Kittie sidekick, almost acting like he gives a shit about this dumbass we knew for 20 minutes. I guess you need to add a personal element so Stabler feels motivated to stop a terrorist attack. Like, before a city block of New York City blowing up was “eh”. He’d stop it, but he wouldn’t be excited about it.
Since when the fuck are there more than four people working at SVU? Who are these people?
So when the deputy mayor comes in hot, yelling about a wild goose chase that ended in just a dead C.I., you better believe Stabler will beat the shit out of him if not for Benson holding him back. At least, the classic SVU dynamic of the rage beast and the one woman who can soothe him. “You do not get to come in here and question our tactics, that’s not how this works” Benson tells the deputy mayor. I’m pretty sure civilian control over the police force is exactly how that works, provided Olivia doesn’t want to arrange a coup that sees Eric Adams eating his gun like Allende in 1973. Thankfully, Jet the Organized Crime quirky hacker uses some computer magic to discern a Sirenko van visited a house in Queens rented out to a hotel employee being blackmailed. Long story short, the hotel is hosting a NATO conference. A ha! The target revealed. I’m really glad Dick Wolf is tackling in these season premieres a preeminent problem facing America today: (guys born in California pretending to be) Russian terrorism. It’s not enough we’re forking over billions to Ukraine while American cities have tap water with Captain Planet levels of pollution, we also need to worry about garden variety Slavic reprobates getting radicalized by nationalism and attacking such beloved, beneficial American institutions as NATO.
EVERYBODY OUT OF THE CHUNNEL!
While all of our beloved main characters are evacuating the hotel, Cosgrove notices Sirenko using a clever disguise of a baseball cap and sunglasses and chases after him. The bomb going off lets him escape. It’s at this point it impressed upon me how much budget Dick Wolf was wasting on this crossover, so much so that like half of SVU Season 24 must be Mariska Hargitay in an interrogation room acting out a sexual assault case with a battery and a scorpion. “Stingy, you knew Battery was only 16 years old!” “Gimme Shelter” has things we’ve missed on these shows for years, such as special effects, extras, having to block off multiple streets for shooting purposes. No wonder Kelli Giddish is getting let go this season; Wolf spent the Rollins money on Adobe flame effects. Sirenko ends up holding some women hostage in a clothing store and despite having Benson on the line as hostage negotiator (Mariska Hargitay can do any job, she’s been on the force for 48 years) the whole thing devolves into an alley shootout that ends with a 61 year old man (Christopher Meloni) routing a 33 year old (Beau Knapp). He goads Sirenko into picking up his gun so he can justifiably shoot him, and this whole scene unfolds in front of Cosgrove and Shaw. “Ease down”, Cosgrove tells Stabler. The two exchange thank yous, knowing each stopped the other from committing premeditated murder. That’s why cop shows are great: it’s the only procedural where you are congratulating characters for not killing people. I don’t think on Grey’s Anatomy people are always telling Ellen Pompeo how great she is for not jamming a scalpel into a patient’s throat. Then again, I don’t watch the show, maybe that’s a regular occurrence.
Look, man, he’s white enough, so cut the suspense. We know he’ll be taken in alive and be given Burger King on the way to the precinct.
As we enter the third hour, Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy, Basic Instinct 2: Risk Addiction), Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi, Black Adam) and Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston, The Killing Fields) discuss the case. Three people weren’t evacuated from the hotel at the time the bomb went off, so Sirenko’s body count now rests at five (three dead in hotel + Ava + Vince). So the Oklahoma City bombing, which this is clearly patterned after, killed 168, whereas this one killed 3. Dick Wolf is saying OKC needed Stabler and Benson to sort that shit out. X-Files: Fight the Future did fake Oklahoma City bombing better, by the way. Watching this I felt like Costanza about the Andrea Doria. “How many people does a hotel lose on average per week? 15? 20?” There’s a reason no one cares about the Boston Marathon Bombing and it being Boston is only part of it. The other, bigger reason is the low body count. They’re all fake people, Dick, why not up the stakes a smidge.
C+ crazyboard, honestly. Carrie Mathison did it much better.
Price asks why Sirenko would bomb a hotel of NATO representatives, to which Maroun points out he is from Chechnya and sympathetic to Russia. It makes a lot of sense, like saying “well, he’s from Palestine and therefore sympathetic to Israel”. I don’t expect much from the fossilized remains that are the Law & Order writers, but I expect a little more than this. Price spends about five minutes asking why the hell this plot is happening, and Maroun brushes aside his concerns, as though he just asked how to get the wizard’s key in the Itchy & Scratchy CD rom game. I do appreciate no one even hints at asking ADA Carisi to collaborate on this case. Everybody knows he’s a pepto chugging simpleton, a flopsweat nepotism hire unsuited for the high stakes game of world diplomacy and international intrigue. If your entire frame of reference was this crossover, you’d think Peter Scanavino was playing “that blonde detective’s boyfriend”.
“Maroun” changes to “Moron” so easily you wonder if it’s an in-joke.
They take a run at Nicole the underage prostitute and she speaks of another Russian guy with a star-shaped medal. There’s only one guy at a Russian embassy party with a military medal, so they find Daniel Rublev (Pasha D. Lychnikoff, actually a Russian man), “senior liaison to the President of Russia”. Maroun, whose job is to ask dumb questions and look pretty, asks what that means. McCoy responds “he’s friends with Putin”. I’d have preferred if he went into a whole thing, like “Webster’s defines ‘liaison’ as…”. Stupid questions deserve snappy answers, as Alfred E. Neuman taught me. Price thinks Rublev ordered Sirenko to do it. There’s no “evidence”, but it would explain why an apolitical gangster would turn international terrorist. Well, not really, but it’s the third hour and things are basically just running on vibes now. Stabler picks up one of Sirenko’s lieutenants with one of those really cool “don’t call your lawyer, come with me now or I’ll tell your friends you’re an informant and thereby mark you for death” maneuvers only completely awesome peace officers do. I mean, it’s one thing when Vic Mackey does it. Dick Wolf is impressing upon me that Elliot Stabler isn’t a piece of shit authority abusing psycho. Man, the Strike Team was probably less corrupt than the cops in the Wolfiverse. At least crime went down in Farmington…
“I am having fun pretending to play genuine A+ #1 American video game.”
Said lieutenant offers up Ava’s phone in which she’s recorded for some reason Rublev bragging to underage prostitutes of a terrorist attack that will put Russia on the map. It’s shot like a porn video. Very strange. This is incontrovertible evidence Rublev at least knew about the bombing, so of course in the next scene it’s thrown out of court because Rublev’s villainously unattractive lawyer points out the DA’s office can’t prove its authenticity. It could be a deepfake for all we know! Price wants Nicole to testify despite Benson’s worries. Shaw and Rollins try to move Nicole from the safe house but assassins know their location and plug Rollins in the gut. Now, outside the show, I know Kelli Giddish is being fired off SVU this season but she’s still in the first eight or nine episodes, so I know she’s not going to bleed out here and now. I also know that this is what happened to Kat Tamin in the Season 23 premiere. She got shot, survived and decided to reevaluate her life and leave PD. If Rollins follows suit it will prove Dickory Wolf is such a hack he writes out female characters the exact same way a mere year apart. “I keep telling you, Dick, you can’t have her leave the force because an imbalance in her humors.”
“This is what you get for wearing white after Labor Day!”
There’s a pretty bad scene between Benson and Carisi, who of course rushes to the scene, where the former says “if anyone can survive a gunshot wound, we both know that she can”. Is this alluding to Rollins surviving a gunshot wound in Season 14 or is this absolute gibberish or both? Thank god they cut it out for syndication, to the chagrin of all the deranged “shippers” out there. To answer the question of how the Russians found out: Nicole was texting somebody and that’s how the Russian hitmen found her location. Olivia doesn’t blame her; it would have been funny if she had, going “Rollins’ life is in your hands!”. It seems dirty pool to blame a 15 year old girl, but “no texting while in a safe house scenario” seems like a no brainer. Benson states “nothing is more important than getting this little girl a semblance of a normal, happy life”, when I’m pretty sure proving the Russian state tacitly approved a terrorist bombing on American soil is slightly more important as far as the world goes than a white girl achieving a loving home. I have a feeling Benson puts pretty white victims over, like, the risk of nuclear war. Last shot of the final episode of SVU is Mariska Hargitay riding a bomb like Slim Pickens. It’s with this vigor that Benson tells the DA’s office that Nicole can’t testify because she shipped her off to Canada to a farm where she’ll be a lot happier.
Oh yeah, definitely a “cell phone video”.
As you can imagine, the DA characters aren’t happy. Nicole was integral to their case, and so what if “in real life” she could’ve given closed circuit testimony. In this world she needs to be in open court so somebody named Boris can smuggle in a handgun and hit her twice in the chest while Mariska Hargitay makes her “I’m not really going to even get nominated for an Emmy but what the hell” face. With both their key piece of evidence and their key witness out of play, Maroun suggests cutting a deal with Sirenko to get to Rublev. McCoy establishes that the target is Rublev, and if you have to give Sirenko a sweetheart deal to get to him, then fine. “How you convict him, I don’t really care”, McCoy says, which I think is probably a Sam Waterston ad libbed line. Waterston has been pretty wooden since his return and you definitely wish he had some of that scenery chewing energy in him from the classic years of the show. After having seen 11 episodes of the revival, I think I’ve crystallized what I dislike about the “order” portion of Law & Order: it’s trying too hard. Hugh Dancy is a red setter bounding after a tennis ball and I never buy him as an ADA particularly. With this case, it is an exercise in seeing which character can be more reactionary, to vent what is meant to be the viewer’s horror at what Sirenko and Rublev have done. “Maybe we’ll get lucky and he’ll get stabbed in prison. I’m not joking” Maroun says to Price. You can tell the franchise has gone woke because she doesn’t throw in the hope that he’s raped in prison. Classic SVU would’ve done that. “Gimme Shelter” isn’t classic anything, though. Sirenko gets 20 years for 5 murders—4 years per murder—in exchange for informing on his boss.
“Welcome to the Law & Order, Dancy–hope your career survives the experience!”
Nobody likes it, least of all Stabler. Contender for the worst scene in the crossover is when Stabler confronts Price and jaws at him about his dead CI, as if it trumps getting a Putin advisor dead to rights for masterminding a terrorist attack. “Tell all this to his mother!” Meloni shouts. Look, Vince was probably one of the better red shirts Law & Order has produced in the last few years, but he’s just that: a red shirt. You meet him and within 20 minutes he’s dead to really impress upon the mortal danger Kirk and Spock and sometimes Bones face. It’s an embarrassing scene that reduces Meloni’s character to a cartoonish hothead. Which, to be fair, he is, but I thought the entire purpose of Organized Crime was to give him a second dimension, possibly a third. Rublev comes to the prosecution in search of a deal, offering state secrets in exchange for some degree of immunity, which they do not want to take. Price is indignant that the State Department might want pertinent information from Putin’s buddy about the inner workings of the next Hitler. “Call the President, I don’t care!” Price says in Hugh Dancy’s ill-fated attempt to give his character a presence he’s thus far lacked. Price and Maldoun are about to leave until Rublev drops the magic word: family. We know from the Oscar nominated film Fast Five that family is everything, so it’s almost enough to get the DA’s office to blink.
“Why aren’t you taking my concerns seriously? Oh, I get it. It’s my big ears, isn’t it? Well, Mr. DA, I can’t help that! [sobs]”
Before that can happen, Rublev is being transferred back to jail and a bike messenger stops up and shoots him. Man, think of a world power extrajudicially killing people in other countries. Who does Russia think they are, us? I like how Price hesitates before trying to stop the bleeding from Rublev’s neck. Okay, Rublev! You got me! I guess I’ll try futilely to save your damn life. Futile it is, as Rublev bleeds out and Sirenko will only serve 20 years for blowing up a hotel in the middle of New York Fucking City. The reporters really roast Price for this at the press conference. The crossover bookends with one of those classic Cosgrove daddy-daughter lunches during which Lily bemoans the shittiness of “Gimme Shelter”’s outcome and basically asks her father why they don’t live in a police state wherein all crime is punishable by death. “Why isn’t America Singapore?” is a good question on the tip of the tongue of the nation’s youth. Cosgrove gives a long, incoherent speech which lays over a montage of the other characters doing what they do; most distressingly, Benson and Nicole are in some New York City park hanging out. Wait, what? Who the hell is looking after Nicole if she’s not actually with some relative in Canada? Where is Benson’s son, Noah? Did she sit him with the nanny so she could gallivant around with some teenage sex trafficking victim? The montage distracts from the fact that Cosgrove’s monologue is utter trash, total nonsense, a lot of words signifying nothing. I have transcribed the last exchange between traddaughter and him for your “enjoyment”:
After a long day of work, it’s back to the ol’ ball and chain…his daughter.
“There must be some way to punish these people so we feel safe.”
“I wish there was, sweetie, I wish there was. But it’s impossible. There’s no magic wand I could wave or speech I could give, so we do the things we can do. Like rescuing victims and helping them feel safe, whole. It’s not always easy or possible, but we try. If we do our best to arrest the criminals and predators so they can’t hurt anyone else. But there’s still a lot of good in this world so we need to focus on that. All those simple, priceless moments we seem to overlook. Like right now, you and me, having lunch, or watching the sun set, or the view of Manhattan late at night from the 59th street bridge. The world isn’t perfect, Lily, but it’s still beautiful.”
Not since Daredevil Season 2’s closing Karen Page editorial voiceover have I been so confused. So there’s no way to punish these people, it’s impossible, so our best is doing our job of arresting criminals and rescuing victims. Then it just devolves into some rah rah New Yorker bullshit these shows have to have to stay on the air. The 59th street bridge, remember that one, kids? Well, it’s still there!
Well, it explains why Part 3 of “Gimme Shelter” is subtitled “Benson Makes A Friend”.
Of all the hours, the last one is by far the worst: the combination of bad writing and a lack of compelling characters sinks it. It’s also an excuse to impotently rattle the saber at Russia, as though someone will be swayed by three hours of Dick Wolf propaganda. “Time to pour my Russian vodka down the drain cause Dick Wolf said so!” The righteous indignation from all parties designed to impress upon the gravity of the crimes we just witnessed becomes smothering. For instance, when Sirenko is telling the attorneys the specifics of his various crimes, Maldoun gets incensed when he refers to Ava as a hooker. “Don’t you dare call that little girl a hooker” she proclaims, as if killing five people is nothing compared to using improper nomenclature. Price gets like five of these moments expressing disgust at, indirectly or directly, the Russians and none of it has any bite. He calls Rublev a “pig” like he’s telling his parents he doesn’t want any damn vegetables. How about the fact that it takes 45 minutes into the third hour to get to the first trial scene? The “order” in Law & Order should be printed in smaller font size. There’s nothing to this scene, a mere elocution by Sirenko, which does bring us the hilarious line “just because I’ve killed people doesn’t mean I’m a liar”, which Rublev’s lawyer seizes upon with aplomb. Otherwise it suffers from what last season of Law & Order suffered from: the courtroom doesn’t “feel” real, it feels like overqualified high schoolers play acting. Next week: Hugh Dancy in The Crucible!
Dick Wolf under fire for allegations of elder abuse
As a story I think I’ve done more than enough to list and articulate my grievances. As a crossover I think “Gimme Shelter” also falls flat. Part of this is really outside of Wolf et al’s control in that they’re doing this at a time at which the franchise isn’t too healthy. SVU and OC have crossovers all the time already, so there’s no novelty in Benson and Stabler sharing a scene. The Law & Order is barely situated, so it’s not like “finally! We get to see Kate Dixon lock horns with Elliot Stabler!” Who cares? In 2001 this would have been something, whereas now it’s practically nothing. It’s been too long and the shows aren’t good enough. In the time between 2001 and 2022 we’ve also seen a propagation of TV universes, be it the Arrowverse or the Chicago programs, so a crossover of this length and breadth is no longer the novelty it once was. The rationale for this particular crossover is half-assed as hell. It’s like they took 5 minutes to think of it. “What’s in the news? Russians… what if it’s Russians who are committing sexually based offenses AND organized crime!” It ties in all three precincts, yes, but it’s a transparently shitty job.
Dick Wolf saw an episode of SEAL Team and said “I can do that”.
Also, what the fuck did the War in Ukraine have to do with anything? Was it a Dick Wolf cautionary tale, like, you might leave a war zone for the relative safety of the Big Apple but you might still get shot in the street after becoming an underage victim of sex trafficking? It seems like unnecessary extravagance for a franchise that is cutting financial corners wherever possible. You could have had a Russian national masterminding a terrorist attack to fool Lloyd Braun or whatever his motive was without the protracted scene in Ukraine or even the Ukrainian sex trafficking victim. Look, man, you’re on network TV in 2022. No matter how hard you try, you’re not going to be “relevant”, so cut it with the exploiting real world events for cheap thrills bullshit.
A quick perusal of Reddit indicates they’re as normal as ever.
I do think it’s interesting to analyze the advertising vs. what ultimately transpired. If you look at the ad on the top of this article, you’ll see Danielle Mone Truitt and Ice-T prominently featured, yet they’re so inconsequential to the plot I don’t think this article has mentioned them until now. They’re on the banner to give the impression that the Dick Wolf universe is more diverse than it is actually is, Wolf having fired two actors of color last season on SVU among other things. If anything, Hugh Dancy deserves to be on there, but he’d make the advert too white. Maybe “Gimme Shelter” should have actually given Sgt. Bell or Ice-T something to do besides deliver a bit of exposition if their inclusion was to be warranted, but it’s pretty obvious Wolf wanted Benson and Stabler to pump up his fledgling revived Law & Order. That’s why Cosgrove opens the crossover, why his new partner is introduced in an episode of Organized Crime, and why they drive the action in the first two halves. Wolf could’ve spent money on better writers instead of staging explosions and the show would be a lot better off.
I’m not really sure that’s “trivia”, IMDB.
I don’t know if I’ll be doing a next column for Law & Ordocki; this shitshow of a crossover so discouraged me I can barely look at anything Law & Order-related without retching. It’s three hours of my time I’ll never get back, plus god knows how many hours I spent writing this article. Not saying my time is a premium, but usually when I watch TV I get something out of it, be it enjoyment or information or Alan Tudyk speaking in an alien language to a baby alien. This? Nothing. I feel dumber for having seen it, because now my nuanced viewpoint of Russian aggression in Ukraine is tempered by alarmist MSNBC conspiracy theory nonsense about Russians being on every corner, ready to sap me of my precious bodily fluids. The only nice thing I can say about “Gimme Shelter”—which what the fuck does this have to do with a Rolling Stones song by the way?—is that Mehcad Brooks makes a decent first impression. I didn’t hate him at least. But otherwise, yeah, it’s a ham-fisted effort to instill paranoia in people who are already paranoid. “Gimme Shelter” is the nadir of the franchise, which is saying something.
I would pointedly refuse to board any bus with this on its side.
Ronnie Gardocki
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