Warning: This post contains spoilers for Season Five of “Law & Order: Organized Crime.”
The second episode of the latest season of “Law & Order: Organized Crime” featured some unconventional scenes for the show — thanks to the episode’s writer, Chris Meloni.
Meloni, who also executive produces the show and stars as Detective Elliot Stabler, tells TODAY.com that comedy is “always good drama.”
This episode, “Dante’s Inferno,” is not only sprinkled with Elliot’s dreams, but also bits of humor not usually seen among “Law & Order” characters. Stabler spends a portion of the episode in a coma having these visions after being hit by a semitruck. Meloni’s close friend Mariska Hargitay guest stars in the episode as Capt. Olivia Benson, who has a storied history with Stabler, her former partner at the Special Victims Unit. She is at his bedside in the hospital, along with the Stabler family.
Both Meloni and Hargitay, despite their characters working with such dark subject matter, love comedy. Meloni wanted to write this episode because Hargitay would be guest starring in it, and he does not believe “there’s anyone alive” that knows Benson and Stabler’s relationship “as intimately and as well” as he and Hargitay do.
He says his real-life daughter, Sophia, once pointed out to him the HBO series “Succession,” which is about the antics of a rich family in the media business, is a comedy.
“I cocked my head going, ‘Really? … That’s how you see it?’ She said, ‘Absolutely,’” Meloni recalls. “And it is. There are such funny moments.”
“I feel as though that our show is richer because people even in the most horrific of circumstances, if they have a funny aspect to them, that never leaves them,” he says. “And it comes out in the oddest and weirdest and most unexpected moments.”
One especially funny scene in the episode shows Stabler in his hospital gown attempting to change and leave. Benson walks in and asks what he’s doing.
“You’re not going to cuff me, are you?” Stabler says.
After bantering back and forth, Benson grabs Stabler’s face between her hands and says, “Why do you got to make everything so difficult?”
As she leaves, Stabler tells her she can either help him out by starting her car, or “just stand there and watch me get naked.”
“This one was me changing my clothes, like, you know, ‘Look, I’m laying down the gauntlet,’” Meloni says. “‘You’re either going to help me escape, or you’re going to stand here and watch me get naked.’ You know, it’s just one of these small — and I think it’s also a nod to the fans.”
Meloni also wanted to write for Benson and Stabler because he “inevitably” ends up rewriting scenes for them anyway.
“I thought it was a natural and correct evolution to get to gain greater insight into their engagements — maybe not where they’re going and all that stuff,” he says. “Those are bigger-ticket items. How they speak to each other, how they feel about each other.”
Another hilarious scene with the two characters also includes Stabler’s older brother, Randall (Dean Norris).
While Stabler remains in his coma, Benson and Randall meet for the first time at his bedside.
Benson and Stabler share a moment alone not long after she meets his brother.Virginia Sherwood/Peacock
Randall asks Benson if she and his brother are “partners,” to which she responds, “And great friends.”
“From the beginning,” she adds, after Randall asks for how long.
“You like brisket?” Randall says.
“I’m sorry?” Benson responds. “Brisket?”
“Yeah, let me cook you a brisket one of these days,” Randall says. “It’s world-famous, mouth-watering, perfect bark.”
After Benson says she’ll bring her coleslaw, Randall says he makes his own.
It’s at this point when Stabler wakes up from his coma and says, “Hers is better.”
Meloni says he thinks Norris played the engagement between the characters “so beautifully.”
“‘Oh, so you’re her?’” Meloni says, “which lets you know, ‘Oh, Elliot’s –’ She’s obviously been a big part, an outsized part of Elliot’s life that Randall doesn’t know anything about, but he’s heard. And he’s also made some inferences of, ‘Oh, she’s your partner, wink, wink,’ kind of thing.”
Benson and Stabler also teamed up for what they do best: interrogating perps. Virginia Sherwood/Peacock
At another point backstage during his and Norris’ April 14 visit to TODAY, Meloni encourages Norris to tell the story of “the genesis of the brisket scene.”
“I have a restaurant in Temecula where we serve the finest brisket in Southern California,” Norris explains of the establishment, Swing Inn Café & BBQ.
Meloni says Norris made sure to inform him about the restaurant.
“That’s all writers do, is they steal,” Meloni jokes about the inclusion of the brisket lines.
“So lo and behold, I get the script, and I’m trying to pick up Mariska by telling her I have great brisket,” Norris says, while cracking up.
“The artistry of that is when he was telling me about the brisket, it put me to sleep,” Meloni jokes, in contrast to his character waking up after that topic of discussion.
Randall and Bernie Stabler are prime players in Season Five of “OC.”Ralph Bavaro/Peacock
The episode ends, however, on a much more serious note with an incredible monologue from the Stabler matriarch, Bernadette “Bernie” Stabler (Ellen Burstyn).
When Stabler wakes up in his hospital bed after his final dream, Bernie is there calling out to him.
When he asks his mother what’s wrong, Bernie explains she was “taught not to cry.”
“A policeman’s job is stressful enough without making it any worse,” she continues before listing off the police officers in the family: her late husband, her son and her grandson, who is Stabler’s youngest child, Eli.
Benson joins the Stabler family, including Bernie and Randall, at the hospital after Elliot’s accident.Virginia Sherwood/Peacock
“For 70 years, I was made to smile, smile. You know? And hold my breath. You went off to work, I would just hold my breath — that I won’t get the phone call, or the visit,” Bernie says.
Stabler then pulls his mom in for a hug and tells her he loves her.
“I thought it was a great moment in a small amount of real estate,” Meloni says of the mother-son scene, “because there are no more dire circumstances than will or will not your son be buried before you. Right? There’s no greater stakes — that in that moment she’s able to share a truth with herself.”
He explains he remembers growing up in a “world where women had their place, and the men were men.”
“That was the dynamic,” he continues, “and I’m not making — passing a judgment on it. That’s truly just the world that I as a child I grew up through, and I think to give voice to that is an interesting callback for generations that may not have experienced that. I think the younger generations don’t — I know don’t have the lived experience I do.
“That’s all. No big deal. But I was like, oh, this is almost like reliving history, hearing history. You know, ‘Smile, smile.’”
