[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Law & Order: Organized Crime Season 5 Episodes 1 and 2.]
Detective Elliot Stabler (Christopher Meloni) kicks off his time on Peacock, where Law & Order: Organized Crime now lives, with a heartbreaking loss and a visit from his former partner, SVU‘s Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay).
Stabler goes undercover as a trucker to investigate what ends up being multiple serial killers responsible for the disappearances of numerous sex workers. He gets to know a young girl, Bunny, who lives in the motel next to the truck stop, only for her to be taken. He rescues her, but one of the men running the trafficking ring follows and T-bones his car. Stabler lands in the hospital, but Bunny dies from her injuries. The season trailer shows Stabler in confession, talking about promising people he’d save them but not keeping his word.
“That theme affected me enough that I think there’s a strand in there throughout the season to a certain degree,” Meloni tells TV Insider (watch the full video interview above). “That’s one of the things that Stabler maybe carries with him, which is all those years on SVU, that was never discussed, never brought up, never addressed. But when I was doing research for Elliot Stabler at the very beginning with SVU and I spoke to some of the real SVU detectives, I felt as though I felt that on them, that no matter how much good they do, there’s always a crime to come. It’s the ones you can’t save.”
Benson visits Stabler in the hospital in the second episode, and Meloni appears in the Law & Order and SVU crossover airing Thursday, April 17, on NBC. Continuing to work together is like “getting back on the bicycle,” Meloni says. “It’s just really a shorthanded love affair, professional admiration, mutual admiration. We just speak the same language and we just cut to the chase of what it is we’re trying to accomplish in the scene, in the arc, whatever it may be.”
There’s been this will they/won’t they between the two for years now — including an almost kiss — and in Organized Crime Season 5 Episode 2, Stabler does say he’s been dreaming about things he lost, and one of those dreams is of her walking away. So what’s coming up there?
“I think we and the writers are trying to find the way, a satisfying way home. We just don’t know what that home is,” says Meloni.
When it comes to how Stabler feels about her and if he even knows completely, “there could be a whole new spinoff on unpacking that,” he admits. “I think it’s wrapped up in how he’s wired, how he’s built, his Catholicism, the commitments he’s made and promises and complicated.”
While Stabler is unconscious in the hospital, his brother Randall (Dean Norris) talks about him still running around trying to make their father proud and how this is no way to live. “I’m very proud of that monologue,” Meloni, who wrote that episode, shares. “I thought he did a great job.” Could we see Stabler start to question how long he can keep doing this job?
“I think that’s always in the back of his mind,” says Meloni. “Why is it you’re doing what you’re doing? Is it worth it? But if you go, what’s being left undone? If you’re a guy who has this weird ‘I want to save the world’ complex, it’s probably very difficult.”
Watch the full video interview above for more with Meloni.
Law & Order: Organized Crime, Thursdays, Peacock
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