Law & Order: Organized Crime Season 3 Episode 7 Review: All That Glitters
A woman from Stabler’s past popped up out of nowhere.
Who is she, and can Stabler trust her?
Bensler shippers are seriously upset with Law & Order: Organized Crime Season 3 Episode 7, but there may be more to Leonetti’s story than it appears.
Leonetti didn’t alert anyone that she was coming to New York. She told Stabler that she was on a mission to get Abramov, and he believed her — and vouched for her trustworthiness to Bell.
Leonetti: Two years ago I had Abramov. I had a witness and I was going to get him protection but before it was approved, Abramov killed his wife and children. It was my fault.
Stabler: No.
Leonetti: We have 48 hours to catch this monster and I am not leaving without him.
The team caught Abramov, so it appears Leonetti was on the up and up, but was she? Bell was right to be suspicious, and Stabler alluded to a mess back in Italy that Leonetti didn’t want to deal with.
Something seems shady about her, and Stabler may learn the hard way that she isn’t what she claims to be. She keeps flirting with him, so her ulterior motive may only be to start a romance, but it could also be something more sinister.
Stabler is at the forefront of investigations into powerful people who don’t want to get caught. He’s already toppled several mob families, and nobody knows what he was up to in Italy.
It’s not a stretch to imagine that one enemy or another could bribe or blackmail someone from Stabler’s past into trying to seduce him to get information they want.
It could even be a lower-ranked member of Abramov’s organization who wanted to get rid of Abramov and thought they could kill two birds with one stone if they used Leonetti.
We don’t know enough about her to tell whether she’s vulnerable to blackmail. We only know she left a mess behind in Italy.
Stabler appeared to be close with her in Italy. He said Kathy loved her, so it’s unlikely he had an affair. That wasn’t in his character anyway; he kept things platonic with Benson for years because he was married.
It’s strange that he never mentioned her before, though.
His explanation that he couldn’t deal with her messages after Kathy died doesn’t ring true. If she was a close friend who pulled him out of a funk so severe he wanted to quit his job, someone in the family should have mentioned inviting her to the funeral.
The only reason I can think of that they didn’t was that Leonetti hadn’t been invented yet. But still, her absence from the series before this is a plot hole that’s somewhat difficult to fill.
It may be several episodes before we get the full story about Leonetti and her intentions, so viewers must be patient. She’s coming on awfully strong, though, and I don’t get the feeling it’s purely because she’s eager for a relationship with Stabler.
She also offered Jet a job in Italy. The spoiler video for Law & Order: Organized Crime Season 3 Episode 8 indicates that the Organized Crime team is in danger of being disbanded and scattered around the world.
Could these two facts be related?
Jet’s relationship with Whalen also took some interesting turns after the two posed as a married couple.
Jet was hurt by Whalen’s ad-libbed comment about her parents not paying for the wedding, though she did her typical thing of pretending she didn’t care before admitting she’d been married before, and it didn’t go well and alienated her father.
These are some intriguing tidbits about our favorite enigmatic tech. What on Earth could have happened that her father still isn’t talking to her?
But what happened to Jet’s hacker boyfriend?
Although she got scared and broke up with him, she admitted later she had made a mistake. Even if he didn’t want to try again, he was working with Organized Crime from time to time, so there’s no reason for him to disappear and be treated like he never existed.
Similarly, is Stabler’s family ever coming back?
It’s annoying that Eli and Bernie’s departures were off-screen. Stabler’s empty nest story would be stronger if we were privy to the whole thing. Bernie and Eli deserve better than an off-hand comment explaining where they went.
The case was intriguing, but it was yet another mini-story not connected to the Silas family.
Was the gold smuggling operation the tip that Pearl gave Stabler? Someone else was behind it, so how would she know about it?
We did get another glimpse of Pearl at the end of the hour. She wants out of the crime business and is desperate to run away to Europe. That’s going to deepen the rift between her and Teddy, but what good is that if she doesn’t stick around to continue snitching to Stabler?
Realistically, Organized Crime would work on more than one case at a time, but I’m eager to get back to the investigation into the Silas family. That’s been back-burnered for the most part, and the longer the gap between episodes about this investigation, the harder it is to remember the details.
Weigh in, Organized Crime fanatics! What was your take on Leonetti? Do you miss the Silas family? And what do you think of the way Stabler’s family was ushered off-screen?
Hit the big, blue SHOW COMMENTS button and let us know! And if you want to refresh your memory first, watch Law & Order: Organized Crime online.
Law & Order: Organized Crime airs on NBC on Thursdays at 10 PM EST / PST.
Jack Ori is a senior staff writer for TV Fanatic. His debut young adult novel, Reinventing Hannah, is available on Amazon. Follow him on Twitter.
