[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Law & Order: Organized Crime Season 4 Episode 9 “Semper Fi.”]
It’s not easy to make a person see that they need help, as is the case with Joe Jr. (Michael Trotter) on Law & Order: Organized Crime when his brothers, Elliot (Christopher Meloni) and Randall (Dean Norris) try to hold an intervention after finding drugs in his hotel room.
Joe goes on the defensive, even bringing up how his brothers got into it at that (already infamous) Stabler family dinner and refusing any help, especially Randall’s rehab pitch. He storms out and goes to Randall’s, where their mother Bernadette (Ellen Burstyn) is staying to ask about her rainy day stash because he needs to leave town for a bit. Then, when she says she spent it, he grabs the Mickey Mantle-signed baseball and storms out. Can he stop himself from selling it in his current emotional state?
“No, I don’t think he can,” Trotter tells TV Insider. “I mean, look, he’s spiraling and that’s so much so that you would go to the extent to go to your elderly mother’s house and not just steal a family heirloom, but speak to her in a way that’s unimaginable—at least for me in my real life, very difficult to speak to Ellen Burstyn like that. But yeah, I don’t think he can stop himself, but I think he’s tried to live a life of maintaining and being a functional addict. I spoke with the showrunner a lot about that reality. He has kind of worked at a system where he uses it when he knows he needs to, but the second that you take that power away from him, he is a fast-moving train with no brake. Something else is going to have to stop him, let’s put that way.”
When Randall goes home, Bernadette asks what he did to Joey because he’s different. No matter how much Randall insists he didn’t do anything, Bernadette insists he did. So how is Randall feeling about the state of his family now?
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“I think he feels some older brother guilt of having abandoned—I mean he didn’t necessarily abandon them, but they felt that he abandoned them and it’s been 20 years and maybe he’s feeling his own mortality and he wants to get back and get things straightened out,” says Norris. “Certainly that’s part of the storyline with Ellen that he wants to square things up with her before it’s too late. And I think that’s really informing what he does because at first he’s like, ‘I’m just coming in to do this and whatever, deal with mom, and then I’m leaving,’ and I think he gets drawn in and he wants to have his family again, as dysfunctional as it is. He misses his brothers in some way.”
He’s also quick to remind us that Randall’s the older brother and therefore “thinks that he’s the one that can deal with everything.”
Now, Elliot is undercover as Organized Crime looks into the drugs. Coming up, “it continues down a really interesting path, and it continues to be complicated,” Norris teases, with Trotter adding, “I don’t think it’s any surprise that the lies are going to eventually catch up to Joe.”
And while you might think Joe will expect his brother, as a detective, to get him out of any trouble in the future, Joe’s not necessarily there yet. “You need to want someone to save you first, and I don’t know that I’m necessarily processing a need for him. In fact, what you’ve seen so far is quite the opposite,” explains Trotter. “I feel like I’ve got it under control, which is very much an addict’s behavior. They’re just blinded by their own addiction. He’s certainly capable, he’s the super cop, but I don’t think Joe feels like he needs him as much as he actually does.”
How are you expecting this storyline to wrap up for Joe? Let us know in the comments section, below.
Law & Order: Organized Crime, Thursdays, 10/9c, NBC