LAW & ORDER: ORGANIZED CRIME’s Ilene Chaiken Teases the Next Step in Elliot and Olivia’s Relationship

In the first season of LAW & ORDER: ORGANIZED CRIME, the forever complicated relationship between Elliot Stabler (Christopher Meloni) and his former partner (now SVU captain) Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) was one of the show’s throughlines.

In just eight episodes, Elliot gave Olivia a mysterious letter, told her she meant the world to him and he loved her (albeit the latter was said during an intervention), they got closure on her brother’s death, and bad guy Richard Wheatley (Dylan McDermott) implied Olivia was the love of Elliot’s life. (And that’s not even including what they went through on LAW & ORDER: SPECIAL VICTIMS UNIT.)

However, with Elliot going undercover at the start of ORGANIZED CRIME’s second season, for the most part, their interaction had been limited, working together on a few cases, but only getting to scratch the surface of what they still need to contend with.

With the undercover arc about to come to an end, SVU boss Warren Leight recently tweeted about a meal between the producers of both shows and the actors about “where does/do EO go from here? If, when, how fast, toward what end.” So what does come next for the duo?

“[The conversation] was really not about the ‘if’ or ‘when,’ it was about the ‘what,'” ORGANIZED CRIME showrunner Ilene Chaiken says. “It was all of us: [SVU bosses] Warren and Julie [Martin], some of my colleagues from the Wolf [Entertainment] organization, and Chris and Mariska, over a lovely dinner, talking about not what should we do, but what’s going to happen with Elliot and Olivia.”

“They now really are ready to grapple with their friendship, their would-be romance, if indeed that’s what it is,” she continues. “They’ve been through a lot, and they’ve got a lot before them. And how can we approach this in a really honest [way]? We want to tell an adult story. We want to tell a real story. We don’t want to be coy. We want to delight and entertain and enrage you. But we want, most importantly, to really dig deep between these two people, and honor this 23-year relationship that so many people are so invested in.”

Of course, since Stabler went undercover, a (figurative) bomb was detonated when—a very drugged—Elliot revealed to Olivia that his now-dead wife wrote most of the letter he gave her upon his return back to New York. His sole contribution? “In a parallel universe, it will always be you and I.”

Unfortunately for Olivia, she didn’t get much clarification about anything, including the circumstances around the letter being ghostwritten or why Elliot decided to give it to her, anyway.

“We are [coming back to it],” Chaiken confirms, with a laugh. “Because I got put on the spot about it in exactly the same way Elliot is going to get put on the spot about it.”

As for the when, “you can look for the beginning of that conversation in episodes 9,” she teases—AKA both crossover hours (of SVU and ORGANIZED CRIME) airing in December.

And while Hargitay played a sizable role in ORGANIZED CRIME’s first season—and less so during the first arc of season 2 due to Elliot being undercover—”it’s still up in the air [how much she’ll appear in the rest of the season],” Chaiken says. “But our episode 9 crossover will hopefully advance the story.”

LAW & ORDER: ORGANIZED CRIME, Thursdays, 10/9c, NBC

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