Law & Order: Organized Crime hit the ground running in 2022 by debuting Richard Wheatley’s new scheme to go after Stabler and the cops who took everything from him. Despite his claim, he clearly has an eye for revenge, and that involved an elaborate setup to get expert hacker Sebastian McClane, a.k.a. Constantine, out of prison to join forces with him and Angela. Based on Season 1, it’s not especially safe to be an enemy or an ally of Wheatley, and former Gotham fan-favorite Robin Lord Taylor weighed in to CinemaBlend on how Sebastian and Angela in particular can survive Organized Crime's big bad.
Of course, Richard Wheatley doesn’t have much to lose compared to those he counts as his enemies, particularly Stabler with his family, including his underage son and mother who can’t live on her own. It’s easy to see what he’s trying to accomplish by going after those who cost him everything, but what is Sebastian trying to achieve? Robin Lord Taylor shared:
Well, first of all, as we go forward, anyone who associates Wheatley, it's a game of survival. Going forward, he has to learn how to survive, because Wheatley is ruthless and has no regard for anyone, no respect for human life, nothing that makes a person human exists in Richard Wheatley. It becomes about a game of survival. And through that, probably one of my favorite connections that McClane has, is with Angela Wheatley, played by Tamara Taylor, who's amazing. They both see in each other two people who are under the thumb of this psycho. And there's a connection there. And maybe they can use each other to survive, maybe they can work together to get out of this alive. And also there's a respect and a tenderness there too. Which is really fun to play in this world when everything else is so dark, and it's about survival. It's a really cool twist that happens coming up.
While the end of the midseason premiere revealed Wheatley, Angela, and Sebastian sitting down to dinner after Wheatley successfully broke the hacker out of prison, it turns out that this isn’t anything even close to an alliance of three people on equal standing. Based on the actor’s comments, it seems that Sebastian and Angela may need to lean on each other if they want a chance to survive her ex-husband. She doesn’t exactly have the cleanest hands at this point, but it would take a lot for her to become as dark as Wheatley, and Sebastian can find “a respect” there that doesn’t come from Dylan McDermott’s character.
Robin Lord Taylor previously shed some light on Sebastian as “as a good person who believes in people” and doesn’t have the same kind of cynicism as Wheatley, and confirmed that Sebastian was sincere about the guilt and pain he feels about accidentally causing a man’s death. So, will he and Angela be able to survive Wheatley by working together? When I commented that the final scene of the midseason premiere looked like it established a kind of villainous triumvirate between Wheatley, Sebastian, and Angela sitting down to dinner, Taylor shared whether fans will see more of that:
Yes, definitely. Because again, McClane is also tied to Richard Wheatley as much, whether he likes it or not. So the only other person that can relate to that, in quite that way, is Angela Wheatley. And so yeah, we'll see more of that going forward.
Unfortunately for Sebastian (and Angela), as much as they may be considerably better people than Richard Wheatley, they’ll also have the NYPD to worry about if the truth gets out. Sebastian is already a public enemy because of the breakout, and his status as a “good person” deep down won’t stop him from being chased by the authorities. Angela still seems to be more or less fooling everybody that she’s a lot more frail than she seems, although Stabler seemed tipped off a bit in the midseason premiere. So, what is Robin Lord Taylor excited about?
I mean, just for me to be in a scene with Dylan McDermott, and then for me to be in a scene with Chris [Meloni] and Danielle [Moné Truitt]. I'm excited for people just to see that. Just for me to be part of this world in this small way. That's the thing I'm most excited about for people to see.
Fans already saw Sebastian with Dylan McDermott in the midseason premiere, and we can clearly look forward to Sebastian with Stabler and Bell in Season 2 as well. Whether that’s because they catch him and lock him back up, recruit him as a CI of sorts to spy on Wheatley (although the CI method just backfired spectacularly on another NBC show), or he slips through their fingers remains to be seen, but there’s clearly a lot to look forward to.
See what’s next for Wheatley vs. just about everybody else with new episodes of Law & Order: Organized Crime on Thursdays at 10 p.m. ET on NBC, following Law & Order: SVU. The two shows will be joined by the revival of the original Law & Order in the not-too-distant future, which will bump The Blacklist (which has been chock full of schemes as well in Season 9) back to Fridays starting in February.
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