LAW & ORDER: ORGANIZED CRIME Post-Mortem: Michael Tow Breaks Down Wen and Elliot’s Heart-to-Heart

[Warning: This post contains spoilers for the Thursday, March 30 episode of LAW & ORDER: ORGANIZED CRIME, “Blood Ties.”]

Elliot Stabler (Christopher Meloni) partnered up with Wen Shao (Michael Tow) on the Thursday, March 30 episode of LAW & ORDER: ORGANIZED CRIME for a very important reason: to find Wen’s missing son.

Though Wen was a teacher, he was able to convince Elliot to work together as they tried to get to the bottom of a human trafficking ring.

The duo had their ups and downs, as Elliot tried to preach patience and not losing control—yes, you read that right; growth!—as they followed the leads, the men did have a chance to have several heart-to-hearts.

Notably, the men spoke about their experience with fatherhood while in the car. After showing off a photo of his son, and the electric bike he created, Wen gushed, “He wants to work with rockets. I was never good with my hands. I don’t know where he gets it from.”

Elliot took a photo of his kids out from his car’s visor and passed it to Wen. “These are mine,” he said.

“Five,” Wen marveled. “How do you get a moment’s peace?”

“We didn’t,” Elliot answered with a smile. “God, I miss it every day.”

Wen relayed that his son wanted to come to America for school—but he had shut it down, much to his current regret. “A father’s job is to protect his children,” he said. “I will not stop.”

Though the scene was only a couple of minutes, the actors were aware of its importance to the episode.

“Chris had given some thoughts—he said, ‘At the end of the day, these are just two fathers connecting,’” Tow recalls. “And that’s really the important part of that scene. [Despite] all the craziness that happened right beforehand, and the idea of not getting along, at the core of it, it was two fathers. Once Chris said that, it clicks. While the rest of the episode is pretty intense in a lot of areas, this was two fathers talking about their families.”

Because drama show scenes are virtually never filmed in the order they air, the car sequence was “a bit earlier” in the production of “Blood Ties.”

“That’s the tough part about it, from the actor’s side,” Tow acknowledges. “At that point, we were still getting to know each other a little bit better and understand our styles. So from an actor’s point of view, for me, it is a little bit intimidating. But that’s part of my job: to come in and to be a guest in his house, and be as good of a guest as I can be. I need to be able to adjust pretty quickly and build that connection, even though we had known each other for maybe a day at that point.”

Also complicating things a bit? Actually filming the car scene. “This is my first scene where the car is actually not really outside; it’s a green screen,” Tow says. “So that is in itself a little bit of a surreal scenario, because [when you’re filming in the car] you’re seeing the [projected] streets passing along. You have 3D all around you! So there’s this feeling you’re actually in the car, but you know you’re not and then the car moves up and down, too—it rocks up and down.”

“But at the same time, while you’re having this connection, there’s a camera a foot away, and you can see a hundred [crew] people in the background watching,” he continues. “So it’s one of those things that while it was intimate in a connection point with another actor, it’s still daunting, because you see all the craziness of technical [filmmaking] all around you. You have to block that stuff out and focus in on the scene. And when that scene is opposite a legend like Chris Meloni, it’s not the easiest thing.”

 

Outside of his unexpected partnership with Meloni, Tow also notes how special it was to be, specifically, in this arc of ORGANIZED CRIME.

“Because it has an Asian storyline, it was great to actually work with a lot of people who I’ve known for years, but had never worked with in person,” he says. “So the other guest stars, many from LA who I’ve known for a long time—it’s cool to have somewhat of a reunion.”

“At the same time, it’s great to be able to be part of a show that I love,” he continues. “And to see a team that I’ve seen on TV all the time and be able to be part of that? It was pretty damn cool.”

And both on-screen fathers got a bit of good news by the end of the episode: Wen was able to safely reunite with his son, and Eli (Nicky Torchia) came home to visit Elliot.

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

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