Tamara Tunie is back within the Law & Order family as she reprises her character, medical examiner Melinda Warner, in an upcoming episode of Law & Order: Organized Crime.
According to TV Insider, Tunie comes back as her Law & Order: SVU character on the Jan. 25 episode of Law & Order: Organized Crime, “Deliver Us From Evil.” In the upcoming episode, a bombing kills a spiritual leader, but their death is at the root of a bigger conspiracy. The episode also stars Ainsley Seiger, Tate Ellington and Dean Norris.
Tunie told TV Insider how Warner comes back into the life of Christopher Meloni’s character, Det. Elliot Stabler, and why.
“Apparently Warner has never left the morgue. She’s been lurking down there all this time,” she said. “Stabler comes to her because she’s the genius and she always hepls to solve the crime, and he’s looking particularly for an exact cause of death in this situation where there was an explosion and the person who was killed in the explosion, there’s a suspicion that the explosion actually wasn’t the cause of death and the explosion was to cover the cause of death. And so he comes to the morgue to see if Melinda can dig a little deeper and make more sense of what really happened.”
The episode has emotional interactions between the two characters, which Tunie described as “a really lovely scene.”
“I can’t wait for the fans to see it because it’s a rare moment when we get to see Stabler’s vulnerability and I think it’s really beautiful,” she said. “She knows something’s going on [in Stabler’s personal life], and of course, they haven’t seen each other since the death of his wife. So there’s a lot under a lot of subtext, and there’s a lot under the dialogue that’s going on.”
Tunie also talked about her relationship with Meloni, saying, “Chris and I are friends, so we see each other and we hang out, and I’m friends with his wife and children, so we see each other regularly.” She also said how she can’t believe 12 years have passed since she worked on a Law & Order episode, adding, “[I]t was great to be back on set together.”