Christopher Meloni was a massive fan favorite when he played the lead character Elliot Stabler during the first 12 seasons of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, costarring with Mariska Hargitay, who played Detective Olivia Benson.
Meloni left the series at the end of SVU‘s twelfth season, so his character Elliot Stabler retired from the police force off-screen in the Season 13 premiere. Fans clamored for his return, and in April 2020, an announcement was made that Christopher Meloni agreed to return in his famous detective role on a new SVU spinoff series.
This new show, called Law & Order: Organized Crime, would follow Stabler coming out of retirement to head up an NYPD task force on organized crime. This was great news to Elliot Stabler fans!
This new series wouldn’t just focus on Elliot Stabler’s detective work. However, to personalize the fan favorite, series producers decided to focus on Stabler’s personal life in addition to following his police work.
This brought to the fore several characters in Stabler’s family, including his son Elliot Stabler, Jr. So, who is this character, and what happened to him on the show?
The character Elliot Stabler, Jr., called Eli by his friends and family and played by Nicky Torchia, was born in 2007 and is Elliot and Kathy Stabler’s youngest child. He has four siblings: Kathleen, Elizabeth, Maureen, and Dickie.
One dramatic storyline in Law & Order: Organized Crime followed Elliot Stabler’s journey into accepting that Eli is really his son, as he initially doubted his paternity but later came around to believe Eli was biologically his.
Eli’s birth was a dangerous case of touch and go because while his mother was pregnant with Eli, she got into a car accident and sustained serious injuries. Detective Olivia Benson and a group of firefighters rescued Eli’s mother from the crushed car. With their prompt action, they managed to provide her with the necessary medical assistance, and she was able to give birth to baby Eli.
When Elliot Stabler got to the hospital, his wife gave him the happy news that they had a baby boy, and Stabler then shared a loving bonding moment with his new son.
Though Eli was a difficult, colicky baby, his parents loved him deeply despite the pressures they experienced in their unstable marriage and Stabler’s demanding career.
Tragedy struck the family years later when Eli’s mother, Kathy, was hurt in a car bombing and later died from serious injuries. Elliot Stabler called his son Eli to give him the terrible news on an episode of SVU called “Return of the Prodigal Son.”
Eli took his mother’s death the hardest out of all his siblings. He went into shock and broke down at her funeral while his father tried to comfort him.
A troubled teenager, Eli resented his father for seemingly being more invested in his career than in his family, and he acted out by stealing his grandmother’s medication and trying to sell it. After taking drugs with a friend he later discovered dead, Eli was devastated and climbed onto a ledge near the George Washington Bridge.
A police officer rescued Eli by convincing him to climb back down, and his father and Olivia Benson picked Eli up at a police precinct, where they learned that Eli was a suspect in his friend’s death. Eli was later acquitted and released into his father’s custody.
Throughout the three seasons of the new series Law & Order: Organized Crime, Eli enjoyed both the love and care of his family and struggled with a number of difficult issues, including his mother’s tragic passing, struggles with drugs, being accused of murder and longing for a stronger relationship with his father.
Fans hope to see Eli come into his own in Season 4 and grow into a happy and stable man after facing so many challenges.