Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: “The Five-Hundredth Episode” (Dick Wolf Productions, Universal, NBC-TV, aired October 21, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last Thursday night at 9 p.m. I watched a Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode, actually called “The 500th Episode,:” and then a Law and Order: Organized Crime episode called “Unforgivable.” (Why are Dick Wolf’s writers and show runners giving the Organized Crime shows titles that are puns on Clint Eastwood movies? The last three were called “The Outlaw Eddie Wagner,” “For a Few Leke More” – I presume the “leke” is the Albanian currency – and “The Good, the Bad and the Lovely.”) The SVU was a quite good one even though the promise of bringing back people who’d figured on the show before was fulfilled in only two instances: Danny Pino, the repulsive presence from Season 13 (I couldn’t believe the casting acumen of Wolf’s staff had fallen so far that he was Christopher Meloni’s immediate replacement!) who partially redeemed himself as a genuinely personable U.S. Senator on the short-lived CBS series BrainDead (a weird mashup of The West Wing with Invasion of the Body Snatchers as Washington, D.C. figures are taken over by a parasite from outer space); and Dann Florek, shown looking older than death on inserts representing Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) calling him on her cell phone to ask for advice on an old case. The plot dealt with an old flame of Benson’s, mystery writer turned true-crime podcaster Benton Lowe (Aidan Quinn) whom she had an affair with when he was 21 and she was 17, who returns to her life ostensibly to crusade for the freeing of Ian Ridley (a nicely twitchy performance by Kyle Cameron), who has been serving 25 years in prison for raping and murdering his high-school girlfriend on prom night in high school all those years ago. But Lowe has come to the conclusion that he’s innocent and has hired Nick Amaro (Danny Pino), who since his stint as an SVU detective has become a forensic scientist and is working for a company that has refined DNA testing to a level that makes samples that couldn’t be tested before able to be profiled now.

This company’s technology enables Amaro, Lowe and Benson to determine that Ridley didn’t rape and kill his girlfriend; the real culprit was her soccer coach, Roger Murray (Brian Kerwin), whose attentiveness and mentorship towards her turned out to be cover for an unrequited crush on her. Only, in the sort of hard-right turn SVU’s writers started pulling late in the Meloni years but have largely given up since, the second half of the episode turns out to go in a different direction: as Benson, Lowe and Amaro are high-fiving each other in the courthouse lobby when a woman comes up to Lowe and accuses him of raping her when she was an intern with his book editor. It turns out, in what’s become a depressingly familiar pattern in the #MeToo era, that Lowe regularly seduced much younger women by plying them with flowers, expensive dinner dates and booze, then having his way with them while they were too drunk to resist. Benson even learns what his seduction song was – “The Girl from Ipanema” (the short single version with Stan Getz and Astrud Gilberto) – which he gave her a cassette of way back when and has since provided his newer girlfriends on flash drives. At the end Benson, who actually yielded to Lowe’s advances and had a for-old-time’s-sake fuck with him, takes the old tape and throws it off a bridge into one of New York’s rivers, sort of like Gloria Stuart as the older version of Kate Winslet in Titanic throwing that jewel back into the water just before she dies and ascends to heaven, which in her case is Leonardo Di Caprio’s dancing arms. This was actually a good SVU and a nice show for a 500th episode, even though I wish they could have brought back more of the regulars (they did have a brief shot of Tamara Tunie doing medical tests on the victim’s underwear).