Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Once Upon a Time in 'El Barrio'" (Dick Wolf Productions, Universal, NBC-TV, aired April 7, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode that followed was one of their typical races against time: alerted by a priest in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico that three young girls have been abducted and lured across the border by a fake “modeling agency” that’s actually a front for human traffickers, the Special Victims Unit cops need to find the girls within the next day or two before they’re shipped out to heaven knows where. There’s a prologue in which there are actually four girls in the current shipment, but when the coyote demands not only their jewelry but also their phones, one woman resists. The man’s response is to knock her unconscious, pour lighter fluid over her and set her on fire, thus killing her and scaring the shit out of the others. The writers, Denis Hamill, Bryan Goluboff and Monet Hurst-Mendoza, called their episode “Once Upon a Time in El Barrio,” nodding to the well-known “Once Upon a Time in … “ movies by Sergio Leone and Quentin Tarantino. Along the way we get to learn more about detective Joe Velasco (Octavio Pisano), who it turns out was a Mexican street kid drawn into the gang lifestyle and then pulled out of it again with the help of the priest who later alerted SVU to the presence of trafficked girls in their jurisdiction.

Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay, top-billed) orders Detective Velasco to go to bed and not continue the investigation on his own after dark, but of course Velasco disobeys orders, offers $50 to a street hooker for information about the girls – and is immediately arrested because the “hooker” turns out to be a policewoman working as a decoy. They also uncover a corrupt cop who got bribed by the traffickers via free sex with the victims, and by finding one of the victims the cops are able to locate the other two just in time. This was one of the better SVU’s of late, though it seems like the writers glued it together with spit and polish from the cliché bank this series has built up over the years (this is season 23, after all!): they’ve done human traffickers before, they’ve done crooked cops before (including cops who were turned crooked by the dictates of their dicks) and they’ve even done their equivalent of the Star Trek “red shirts” before, in this case a sympathetic Mexican-American woman detective, Rosanny Chavez (Karina Ortiz), who gets killed in a shoot-out after essentially having been set up by the bad cop who’s also her superior officer. Actually, as Charles pointed out to me after he read the above, she’’s killed when she’s run over by a car, but the implication I thought we were supposed to get is that she rean across the street and put herself in harmn's way while taking part in a shoot-out that would not have been necessary if her C.O. had remained on the up-and-up.