Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Do You Believe in Miracles?" (Diuck Wolf Productions, Universal, NBC-TV, aired May 5, 2022)

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

At 9 p.m. I watched a quite good Law and Order: Special Vlctims Unit episode that was, if anything, even better than the Law and Order show that preceded it. Its episode title was “Did You Believe in Miracles?” and it was a chilling story about a couple named Peter and Claire Lee (Reggie Lee and Virginia Kull) whose 14-year-old daughter Beth (Isabella Russo) is taken for a weekend by a member of their church named Luke (Alexander Koch). What the Lees think Luke is doing to their daughter is taking her to a real-estate site where she will help build houses. What he’s really up to is spending a weekend alone with Beth at a cabin his family owns upstate. It also turns out that his real name is Nathan and his object in befriending the Lees has been to “groom” Beth, though in an interesting variation on the formula from Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita he seduces both Claire and Peter to ingratiate himself with their family so he can go after the daughter. The cops trace Nathan’s hideaway midway through the episode thanks to another woman whom Nathan a.k.a. “Luke” romanced to get access to her daughter. But because Nathan took Beth legally and had her parents’ permission to do so, they can’t really charge him with kidnapping her – and since she’s 14 under New York law she has the right to refuse rape kit or a paternity test or even any procedure to see if she’s pregnant.

Meanwhile Nathan has done such a good job of grooming her (to use the word in its true sense instead of the way the governor and legislature of Florida used it to describe a teacher who’s honest about sexuality to their students) he has literally managed to get Beth to believe that he is Joseph, she is Mary and their baby is the second coming of Christ. “I’m going to have God’s baby!” Beth says as Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) tries to take her into custody. Eventually Benson hits on a stratagem to trick Beth into taking a pregnancy test that can establish that Nathan is the biological father of her baby-to-be: she tells Beth that once she turns 15, which Beth will do in a month, she’ll be able to marry Nathan in Maryland as long as she has her parents’ consent. The trick is she has to undergo a pregnancy test to prove that the fetus she’s carrying is indeed Nathan’s, and of course once the test comes back and proves it is the cops can arrest Nathan for statutory rape – while Beth protests that she’s still in love with him and Peter and Claire have to put their badly wounded family back together now that all three of them realize they had affairs with Nathan and he was able to manipulate them.

I particularly liked the line writers Micharne Cloughley, Candice Sanchez McFarland and Victoria Pollack gave Peter to say, “I’m not Gay!” twice, including the admission he makes to the cops that he had sex wtih Nathan “two or three times” and it wasn’t just a proverbial “Christ, was I drunk last night!” one-night stand. One of the things that made me a major Law and Order: Special Victims Unit fan was the way the show dealt with Queer people and their issues, while at the same time avoiding the “born that way” clichés we like to use to describe ourselves. I’ve long felt that the origins of sexual orientation are moire complex than we like to let ourselves believe, and while I don’t think people change their sexualities the way they change their shirts, I also believe people’s attractions can change and grow over time, as mine did.