Law nad Order: Special Victims Unit: "A Final Call at Forlini's Bar" (Dick Wolf Productions, Universal, NBC-TV, aired May 19, 2022)

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

Once again, the Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode, “A Final Call at Fortini’s Bar,” turned out to be even better than the Law and Order which preceded it. This time the central character was Delia Hackman (Jordana Spiro), a monumentally abused woman who’s been married four times (twice to the same man), who encounters the Special Victims Unit when she claims to have been raped by her current husband, construction worker Ty Hackman (Derek Phillips). The two have had a long cycle of abuse going on, including her taking out restraining orders and him getting a sick kick out of flouting them. Midway through the episode she reaches out to him because he still has her cell-phone charger (it’s an indication of how subjugated she feels that it doesn’t occur to her to go out and buy another charger). He goes out to the place she’s renting while he’s out on bail – he’s supposed to be wearing a monitoring bracelet on his ankle and that’s supposed to ensure he only goes from his home to his job and back – and he plays cat-and-mouse with the charger, waving it in her face and then putting it in his pocket. Then he grabs her and pulls her head to his crotch, and she’s been with this asshole long enough that she knows what that means. He turns his back to her long enough to mix them both drinks, and that’s when she grabs a kitchen knife and shoots him from behind, then leaves him on the floor bleeding out until he dies.

She explains that she didn’t call 911 because she was waiting for her phone to recharge – and when it’s finally charged she called Detective Amanda Rollins (Kelli Giddish) from SVU because Rollins had taken her original rape allegation. Unfortunately, the head of the district attorney’s trial division, Lorraine Maxwell (Betty Buckley), is a hard-ass who, when Rollins asks her to be lenient, says, “I was in an abusive relationship for 15 years, and I got out of it without killing the guy.” Maxwell not only assigns Rollins’ boyfriend, assistant district attorney Dominick Carisi, Jr. (Peter Scanavino), to prosecute the case despite his obvious conflict of interest (a real slip on the part of this episode’s writers, old Law and Order hands Warren Leight and Julie Martin), but during the trial she takes over Delia’s cross-examination and asks a few pointed questions herself. Desperate to ensure that Delia gets a fair trial and doesn’t have to rely on an overloaded public defender who doesn’t have the time, energy, skill or budget to investigate it properly, Lieutenant Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) reaches out to former SVU prosecutor Ravael Barba (Raúl Esparza), despite her antagonism towards him for having defended super-criminal Richard Wheatley over on Law and Order: Organized Crime.

But Barba agrees to take the case despite being in an alcoholic stupor (the episode title “A Final Call at Forlini’s Bar” refers to Barba’s favorite watering hole, which is about to be torn down), and he recovers from lt long enough to unearth an expert witness, psychiatrist Dr. Emily Sopher (Linda Emond), who testifies that the repeated bouts of physical injury Delia sustained at the hands of her husband, including actual blows as well as him repeatedly slamming her head into the wall, had caused her long-term damage and made it possible that she killed him without an actual criminal intent. Lorraine Maxwell is sufficiently moved that she agrees to drop the case, and Delia is referred to a long-term therapy program aimed at restoring as much of her cognition as possible, but the real takeaway is watching prosecutor Carisi go after Delia and the other witnesses for her with all guns blazing, even though it’s likely to piss off his girlfriend and possibly even lead her to break up with him.