Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "And a Trauma in a Pear Tree" (Wolf Entertainment, Universal,, NBC0-TV, aired December 8, 2022)

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

tBefore we watched last night’s new episodes of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and Law and Order: Organized Crime, my husband Charles rather startled me by saying that he liked Organized Crime the best of the three shows and said Dick Wolf and his writers have run the familiar tropes of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit into the ground. He also said he thought the series had degenerated too much into Law and Order: The Soap Opera. This was a frequent complaint of mine as early as the late Christopher Meloni era, when they really went overboard on the continuing melodramatics of the relationship between Elliott Stabler (Meloni) and his wife Kathy (Isabel Gillies), i including their trial separation and the brief affair he had with a new police partner, played by Connie Nielsen (the very tall Scandinavian-descended actress who was Sylvester Stallone’s wife and co-star briefly), as Mariska Hargitay was briefly written out of the series so she could have a baby in real life.

Alas, this episode went all too much off the deep end in the Law and Order: The Soap Opera department, as it was Christmas-themed (the episode title was “A Trauma in a Pear Tree”) and writers David Graziano and Julie Martin (the latter an old Law and Order hand) went way overboard on the “Christmasicity.” The show featured Detective Amanda Rollins (Kelli Giddisn) and her current boyfriend, assistant district attorney Dominic Carisl, Jr. (Peter Scanavino), planning a surprise wedding and getting the SVU crew to attend by having a judge in a case they’re working on summon them to his courtroom. They think something’s gone haywire with the case but they learn when they get there that the judge is about to officiate at the Carisi-Rollins wedding. Alas, in addition to marrying off Rollins they’ve also decided to have her leave the Special Victims Unit and take a job at Fordham University as a lecturer on crime and law enforcement.

There’s a weird set of scenes between Mariska Hargitay as Captain Olivia Benson and Giddish as Rollins in an upstate motel they’re staying in because Benson’s adopted son Noah (Ryan Buggle) has discovered online that he had a half-brother, Connor McCann (Tim Ryder), who’s been adopted by a picture-perfect suburban couple of the kind Norman Rockwell could have painted, Matt and Ginny McCann (Gregory Abbey and Anne Belknap). Noah and Connor met online through an ancestry Web site and corresponded, bonding over their mutual love of video games (well, they’re 2020’s-era boys, so why not?)/ Benson has gone up to visit them and the McCanns offer her to stay in their spare bedroom, but she’s already booked a motel and it’s a good thing she has, too, because she discovers that the motel room is wired with secret video cameras and the desk clerk is in league with another man to secretly record the guests in the room and then post their videos to the Web as amateur porn. Benson summons Rollins to the small town and the two of them bust the bad guys, who seem to have hatched their scheme based on the movie Psycho (remember the peep-hole through which Norman Bates, played by Anthony Perkins, eavesdropped on Marion Crane, played by Janet Leigh, as she showered before he offed her?).

They entrap the mastermind (and I use the term loosely), Ray Sprague (Jesse Lehman, who actually is a quite good-looking man), by coming on to him in a singles bar and offering him a three-way, and afterwards there’s a scene in the motel room in which Benson and Rollins get drunk on boxed wine and seem to be heading for Lesbian territory when Rollins suddenly blurts out that she’s quitting SVU to take the Fordham job and Benson flashes back to her own emotions when Stabler left the force lo those many years ago. She even confesses that she had a crush on Stabler (as did most of the straight women and Gay men in America; when Meloni was on SVU I joked that the show’s fan base consisted of Gay men who thought Christopher Meloni was hot and straight men who thought Mariska Hargitay was hot) which she never acted on because he was married, and since his wife was killed in the first episode of Law and Order: Organized Crime she’s been in a quandary over what to do about it. (Meloni’s real-life wife is an art director named Sherman Williams, and though she was born Doris Proctor the gender amiguity of her pseudonym is probably what led to the widespread belief that Meloni is Gay – along with a lot of wishful thinking among Gay men like me.)

As if those weren’t enough plot strands for you, there’s also a trial going on of a man named Elias Olsen (Adam Petchel), whose criminal specialty was kidnapping teenage girls and holding them hostage in his basement, imposing a system of rewards and punishments on them. In a previous episode he was busted by junior SVU detective Grace Muncy (Molly Burnett), who threw a police radio at him to stop him from fleeing and wounded him in the forehead. Olsen’s attorney, Mason Carter (Robbie Williams), goads her on cross-examination into losing her temper on the witness stand, and the case ends up with a hung jury – which means she’ll have another chance to give evidence against him without potentially blowing the case, though it also means Olsen’s last victims, Priya Singh (Aditi Yadav) and her mother Nisha (Anjali Bhimani), will have to testify again.