Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Jumped In" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired January 5, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Alas, the other two shows on the Law and Order franchise weren’t nearly as good in their 2023 debuts. The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode, “Jumped In,” had two separate plot strands interwoven together by the writers (who aren’t credited yet on imdb.com). One was about the “BX-9” gang of immigrant kids from El Salvador, obviously patterned on the real-life MS-13, whom Lieutenant Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) tangled with in a previous episode, “The One You Feed,” aired September 29, 2022. Three teenagers from this gang approach Benson outside her apartment building while she’s coming home with her adopted son Noah (Ryan Buggle, who used to bother me so much as a character I was hoping Dick Wolf would let his writers kill him off already, but as he’s grown he’s become less obnoxious. One of the BX-9 kids threatens her with a machete while the other two, riding a moped, run her down and knock her to the ground. Benson shoots the kid in the knee, incapacitating him. She emerges with a black eye and sends her son away to the wonderful Norman Rockwell-esque couple who adopted his half-brother. She’s determined to track down the gang and in particular its secret leader, Oscar Papa (though if his identity is so secret, why does everyone on the police force seem to know who he is?), but to do that she’ll have to work with Detective Nick Duarte (Maurice Compte) of the anti-gang unit in the Bronx, where BX-9 is based, even though Benson already tangled with Duarte on “The One You Feed” and at least briefly became convinced he was corrupt.

She gets her chance when the New York Police Department’s chief of detectives, Ton McGrath (Terry Serpico) – depicted here and in his previous appearances on SVU as an old-line cop who looks fondly back to the days when police could simply beat up suspects and didn’t have to worry about reading them their rights, and who also doesn’t like having to work with women and people of color on the modern-day police force – to clean up the Bronx SVU, which is under FBI investigation for corruption. Benson brings in her A-list team from Manhattan SVU (one wonders how sex crimes in Manhattan are going to be handled when all the top SVU detectives are in the Bronx) and they stumble on a serial rapist who’s preying on deaf girls from a Catholic prep school, St. Genevieve’s. A man was arrested and convicted of one of the rapes 10 years earlier, but Benson and her crew are convinced that he’s innocent, in part because similar rapes have continued to happen even as he’s been behind bars. Eventually the Manhattan SVU cops catch the rapist – a middle-aged man who was raised by a deaf mother and thereby grew to hate all deaf women. Benson also manages to trace the kid she shot in the opening scene and reaches out to help him, but the show has an open ending with her and Duarte forming an uneasy alliance to track down, arrest and build evidence against the mysterious “Oscar Papa.” It’s an O.K. episode but nothing special, and it certainly didn’t live up to t he thrill-a-minute promise of the opening scene, which NBC used in its promos quite extensively even before the show actually aired. The show’s most interesting aspects are the crossover appearance of Camryn Manheim’s character from the flagship Law and Order as sign-language interpreter for the deaf victims, and the peremptory order McGrath gives Benson that she’s not supposed to reopen previously closed cases – which becomes moot when another deaf rape victim turns up, this time murdered as well as raped.