Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Soldier Up" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-0TV, aired January 12, 2023)

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

The Law and Order:Special Victims Unit that followed “Second Chance,” “Soldier Up,” was nowhere nearly as good as this show has proven itself capable p\of being in recent years. It was a continuation of last week’s episode in which the notorious “BX-9” street gang of immigrant and refugee children from El Salvador – obviously patterned by writers David Graziano and o.d Law and Order hand Julie Martin on the all too real MS-13 turns out to be run by a quiet-seeming, unassuming young man named “Oscar Papa” (Rigo Garay)Goya Robles, whose marvelous portrait of carefully controlled villainy marks him as an actor to watch) who hires two lieutenants, nicknamed “Bugbear” and “Sacrilege” (the former is unidentified on imdb.com but “Sacilege” – so named because he once robbed a church – is played by Rigo Garay), who hit upon a recruitment tactic for the gang. They rape the mothers of the kids they want to recruit and then threaten to do it again if the targeted kids still refuse to join. There are sporadic attempts to give this story some of the moral complexity that has made SVU a great show over the years – notably the pathos of the 15-year-old boy who attacked Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) with a machete in the opening scenes of last week-s episode because his recruiter, “Maestro” – who had taken him from El Salvador via Mexico and lain on top of train cars and shown him the stars – that he’d be admitted to the gang as full-fledged “soldier” if he killed Benson – but overall this is a rather sad but superficial tale about gangbangers holding an immigrant community in line out of sheer terror. Among the macabre settings in this show is a grove of trees in Jacob Bronck Park (named after the man who gave “The Bronx” its name) in which each branch has a pair of women’s underpants hanging from it, the former property of the women the gang members, Bugbear and Sacrilege in particular, have raped to get them to submit. Eventually the Manhattan SVU cops pull down the panties and have them tested for DNA, and all show semen samples that are a match to Bugbear and Sacrilege (these two must have been very busy boys!),while Oscar Papa gest arrested but the police and prosecutors still aren’t sure they have enough evidence against him to win a conviction. This was an O.K. episode without being anything really special.