Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Bend the Law" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired April 27, 2023)

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

Last night’s (Thursday, April 27) episode of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, “Bend the Law,” was directed by Martha Mitchell from a pretty wild script by David Graziano, Julie Martin, Brendan Feeney and Gabriel Vallejo. It’s two interlocking stories, one of which deals with the continuing dilemma of Detective Joe Velasco (Octavio Pisano) over what to do about his old friend from his gang-banging days in New Mexico, Anthony “Chilly” Suarez (Joseph Castillo-Midyett), who literally saved his life and carried out two killings for a drug cartel that Velasco was supposed to do. Velasco and his strait-laced partner Tonie Churlish (Jasmine Batchelor), go to Maine to track him down and find out he’s become a schoolteacher at a school run by a relative. He’s also got married, and his wife pulls a gun on Velasco after she learns he’s secretly recorded Suarez – who now goes by the name of his principal/relative – confessing to at least two murders out of state in states where it’s legal to record conversations surreptitiously. Velasco saves his own job by arresting his old friend who saved his life way back when, The other, and by far more interesting, story line begins in a men’s club in which a woman forces her way into the club with a gun and demands her husband Harold. She suspects he’s up to extra-relational activities based on her finding condoms in his possession, and she shoots him in the crotch as her revenge. The Special Victims Unit responds to the call and finds at least three 15-year-old women on the premises, all engaging in hot necking sessions with the elderly and middle-aged male club members.

SVU detectives interrogate the men and one of them rats out club member Robert Briggs (Tom Irwin) as the man who put together the men and the women and recruited the girls to work at the club, at first as “hostesses,” then as “entertainers,” and finally as out-and-out hookers. This sets up a huge conflict of interest because Briggs is also the “kept” husband of Lorraine Maxwell (Betty Buckley), head of the trial division of the district attorney’s office and, of course, a specialist in cases of child sexual abuse. Naturally the fact that her husband – her second husband, whom she married seven years earlier after a bitter breakup from her first one, a domestic abuser – was running an underage prostitution ring from his club is a huge political embarrassment for her. In an understandably tense confrontation between them he explains that he got tired of living on a monthly allowance doled out by her from the huge settlement she got in her first divorce and he wanted to do something that would be a successful business venture. At first he tried real estate, but the development he invested in with a partner went belly up after the partner bailed. So he got into the sex-for-sale business and, though he was careful not to indulge in the forbidden joys himself, he pimped out the girls to his fellow club members under the cover of reproducing scenes from Greek mythology in which the girls were cast as “nymphettes.” (By coincidence – or maybe not – “nymphet” was the term used by Humbert Humbert, the central character of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, to describe the underage girlfriends for whom he had a penchant.)

An embittered Briggs threatens to take the case to trial, spurning the plea bargain his lawyer has negotiated for him, on the ground that if he’s going to go down he’s going to take his wife down with him. He even calls her a “castrating bitch” and says he can now understand why her first marriage broke up. Then he demands she share a steak dinner with him to commemorate their anniversary – only they’re at home, since he’s ordered the dinner delivered, and while she refuses to eat he has some of the steak and immediately chokes on it. I had been wondering whether he’d arranged the meal as a murder-suicide in which he was literally going to feed them both poisoned meat, but it appears it was just an accident – only Lorraine, instead of doing anything to help him survive, lets him choke to death on their living-room floor with the famous intensity of Bette Davis getting rid of her inconvenient husband (Herbert Marshall) in The Little Foxes by withholding the heart medication he needs to short-circuit a heart attack. She gets away with it and we’re left with the quandary this show often leaves us with: whether we condemn her actions or approve of them, since she was letting her husband die not only to save her own career but everything she’s worked for to bring sexual criminals to justice. Besides, even if we have our doubts about whether she should have let her faithless husband die, we’ve got to wonder about her rotten taste in men – and not only on this show, either: Buckley achieved stardom as the mother on the late-1970’s TV series Eight Is Enough, in which she was married to Dick Van Patten, a relentlessly homely middle-aged man who looked like he’d been baked out of Wonder Bread dough.