Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Prima Nocta" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired May 2, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The other Law and Order shows I watched two nights ago (Thursday, May 3) were a Special Victims Unit episode called “Prima Nocta” and an Organized Crime episode called “Redcoat.” “Prima Nocta” – which takes its title from the jus primae noctis, by which a feudal lord could have sex with the wife of any of his serfs on their wedding night – was a pretty bizarre series show about a rapist who targets women on the eves of their weddings and, as he leaves, tells them, “You’ll always remember me.” The show begins with the wedding ceremony of the rapist’s latest female victim, only the bride-to-be has a breakdown just as the ceremony reaches its conclusion, bolts from the church and doesn’t tell anybody – especially not her fiancé – what’s wrong. The befuddled would-be husband audibly wonders whether he is in fact married – she walked out after he’d said his vows but before she’d said hers – and the only person she’s willing to talk to about the incident is Our Heroine, Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay). She and the other SVU cops do a records search of the New York Police Department looking for similar cases of rapes of women on the eves of their weddings, and fortunately they find a couple, including one of Breena Richards (Mary Antonini), who’s never told her husband of her rape because she’s Black, he’s white and the baby they had shortly after their marriage was actually the rapist’s biological offspring, not the husband’s. On his subsequent rapes the perpetrator, who turns out to be a heavy-set young learing-disabled (or whatever the current P.C. euphemism is) Black man named Leon Wallace (Jeremiah Latrell Caldwell) who worked as an occasional delivery driver at a discount florist’s and that’s how he learned which potential victims were about to get married, got more meticulous.

He wore condoms and gathered up the woman’s bedsheets and clothes to make sure he didn’t leave any of his own DNA on the scene, and he made sure to bind and gag the women so they couldn’t identify him. In Breena’s case it was his first rape and he was still pretty sloppy, enough so that she got a glimpse of him that was enough to enable her to recognize him in a police lineup. Leon Wallace’s motive turns out to be classic “incel” (short for “involuntarily celibate”); he can’t get women to date him so he decides to take out his anger on the entire female gender. The one person who’s nice to him is his senior-citizen landlady, who rents him a room in her home and is savvy enough that when the cops try to grab Leon’s hair brush to obtain a sample of his DNA, she says that her granddaughter is an attorney and she will sue the police department if anyone dares try to take a hair sample from that brush for DNA testing. Ultimately Breena recognizes him visually and the more recent rape victim sorta-kinda identifies him by voice. The final scene shows assistant district attorney Dominic Carisi, Jr. (Peter Scanavino) and his wife, former SVU detective Amanda Rollins (Kelli Giddish in a welcome return to the show), deciding to pose as a yet-to-be-married couple on the eve of their wedding to entrap Leon. He gets a lighter (but still substantial) prison sentence because Leon’s attorney negotiates a plea deal for him. A few days earlier I’d dug out my old boxed sets of the first 12 seasons of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit (the Meloni years) and watched the first-season episode “Stocks and Bondage,” which featured Mariska Hargitay and Christopher Meloni as they looked a quarter-century ago and provided a dramatic contrast to what they look like now!