Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Fractured" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, 2024)

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

Alas, after that quite good Law and Order, the Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode that followed, “Fractured,” was just pretty much the same-old, same-old. It starts in an off-campus dorm room with four pre-law students at the University of New York: Elodie Whitfield (Lexi Minetree), Damon Reynolds (August Blanco), Shelli Henson (Larkin Reilly), and Teddy Hall (Jeremy Gill). The four are desultorily studying but obviously bored and in a mood to party. When Teddy steps out and says he has a date for the evening, the other three decide to do a three-way with each other in his absence. They put the top chain on the door but Teddy, who got stood up, returns and uses his door key to open the door as far as it would go and sees the other three in flagrante delicto. He walks off but returns to the apartment later that evening to find Shelli dead, Elodie raped and Damon beaten unconscious. Instead of reporting it to the real police, Teddy calls the campus police on the advice of his dad, who tells him the campus cops would arrive sooner than the real ones. When the SVU detectives finally get the case, they immediately suspect Teddy assaulted, raped and murdered his roommates out of jealousy, but ultimately the culprit turns out to be another fellow student, Sam Ellis (Ari Dalbert), a classic “incel” who had an unrequited crush on Shelli. The cops don’t have much evidence against him, though he installed a secret camera in her bedroom (hidden inside a smoke alarm) and filmed the three-way, then downloaded and re-ran the footage on his own computer no fewer than six times.

Shelli had “friend-zoned” Sam, and in a video she filmed for a women’s empowerment group the day before her death she not only said she was teaching herself to say no, she identified Sam as the person she was practicing to say no to. This idea of writers David Graziano and old Law and Order hand Julie Martin – having the murder victim in essence come back from beyond the grave to name her killer, à la Hamlet – was the one even remotely innovative aspect of this episode, which otherwise was pretty much a by-the-numbers SVU. Its only other interesting aspect was the overpowering protectiveness of Shelli’s mother Donna (Virginia Smith), who swoops in at the end of the episode and takes her back to the small town from whence she came to find her a therapist and help her recover from what the big, bad city did to her – and is it just me, or am I right to be tired of the same old clichéd stories of city-bad, country-good? There’s also a weird scene at the campus of the University of New York in which about 100 students with hand-printed picket signs swarm around the cops who are trying to arrest Sam Ellis to protest his innocence and denounce the police. One heavy-set Black man even stands on the hood of the police car that’s there to take Ellis away, as if he’s deliberately trying to stop the car from moving. My husband Charles questioned that scene, saying he’d think most young people would have a favorable attitude towards the police unless they or their friends or family had been on the wrong side of police abuses, but it’s become axiomatic in the Law and Order universe these days that ordinary citizens are automatically hostile to the police and are willing to believe just about any unfavorable account of them.