Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Divide and Conquer" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired October 17, 2024)

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

Alas, the Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode right after that one, “Divide and Conquer,” wasn’t as good despite the welcome return of Kelli Giddish as Detective Amanda Rollins, who withdrew from the Special Victims Unit to become a college criminology professor, marry assistant district attorney Dominick Carisi, Jr. (Peter Scanavino) and have her third daughter by him. (She’d previously been depicted as having two daughters from previous relationships, including at least one one-night stand. It reminded me of that French movie I reviewed for Zenger’s in which the central character was a single woman who’s raising four children, each from a different father.) She and Lieutenant Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) have a for-old-times reunion when Rollins turns up as part of the “Intelligence Division” (a title almost as bizarre as the New York Police Department’s real-life “Anti-Crime Unit,” which led Stephen Colbert to joke on air, “Just what is the rest of the NYPD supposed to be doing?”). Their current target is a gang of four Albanians – Alex Naziri (Pawel Szajda), his brother Aldrit Neziri (David Garelick), Zef Sokoli (Roman Mitichyan), and Sandro Nikolla (Luis Moço) – who travel the world, visit different cities, pull a carefully staked-out home-invasion robbery and then get on planes and fly somewhere else, so they’ve never been caught. The intelligence unit has received information that they’ve arrived in New York City, and their latest target is wealthy investor James Fletcher (Adam Aalderks), his wife Nora (Emily Jackson), and their friends Graham and Valerie Martin (Ben Jeffrey and Kate Abbruzzese).

Unfortunately for the bad guys as well as their victims, but fortunately for the side of law and order, Alex Neziri is the sort of guy who can’t keep his dick in his pants. After shooting James in the knee (not in the crotch, as I first thought and feared) to get him to give him the combination of his secret safe so the crooks could steal the $10 million in gold contained therein, Alex held a gun on Nora, forced her to undress, and raped her in full view of James and the Martins. We don’t get to see this but it’s good enough to declare it a sex crime and get Benson and Rollins (the most interesting on-screen partner she’s had since the departure of Christopher Meloni) back together on the case. Ultimately they realize that the whole thing was set up by the Fletchers’ business manager and investment consultant, Dennis Maynard (John Hemphill), who had handled the conversion of half of James’s portfolio from stocks and bonds into gold. Dennis at first tried to talk him out of it – at least according to Dennis’s own account – but James insisted that he was convinced the end of the world was coming and he wanted his assets in an eternally valuable form. (He didn’t stop to think that if the end of the world really happened, his gold would be useless.) At first Nora doesn’t want the cops to know she was raped – she made Valerie Martin swear an oath of secrecy – but Valerie reported it to the police anyway, Nora went through a rape kit (which judging from the descriptions I’ve heard of it is about as invasive as the actual rape) and the cops got a hit on the DNA, not from a local case but from a woman Alex was accused of raping in The Netherlands. Ultimately the cops are able to set up a sting operation with an undercover agent posing as a buyer for the stolen $10 million in gold, Alex is killed by his accomplices, the other crooks are arrested and the Fletchers can pick up the pieces of their put-upon lives, though without the services of the financial manager who sold them out to the Albanians in order to cover his own losses in the markets. It was an O.K. SVU and Kelli Giddish’s return to the show was welcome, but it still seemed pretty ordinary after the well-limned conflicts of the “Big Brother” episode of Law and Order that preceded it.