Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Constricted" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired October 24, 2024

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

The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode that followed, “Constricted,” written by David Graziano, Julie Martin and Candice Sanchez McFarlane and directed by Michael Smith, was almost as good. It begins with parallel story lines involving 16-year-olds Josh Blake (Troy Garity and Hannah Brolin (Maya Drake), who have been best buddies since grade school, have started a serious romantic relationship and now want to have sex with each other for the first time for both. Hannah’s mother Allison (Rosie Benton) wants it to be “special” for her and especially doesn’t want her daughter to lose her virginity in the back seat of a car the way Allison herself did. So she agrees to go to the movies with her sister so Hannah and Josh can have Hannah’s apartment to themselves for the big night. Josh, in turn, gets a pep talk from his dad Ryan (Landon Maas) that starts to sound like Ryan’s role models for how to deal with women are Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson. Unbeknownst to Hannah – or to us until half an hour into the show’s hour-long running time – Ryan has shown Josh a virtual-reality porn video showing a woman being choked nearly to death by her partner, and that’s what Josh decides he should do to Hannah on their Big Night. The night ends with Hannah unconscious and in the emergency room, where her mom takes her that night, and both she and Josh being investigated for statutory rape. Then Hannah finally comes to after a couple of days and she tells the SVU cops that she definitely didn’t like what Josh was doing to her and told her to stop – which makes her an innocent victim and him an out-and-out rapist. Josh says he didn’t hear her withdraw her consent, and in any case he was choking her so tightly she could barely say anything, but eventually he admits he learned how to choke a woman from a porn video he saw.

Ryan says that both he and Josh’s mother Paula (Allison McAtee) have a strict no-porn policy at home and all Josh’s Internet-connectable devices have anti-porn filters on them. Josh says he saw the video when two older kids on his high school’s fencing team showed it to him. Ryan, who quickly emerges as the real villain of the piece, offers one of the SVU detectives an out-and-out bribe to make the case go away. Meanwhile, the story takes an even darker turn as two 13-year-old boys assault a girl their own age in a park, and she runs away from them, tries to get across a street and is hit by a taxicab. She lingers in the hospital for two days but eventually it turns out her assailants were shown That Video by Josh and got the idea from it to do it for real. Ultimately the girl dies and prosecutor Dominick “Sonny” Carisi, Jr. (Peter Scanavino), who’s already been seen rousting a potential pedophile for cruising his nine-year-old stepdaughter and two teenagers on the same block, wants to try Ryan for reckless-endangerment homicide given that he showed Josh the fatal video and Josh in turn showed it to the two kids who actually assaulted the 13-year-old girl and led to her death trying to run away from them. He doesn’t have enough evidence, but he is able to persuade Ryan to confess to something – it isn’t all that clear what – by appealing to his sense of shame. (Of course, if it were Donald Trump, this would be fruitless because he has no sense of shame. The Trump parallels to this character are irresistible because they’re both New Yorkers involved in real estate and both believe that their money and clout can buy their way out of anything – only in Ryan’s case, unlike in Trump’s, he can’t.) The episode ends with Ryan’s wife Paula divorcing him now that she knows about his porn addiction, his employers likely to fire him, and the parents of the girl who died likely to file a wrongful-death suit against him – a far different outcome than the real-life Trump, who is almost certainly on his way back to the White House where he can use the power of the Presidency to make all the charges against him magically go away!