Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Rorschach" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired November 7, 2024)

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

Last night (Thursday, November 7), after the Law and Order episode “Time Will Tell,” I stayed on NBC for the Law and Order: Special Victims Unit show “Rorschach” and then switched to CBS for an Elsbeth episode called “Elsbeth’s Eleven.” “Rorschach” dealt with a young straight couple, Chris Becker (Graham Patrick Martin, a drop-dead gorgeous twink type) and Ellie Hughes (Jen Parker Davis). At Ellie’s suggestion, the two decide to drive across country in a camper van, stopping at campsites along the way and filming their exploits for a “vlog” (a video Web log) about how wonderful their trip is and how much in love they are. Only the trip goes awry when they reach Rockland County in upstate New York, where other tourists find both Ellie and Chris badly wounded after an attack on them. The Manhattan Special Victims Unit gets called to work the case after Rockland County’s own police decide they’re in over their heads, and there’s also a tall, dark-haired, bespectacled FBI agent named Harrison Clay (Josh Cooke) in the mix. Ellie and Chris have both been taken to a nearby hospital, albeit on separate floors, and Ellie is in a coma. Her mom Laura (Jama Williamson) insists that Ellie can still communicate with her by squeezing her arm, even though the doctors insist that Ellie is brain-dead and want to pull the plug on her. A rather patronizing doctor, Isaac Haimes (Mike Shapiro), explains in the typical snippy, smarmy way of medicos everywhere that often parents hold out hope for their children’s recovery when there’s no rational basis for it. Ultimately the cops deduce, on the basis of two holes carved into a tree trunk near the site where Ellie and Chris were discovered, that there was no outside assailant and Chris committed the crime himself.

Ellie had run off in the middle of the night to cruise a local bar; the bartender made a pass at her, she turned him down, and he got so angry he literally spat on the top of her head. The police doctors, doing a rape kit on her, found only Chris’s semen inside her but also ID’d the bartender’s DNA from his spit. Later Ellie returned to Chris but he got angry, smelled whiskey on her breath, and ultimately flew into a jealous rage and struck her with a rock three times, then raped her. (Chris had previously told the cops that he and Ellie had had sex, but it was consensual and had happened before she left for the bar.) After that he stuck his knife into the tree and threw himself on it, barely missing his own heart, so it would look like he’d been assaulted as well. The cops also discover that there was a growing antagonism between Chris and Ellie after they see outtakes from their vlog, including one in which they have an argument over where to put the cell-phone camera that ends with Chris striking Ellie in the arm and leaving a bruise. There’s also the fascinating character of Chris’s mother Virginia (Gina Costigan), who swoops down in the middle of Chris being interrogated and demands that he stop talking until she can get him a lawyer. Charles and I both had vague memories of a Lifetime movie with a similar plot, and both were apparently based on a true story. Though not at the socially conscious level of the “Time Will Tell” Law and Order that preceded it, “Rorschach” was a good SVU, and though the title was never literally explained, I gather what writers Julie Martin, David Graziano and Nicholas Esposito meant by it was the way in which we “read” unconscious or comatose people differently based on what we want them to be thinking, saying or doing within their lack of literal communicative consciousness. The key scene is one in which Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) asks the comatose Ellie to squeeze her hand if she was attacked and if Chris was the one who attacked her. She responds positively to both questions, though it’s unclear whether we’re supposed to believe she’s actually communicating or it’s just wishful thinking on both her mother’s and Benson’s part.