Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Shock Collar" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV,, aired May 1, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode which followed on May 1 was almost as good. It was called “Shock Collar” and centered around Cady Greene (Lea Zawada) and her 11-year-old (at least that’s my best guess) daughter Haley (Aislin Echo Wood). Cady is raising Haley as a single parent since the girl’s father, Dylan Reed (Joshua Bess), is an itinerant musician who not only works night but frequently goes off on the road for months. Cady is working as a delivery person for a food service company, and one afternoon, while Haley is ill and Cady is promising to take her to a doctor to have her checked out, she stops the car and leaves it unlocked and with the motor running to make a scheduled delivery. Then someone gets into the car and drives off with Haley still inside. The police, led by Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), at first suspect Dylan, but he was locked in a recording studio all week working on a commercial. Then video of Haley turns up on the “dark Web,” courtesy of a site called “Missy’s Mayhem” in which we hear (but see only in glimpses that don’t show her face) a woman literally torturing her, including forcing her to wear a dog-style shock training collar. Though the site itself is encrypted and uses a VPN (virtual private network) to conceal their location, many of the customers are logging onto it through non-secure communications, and the police are able to trace some of them. One of the “Missy’s Mayhem” devotees has violated the site’s own rules by copying video feeds from the link, while another tells the police, “I don’t like her as much as the first Missy.” That reinforces the cops’ suspicion that the people holding “Missy” have done this before. From the sounds of dogs barking in the background of the videos showing Missy being tortured, the police deduce that she’s being held at a site that contains a dog kennel.

The police lab technician is able to narrow down from the sounds of the dogs barking what the likely breeds are – German shepherds, Rottweilers, or pit bulls – and since they deduce that Haley is being held no more than 20 miles away, they go searching for her captors among the dog breeders in a 20-mile radius of New York City. There’s one great scene in which a heavy-set dog breeder named Tom Holder (Jacob Keith Watson) is astonished that these police officers from big bad New York City are there to investigate him committing kidnapping, manslaughter and other dastardly things with a female partner when he’s in fact Gay. Ultimately they trace the videos to a Rottweiler breeding center run by a (straight) couple named Gus and Nicole Carwood (Skylar T. Adams and J. J. Pyle). Treading carefully because among the things they’ve found out about the Carwoods is they own at least six guns, the police ultimately enter the Carwoods’ home and find Gus Carwood shot and badly wounded by his wife. The two of them are interrogated separately and told the first one who rats out where they’re holding Haley will get more lenient treatment, and ultimately Nicole gives them the location of a freezer locker in which the police find both Haley and the backdrop set from which the torture videos of her were live-streamed. Ultimately Haley is returned to her mother, though unlike in most SVU scripts dealing with tortured or kidnapped children, Cady isn’t offered any advice on how to deal with the traumas Haley has undoubtedly experienced from her time in captivity. I did like the touch that the Carwoods’ interest in torturing children began when Gus got sexually excited from watching Nicole rubbing the nose of one of their dogs in its own shit to housebreak it. Soon they ramped up their sadistic fun to torturing and ultimately killing their own daughter (whose remains the police find crudely buried on the Carwoods’ property) and then, after she died, to find, locate and kidnap Haley because, as Gus explains, “she waved to us from the car, and we took that as an omen.” Like the “Sins of Our Father” Law and Order, this Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode was a grim tale at the end of which the police arrest not only the Carwoods but also all the customers they can identify who logged on to their site and paid them money to do so.