Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Fidelis Ad Mortem" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired January 15, 2026

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, January 15), after I watched the “Dream On” episode of the flagship Law and Order show, I caught a surprisingly dark episode of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit called “Fidelis Ad Mortem” (“Faithful Unto Death”) that begins with three teenagers going retro with physical music media. They’ve bought an old cassette boombox and a supply of tapes for it at a thrift store, and one of them, with no labeling other than “#56,” has about 40 remaining seconds of a confrontation between a younger woman and a much older man in which the woman literally pleads for her life and the man is heard making the typical sounds of sexual assault. Fortunately one of the three kids who discovered the tape is Gabe Curry (Jay Mack), teenage son of Special Victims Unit Detective Renée Curry (Aimé Donna Kelly, who quite frankly didn’t look old enough to me to have a teenage son), who brings the tape to his mom. Mom in turn gives it to SVU Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), and she has it digitally enhanced by the New York Police Department’s crime lab. The cops trace the tape to a building that is about to be demolished in a redevelopment scheme, but before the building is torn down the police find a skeleton behind one of the walls. There are actually two people’s bones in there, and one of them (the main one and the one they can identify) is of a young Black woman named Tyresia Davis whose father Jaden (Donald Paul) and daughter Tiffany (Cecelia Ann Burt) have understandably felt stonewalled because the NYPD took reports when Tyresia disappeared 27 years earlier but did nothing to find her. Then the police interview Tyresia’s former boyfriend, Miles Gibbs (Ski Carr), who’s in prison serving a long stretch for having been an enforcer for a drug cartel. Miles is at first unremittingly hostile towards the police, and later we learn why: in addition to two rival drug gangs, each with their own enforcement mechanisms, there was a third one that was composed of corrupt cops.

The bad police were ostensibly working in drug enforcement but in fact were short-weighting the drugs they turned in on raids and using their own connections to market the rest and make far more money than the city was paying them to be cops. They had initially cultivated Tyresia as a confidential informant, but then they decided that she was getting to be too much trouble because she, a young woman genuinely concerned about the effects of drugs on her African-American community, might turn on them and rat them out to their bosses. Among the corrupt police officers is a Black retired detective named Thomas Ahern (Chi McBride) who used his drug money to buy himself a yacht and other trappings of the good life. Eventually, though, he realizes the game is up and turns state’s evidence to implicate the real ringleader of the crooked-cops’ gang, Leo Eikmeier (Nick Sandow). It turns out Eikmeier is an investigator with the district attorney’s office, which causes district attorney Nicholas Baxter (Tony Goldwyn) and the prosecutor actually assigned to Manhattan SVU, Dominick Carisi, Jr. (Peter Scanavino), briefly to consider whether they need to ask the governor to appoint a special prosecutor to take the case off their hands. Ultimately they decide not to, and Carisi takes the case to court and wins convictions. But they also trigger a crisis of conscience in SVU’s newest detective, Jake Griffin (Corey Cott), who’d grown up believing his father, also a police officer, was honest. Like Elliott Stabler (Christopher Meloni) in the later stages of Law and Order: Organized Crime, young Griffin has to come to terms with the idea that his dad, whose example led him to make the police his career, was just as corrupt as the rest of the crooks on the force – though the episode ends ambiguously with Griffin getting an answer from his mother, who assures him that his late father was honest. I liked the coincidence that the January 15 episodes of both Law and Order and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit dealt with police officers’ children and their chancy, to say the least, relationships with their cop parents.