Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Frequency" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired March 5, 2026)

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

The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit show that followed after the flagship Law and Order on March 5, 2026 was called “Frequency,” and like the “Remedies” episode of Law and Order also used a gimmick that had been used previously on SVU. A child has been kidnapped by a predator and is being held in captivity inside a dog’s cage in a room in an unknown home, and the cops have to find the child and rescue him (in this case it’s definitively a he) before the sicko who took him gets tired of the game and kills him. The police stumble on this when the radio and video frequencies under which the perp is monitoring his captive somehow got jammed and end up being viewed by a middle-aged (straight) couple who use identical equipment to monitor their own pre-pubescent daughter. It’s therefore a race against time to see if the police can find where the child is being held before anything nasty happens to him. They also aren’t sure just who the kid is or how long he’s been held captive, and there’s one chilling scene in which they invade the office of an Asian-American doctor to ask if it could be her child, who’s been missing for over a year. She freaks out when her hopes are initially raised and then dashed again, and the people I felt sorriest for in the scene were her patients, who came there expecting a professionally competent woman doctor and ended up with an at least temporarily traumatized basket case. The newest member of the Manhattan SVU, Detective Jake Griffin (Corey Cott, who among other things is the sexiest cast member of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit since Christopher Meloni left), notices from the video that the captive boy is autistic, which he realizes because he had a younger brother who was autistic and the two worked out a system of non-verbal communication which he wants to try out on the captive. One quirk in Brant Englestein’s script is that the eavesdropping is two-way; the police can speak to the child (though, being autistic, he’s not inclined to answer verbally) and can also be overheard by his captor, who’s in a different location (it turns out) but is using the video feed to monitor his captive.

Ultimately the police identify the child as Avery Li (Camden Everett Kwok), son of Lauren Li (Elizabeth Sun), who reported him missing a year before. The cops also obtain a note written by the captor, which is printed in a childlike script full of misspellings, including “sturt” for “street.” From the note, and from her training in profiling from a male FBI agent she once dated and who fathered one of her own children, Detective Amanda Rollins (Kelli Giddish) deduces that the criminal is a loner with poor social skills, a lot of time on his hands because he probably isn’t working, and is a hoarder. The police ultimately trace the signals to an apartment occupied by Costa Lykos (Eric Edelstein), a sort of slovenly, proletarian version of Orson Welles. When Detective Rollins visits him as part of her investigation, he at first tries to divert her attention by giving her the address of a cousin named George who he says is the real crook. We figure Costa is the real abductor when he slams the door behind Rollins as she enters his apartment and we see he’s carrying a gun, but we also worry about Rollins’s safety because she’s trapped behind a locked door with a madman with a gun. Costa also turns out to have an elaborate ham radio setup and huge stacks of old newspapers on shelves (thereby checking off the “hoarder” box and making this show something of a busman’s holiday for me, since my husband Charles and I have an apartment filled with stacks of books, CD’s, DVD’s, and papers). Fortunately Rollins catches on in time when Costa writes the address of the either innocent or totally fictitious “George” on a slip of paper, and misspells “street” as “sturt” just the way the kidnapper did in his old note, which explained that he had taken Avery precisely to preserve his innocence instead of for physical or sexual abuse. Costa attempts to flee the scene through the subway system, but he ends up getting run over by a train (subway ex machina) and killed – alas, before he can reveal to the police exactly where Avery is being held. But because one of the things he told Rollins before he fled and was killed was that he had a mother diagnosed with terminal cancer, the cops trace the mother’s apartment and, behind the bed where she’s laying unable to go anywhere, they find a secret padlocked door which one of the male SVU members breaks down and discovers the dog cage with Avery in it. It was a grim and appropriately suspenseful tale even though as social comment it was hardly in the same league as the Law and Order “Remedies” episode just before it.