Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Arcana" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired October 29, 2026)

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

Last night (Thursday, October 29) my husband Charles and I watched the latest episodes of Dick Wolf’s series Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and Law and Order. The SVU, called “Arcana,” turned out to be an odd, quirky show that begins with self-proclaimed psychic Beatrice Witt (Susannah Flood) giving a reading to a hot-headed middle-aged man who demands to be put in contact with the spirit of his dead mother. All goes reasonably well until he demands to know the whereabouts of the valuable stash of Nikon cameras his late mom owned, and just then Beatrice tells him that she’s lost contact with his mom’s spirit. He gets angry and grabs her wrists, leaving bruises on her arms. Just as I was beginning to wonder whether the main plot (the writer was Brant Englestein, a relative newcomer to Dick Wolf’s franchise) was going to turn out to be that the cameras would be recovered, there would be exposed film inside them, and on one of the rolls would be photographs of a sexually related murder or assault, instead the guy just walks out and the location of the camera stash remains unknown. Later Beatrice Witt complains to the Manhattan Special Victims Unit that she was raped by an unknown assailant who allegedly broke into her home through a window whose lock was broken. The cops come out to investigate and Beatrice assures them that she lives alone except for her seven-year-old daughter Emma (not listed on imdb.com). When the police, in the persons of Captains Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) and Renée Curry (Aimé Donna Kelly), show up they find there’s a third person there: Sarah Witt (Lisa Emery), Beatrice’s mother, who’s come down with Alzheimer’s and has been locked up inside a room, sort of like the first Mrs. Rochester in Jane Eyre. When the police enter her room she literally screams at them.

Eventually it turns out that Sarah’s late husband, Beatrice’s father, was an alcoholic who regularly beat, assaulted, and raped her while “in his cups” until he was killed. The police who investigated his killing at the time assumed that Sarah had killed him in self-defense and she wasn’t prosecuted, but as part of the investigation into Beatrice’s current assault they uncover evidence that Beatrice herself was the killer. She’d picked up dad’s revolver off the floor where he’d dropped it in an alcoholic stupor and used it to knock him off before he could do in her mom. At this point I was wondering whether the payoff would be that dad actually didn’t die; he was still alive and secretly living in the house’s attic (where the police had found evidence of recent habitation), where he could occasionally sneak out and go after Beatrice. Instead Englestein did one of the most annoying tricks a mystery writer can pull: he had the assailant be someone totally unrelated whose existence we had no idea of until he got brought on as a culprit ex machina in the final act. He turns out to be Chris Garibaldi (Bryan Manley Davis), whom Beatrice dated while still in high school and later went crazy and was in and out of mental hospitals the rest of his life. He’d just got released from his latest incarceration three weeks before and he’d gone back to the Witt home, secretly moved into her attic, obsessed over her and finally made his move on her one night.

This reminded me of a Lifetime movie called Boy in the Attic which I quite liked, and another Lifetime film that also involved a man secretly living in the heroine’s attic that took on an unintended aura of comedy. In fact I reviewed that one on imdb.com and got a rather testy response from someone who said there was nothing funny about the situation and in fact it had been based on a real-life story in which the man in the attic had terrorized the woman who was unknowingly hosting him. The character I felt sorriest for was Sarah’s former caregiver, a hot young Black guy who’d been accused of stealing Sarah’s jewelry and been fired for that by Beatrice – only when the cops finally busted Chris Garibaldi they found all Sarah’s jewels in his attic redoubt and gave it back to Beatrice. There’s also a subplot in which Captain Curry makes her distaste for Beatrice’s line of work clear because after her husband died, her mother had urged her to go to a psychic, and said psychic had told her that her late husband missed her in the afterlife and wanted them to communicate. That raised Curry’s hackles because in this life she and her husband had agreed to separate because they weren’t getting along, which of course reminded me of the plot of the film A Stolen Life (the 1946 Curtis Bernhardt-directed Bette Davis vehicle in which she played twins, and when the bad sister dies the good sister tries to take her place without realizing that the bad sister’s husband, whom the good sister had always wanted, had got tired of her extra-relational activities and was about to divorce her; I reviewed it on moviemagg at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2026/10/a-stolen-life-bd-productions-warner.html) which Charles and I had just watched. “That was a weird one,” I acknowledged to Charles afterwards, and of course he agreed.