Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Obedience" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired November 12, 2026)

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

Last night (Thursday, November 12) my husband Charles and I watched episodes of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and the flagship Law and Order. Law and Order: Special Victims Unit has become the longest-running (it’s into its 28th season) scripted series in prime time, and last night’s episode, “Obedience,” was its 600th. Executive producer Dick Wolf and line producer Michele Fazekas decided to commemorate the anniversary by bringing back Elliott Stabler (Christopher Meloni, my greatest celebrity crush of all time; he’s now considerably older and more grizzled but that fabled basket is still intact, and since he was wearing blue jeans throughout the episode I got to see a lot more of it than when he was an SVU “regular” and that great bod was frustratingly encased in Armani suits) and having him and Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) rework and old case. It dealt with the rape and murder of a nun named Sister Benedicta (her pre-ordination first name was Clare but I don’t recall her last name) in 1998 (a year before the show actually went on the air). A young Black man named Charles Greene (Chukwudi Iwuji) with a history of crack addiction and petty crime to support it was convicted of the murder and has served 28 years in Attica for it. But Gwen Sharpe (J. Smith-Cameron) of an Innocence Project-like organization approaches Benson and asks her to reopen the case. Greene claims he merely found Clare’s body after she’d already been stabbed, and he tried to pull the knife from her chest only to have her blood splatter all over him. He was convicted after a test of the bite marks on her shoulder matched his and after Stabler’s interrogation, which was not videotaped. Stabler is at first super-reluctant to reopen the case because he’s convinced he got it right the first time, but after certain details don’t add up and Benson points out that bite-mark evidence is no longer considered scientifically credible, he turns around. As part of the re-investigation Stabler and Benson interview Sandra Garza (Laura Innes), who left the order of nuns at the center of the case and has led a secular life ever since. Garza tells the cops that there was a corrupt priest at the convent named Father Anthony Lazzaro (William Sadler) who took advantage of the nuns’ sexual naïveté to molest them, including both performing oral sex on them and making them suck him. He was able to get away with it because many of the women in the convent had never had sex even before they took the vow of chastity and therefore were easy prey for his assertion that having sex with him would bring them closer to God.

The cops try to trace Father Lazzaro but have to maneuver through the church hierarchy to do so. First Stabler and Benson interview an African-American priest, Father Dave (Darrell Morris, Jr.), who’s running Father Lazzaro’s old parish, but he can’t (or won’t) tell them Father Lazzaro’s current location. Then they’re told by church attorney Peter O’Sullivan (a marvelously smarmy performance by Jim Gaffigan, usually known as a stand-up comedian) that he’s not allowed to tell them where Father Lazzaro is. The cops demand the information and get swamped with irrelevant and useless documentation which they have to go through for the few nuggets of important information – a classic strategy used by big bureaucracies both sacred and secular to evade responsibility for their actions. Stabler and Benson also interview the Mother Superior of the convent, Mother Eusebia (Kathleen Chalfant), who acknowledges that she knows where Father Lazzaro is. He’s at a so-called “therapy” camp in upstate New York which the church maintains for priests accused of sexual sins so they aren’t actually punished for their crimes. Instead he and his fellow residents are being kept in that relatively nice environment, and when the cops show up to arrest him not only for Clare’s murder but that of another nun named Christine (whose corpse they exhumed from the basement of Father Lazzaro’s old church and discovered not only she but her unborn baby had been killed, and they were able to extract enough DNA from the surviving skeleton to prove that Lazzaro was the father), he’s alone in a canoe rowing for relaxation at the facility’s private lake. The director of the “treatment center” (Brian Sgambati) calls Lazzaro to come in from his rowboat outing and talk to the cops, and he’s initially combative until they mention Christine. The assistant district attorney assigned to SVU, Dominick Carisi, Jr. (Peter Scanavino), takes charge of securing Greene’s formal exoneration and release despite Greene’s fully understandable bitterness that he was robbed of 28 years of a normal life he could have had if he hadn’t been busted and convicted of a murder he didn’t commit. Writer Michele Fazekas did a nice job of conveying both the antagonism and affection between Stabler and Benson as they reunite to solve a case they initially got wrong, and there’s an especially poignant moment when Stabler acknowledges that one of his initial errors in the investigation was not interviewing Father Lazzaro at all. When Benson asks him what would have happened if he had, Stabler says, “He’d have denied it all, and I would have believed him because I’m a Catholic myself and we believe the priests are close to God.”