Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: “They’d Already Disappeared,” “Nightmares in Drill City” (Dick Wolf Productions, Universal, NBC-TV, aired November 4 and 11, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I watched the last two new episodes of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and Law and Order: Organized Crime for another three weeks, until a big “crossover event” they have planned for December 9 in which former assistant district attorney Rafael Barba (Raúl Esparza) will be defending organized-crime kingpin Richard Wheatley, nèe Sinatra, against a number of charges including the murder of his dad so he could take over daddy’s crime empire. The last two SVU shows were “They’ve Already Disappeared” (November 4, 2011) and “Nightmares in Drill City” (November 11, 2021), both of which unusually taut and well-written dramas/ “They’ve Already Disappeared” was about a series of murders of prostitutes which the Special Victims Unit stumbles onto and their officers soon realize that they were committed over a period of 10 years by the same person. They also realize that the regular police couldn’t have cared less about these crimes because of the contempt with which they held the victims – at least one of the police reports we see contains, handwritten, the infamous initials “NHI” – for “No Humans Involved” – a police designation that first came to light in the 1990’s an an explanation for why it took so long to catch the so-called “Green River Killer” who knocked off hookers over 20 years in at least two cities and the cops missed it because sex workers’ lives didn’t matter.

The SVU cops made a grisly discovery about these cases that reached my husband Charles’ admittedly low threshold for gore: the victims’ boty parts were kept carefully preserved in formaldehyde jars by the killer, who removed them because he kept his victims as munnies and mummified them pretty much the way the ancient Egyptians had: removing all their internal organs first, then bathing them in preserving oils and wrapping them in linen. He even kept his trophy room warm with space heaters to mimic the climate of the hot Egyptian desert. The killer turned out to be a man who’d grown up ini a carnival, and Lieutenant Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay, who after having played this role for 23 years is being photographed in such soft focus Charles complained she looked blurry even when the backgrounds are clear) did something her character and the other SVU personnel have done on this show many times before: got a criminal to confess by appealing to his vanity. Last night’s episode, “Nightmares in Drill City,” begins with a Black male rapper, “G” (true name: David Graham) (Quincy Giles) and his two girlfriends, Jasmine Cruz (Annelise Cepero) – the last name of the character is given as “Castro” on imdb.com but “Cruz” is what we hear on the soundtrack – and 17-year-old honor student Victoria Warshofsky (Allison Thornton), who sets up a date with a young Black man who’s editing videos for his rapper brother.

G and his two women crash into the house and stage a home invasion that leaves the rival rapper and his girlfriend dead and the nice young kid permanently in a wheelchair. It turns out that both the killer and the principal victim were practitioners of a new form of rap, even sleazier, more perverted and more evil than its predecessors, called “drill,” whose “artists” not only commit crimes themselves but dramatize thier crimes in their videos and post them on YouTube, where they get millions of followers from people who actually like this shit and buy into the “bad-ass” fantasy these sick, evil people sell. (I think all forms of so-called “gangsta rap” are a pestilence on the culture and wish the whole genre would disappear, but absent some pretty nasty attacks on the First Amendment the only way that will happen is if millions of the fans of these genres finally grow consciences and stop listening to or watching this garbage.) When Sgt. Odafin Tutuola (Ice-T) busts G and G boasts of his millions of YouTube hits, saying that makes him a star, my husband Charles and I couldn’t resist joking about Ice-T’s past as a gangsta rapper himself; Charles snarled, “You ain’t a star like I was,” and I caught his joke and said, “Wnen I made ‘Cop Killer’ I put it out on a CD people actually had to pay for!”

It turns out that the main issue is not who committed the crime – that’s pretty open and shut – but whether Victoria and Jasmine were hardened criminals or victims themselves, since we eventually learn that both were classically “trafficked” by G, who pulled all the classic pimp moves on them – first seducing them himself and getting them to fall in love with him, then asking them for the “favor” of having sex with other guys, getting them hooked on drugs, giving them lavish gifts and taking them to “parties,” and beating the shit out of them if they tried to escape or get out of line. The real conflict is between a hard-nosed white-haired woman District Attorney who wants to throw the book not only at G but the two women as well – especially Victoria, since she thinks her office would look bad if they charged an African-American and a Latina while letting the white girl off leniently – and the crisis of conscience assistant district attorney Dominick Carisi, Jr. (Peter Scanavino, series regular and, in one of the ill-advised decisions by Dick Wolf and his writers to turn this show into Law and Order: The Soap Opera, has been shown having an affair with Detective Amanda Rollins, played by Kelli Giddish; the fact that she’s a recovering gambling addict isn’t stopping this misbegotten relationship, nor is the fact that she already has two kids by two different fathers) has between his boss’s orders to destroy Victoria on the stand in cross-examination and his own compassion for her as a trafficking victim that eventually leads him to persuade his boss to drop the charges against Victoria and Jasmine in exchange for long-term probation, drug treatment and community service.