Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Tangled Strands of Justice" (Dick Wolf Productions, Universal, NBC-TV, aired April 28, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode that followed, “Tangled Strands of Justice,” had two interlocking plot lines (as the title suggests), an annoying practice Dick Wolf has mostly avoided in Law and Order and SVU but which worked powerfully here. It helped that the writers, old Law and Order hands Warren Leight and Julie Martin, kept it to just two stories instead of the three that’s become standard on legal shows as well as the otherwise estimable cop show Blue Bloods (which I like a good deal better than my husband Charles because he sees it as rah-rah propaganda for the police whereas I see it as a good deal more complicated and nuanced than that). One plot line deals with a young woman, Libby Brandon (Gabrielle Carrubba), who we first see in bed with a middle-aged man. She gets up while he’s still asleep and steals eight high-end watches from his dresser drawer, and later she’s arrested and the watches are recovered. It turns out that the reason the Major Crimes Squad detective who caught the case, Nadia Szabo (Orfeh – when I saw that oddball name in the credits I assumed she was Black, which she isn’t), was able to apprehend her so quickly is that her DNA was in the system because a year before she had been violently raped, and her rape-kit sample was leaked to Detective Szabo by Abel Truman (Frank Wood), an official in the medical examiner’s office with whom Szabo was having an affair.

Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) of the Manhattan Special Victims Unit goes ballistic when she hears about this because it’s hard enough to get rape victims to cooperate with the police and go through the trauma of having a rape kit done (which is such an invasive procedure it’s literally like being raped all over again) without the knowledge that their DNA could be used against them if they’re ever suspected of a crime themselves. Detective Szabo and the district attorney assigned to prosecute the case, Cassandra Drakos (Orlagh Cassidy), couldn’t be less interested in such details: to their minds, Libby is a perpetrator now regardless of how she may have been a victim before. The other plot strand deals with a prologue set on September 11, 2001, in which a 15-year-old Black girl named Aretha Green is the subject of a police grid search because she’s been reported missing by her mother, Cora Green (Nicki Micheaux), only the search is abruptly called off because of the World Trade Center attacks and the cops conducting it are all ordered to go to Ground Zero. As a result, Aretha’s disappearance ends up forgotten for over 20 years until her body suddenly turns up, and what’s more, she turns out to have been five months pregnant when she died. The autopsy doctors discover fetal bones among the remains and do DNA tests on Aretha’s remains as well as the child’s and some old baby teeth of Aretha’s which her mom had saved.

Though the DNA tests rule out any family member as the father of Aretha’s unborn child, her grandfather, Coleman Green (Ron Canada), turns out to be the culprit anyway because [spoiler alert!] he’s not really her grandfather, just someone who married Cora’s mom after she got pregnant with a guy who abandoned her. When he’s finally arrested for molesting and murdering his supposed granddaughter, he inisists that God is O.K. with his conduct because at least Aretha wasn’t his biological kin. The part of the story that really moved me was the trauma Cora will be going through when she realizes that the grandfather she was relying on all those years for support was a) her daughter’s killer and b) not her grandfather at all – though at least she gets a weird sort of consolation prize. She’s reunited with her younger daughter Nina (Renée Harrison), who had run away from home after Aretha’s disappearance and got into prostitujtion and drugs, and though she’s been in a rehab program and doing reasonably well, the news of her sister’s discovery throws her off the wagon byg-time and she’s found on the street desperately trying to turn a trick to raive the money for drugs when the cops find her, spare her that downward spiral and get her back to her mom. Meanwhile, associate district attorney Cassandra Drakos gives a press conference announcing that she was the one who discovered the abuses in the medical examiner’s office that led to rape victims’ DNA being leaked – and Captain Benson has to watch it with a predictable level of disgust at Drakos’s grandstanding.