Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Dead. Ball" (Wolf Entertainment,m Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired November 10, 2022)

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

Last night’s episode of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit was good, but a bit if a disappointment after the quite extraordinary Law and Order that preceded it. It was basically SVU plot line 101, about the privileged celebrity who thinks he can get away with anything, including out-and-out rape, and the elaborate network of legal contacts, including his manager and business manager, who shield him from the normal consequiences of his actions. In this version, written by Brendan Feeney, Karen Dobie and Gabriel Vallejo, the celebrity is a huge soccer (or, as he keeps correcting the American characters, “football”) star from Brazil named Paulo Rocha (Michael Ocampo) who in the opening scene is about to be interviewed by a woman reporter from Britain, Nellie Kramer (Cameron Kelly). Paulo asks his business manager, Antonio Campos (Jonathan Medina), and his manager to leave the room so the two can be alone, and afterwards he tries to force himself on her sexually. She records a conversation because she had the recorder on her cell phone turned on to do the interview, but eventually she drops the case because the two actually had a consensual affair years before. She eventually broke up with him, but nbot before he got her pregnant and she kept the baby, a son, and is determined to raise him without interference from him. When he threatens to demand custody of the boy if she continues to press the case, she drops it and high-tails it back to Britain. The police, led by Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay, who quite frankly looks like she’s getting as bored with this role and these plots as we are), look for other women Paulo has forced himself on, but he and Antonio have extracted non-disclosure agreements from all of them so none will talk.

Then the cops look through Paulo’s financials and find that in addition to the payments to women from his official bank account. There have been regular cash withdrawals olf money Paulo gives to Antonio Campos’s wife Marcia (Diana Coconubo, whose last name sounds like one of those exotic skin muisturizoing lotions being hawked on TV these days), and the secreet Paulo is paying his business manager’s wife to cover up for him is that Paulo is having an affair with the Camposes’ 16-year-old daughter Ana (Amanda Pauge Philipson). Of course the higher-u9ps in the New York Police Department intercede and try to get Benson to drop the investigation – no doubt they were involved by the multi-million dollar owners of the American team Paulo plays for – and of course she tells them politely but firmly to get lost. When the cops wire Antonio to get the goods on Paulo. He pulls out a gun (which he stole from Paulo by rifling through some of his belongings he’d been asked to cover up) and shoots Paulo for being a sex pig and seducing his daughter, and in the end bvoth men plead guilty and avoid jail time so the New Yoro team can still make money off Paulo’s spectacular play, but at least he’ll be on the national sex registry (like that’s going to stop him?). We’re obviously meant to see this as some kind of comeuppance. But it does seem to me like Paulo essentially skated on the charges against him and I was rather hoping that he’d be in prison and regularly subjected to rape in the other direction, as he no doubt would be as a pretty-boy athlete locked up in a building full of horny bastards deprived of women and therefore willing to fuck anything they can make submit to them.