Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Controlled Burn" (Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired November 3, 2022)

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

The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode that followed, “Controlled Burn,” was in its own way just as good. It was a chilling tale of a woman who goes to what’s ostensibly an “office party” with her boss, Spencer Lewis (Jordan Belfi). It actually turns out to be an orgy for sex-obsessed 1-percenters and the victim, Maggie D’Angelo (Brooke Bloom), an analyst for Spencer’s firm who was working on a financial report to facilitate a $2 billion deal in which Spencer’s company was being acquired by super-rich woman tycoon Lena Hess (Lola Glaudini), had undergone an operation for cervical cancer but had not had the follow-up procedure to reopen her vagina so she could have sex again. When she comes to after accepting a drugged drink at the party and being raped by an unknown assailant wearing a crow’s-head mask, it’s morning and she flees the scene and is rescued bo a local Black homeless person who tells police that “a crow” was following her. Detective Odafin Tutuola (Ice-T) has a hard time believing this until Maggie herself is recovered enough to be interviewed and tells the cops her assailant was wearing a crow’s mask. The police raid the next party on the circuit and eventually learn that Lena Hess owns both apartments where the orgies took place and has wired them for both sight and sound, so she has extensive records of who’s doing what to whom, which she’s using to blackmail the guests. Maggie’s actual assailant turns out to be Ethan Schmidt (Dave Shalansky), a tympani player in a local orchestra, who when he found that he couldn’t fuck Maggie in the normal way, he took her in the ass. He also stuffed the yellow panties she’d been wearing into her mouth, where they stayed until she puked them up the next morning. Fortunately for the case against Schmidt, the panties contained enough of his DNA that he’s prosecuted successfully, and there’s some pathos in his desperate pleas that he’s glad he got caught because he needs help overcoming his obsession.

Only the cops try to prosecute Lena Hess for hosting the parties, but she’s able to slip through their fingers; the judge in her case releases her on her own recognizance but puts her under house arrest and orders her to wear an ankle monitor. But Lena is somehow able to slip off the ankle bracelet and head for the airport, where a private plane is waiting to take her out of the U.S. to another country that doesn’t have an extradition treaty with the U.S. On her way out, she leaves a matchbook with a phone number and an invitation to Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) to call her, and when Benson makes the call Lena urges her to use all her video evidence to prosecute the men who run New York’s (and, by extension, the world’s) economy for their perversions. Benson is uninterested in joining the crusade Lena is offering her against the male half of the human race, though she concludes that at one point Lena was the victim of sexual violence herself and that gave h er a hatred of all men. This SVU is another chilling story of how the really rich and powerful don’t have to live by the same laws everyone else does (does the name “Donald Trump” mean anything to you?) even though non-elites who commit the same crimes actually suffer consequences for them.