Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "A Better Person" (Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired November 17, 2022)

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

The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode that followed, “A Better Person,” was almost as good. It started out on the 21st birthday of Aidan McDaniels (Dani Foster), son of New York homicide detective Mark McDaniels (Greg Grunberg). Matk has taken his son to a bar for his 21st birthday and is not only plying him with cocktails byt has apparently hired a woman to come on to him and get him to have sex for the first time. (We’re not told outright that the woman is a hooker, but it’s pretty obvious that’s what she is.) The next morning Mark drops by Aidan’s apartment to drop off a new suit he had bought Aidan for his birthday, and finds him brutally murdered with bite marks all over him, including his genitals, as well as being sodomized with a wine bottle and finally killed with blunt-force trauma to the head. When the SVU cops arrive they find a towel draped over Aidan’s crotch and his apartment empty of all his clothes. They trace his movements on the last day of his life and find surveillance footage of him in full drag, and it turns out Aidan was a Transwoman who had taken the name “Ada” and was wearing women’s clothing exclusively. Her mother, Laura McDaniels (Christine M. Campbell), had divorced her dad 10 years earlier and moved to Sedona, Arizona, though she’d maintained a long-distance relationship with Ada and, unlike her dad, was supportive of her through her transition.The police get the break they need only after another Transwoman, Cora Brava (Rain Valdez), reports a similar assault against her. Only Cora was able to stay alive long enough to grab her can of chemical Mace and spray it in the face of her attacker, who fled down the fire escape and into a cellar where the newest SVU detective, Grace Muncy (Molly Burnett), caught him at great risk to herself. The assailant turns out to be a Belgian national named Lukas Peters (Tyler M. French), who was in New York City to supervise a construction assignment for the multinational corporation for which he works. It turns out h e had just come to New York City following a similar assignment in Germany, where there were eight more ongoing investigations of brutal murders or near-murders of Trans people. The Manhattan SVU contacts Interpol, who relay the information back to SVU that the German authorities want him back, but they’re willing to wait until he serves out whatever sentence he gets in America.

That may be shorter than he deserves because the only crime for which assistant district attorney Dominick Carisi, Jr. (Peter Scanavino) is prosecuting him is the assault and attempted murder of Cora Brava º– and Lukas hires a scumbag Black woman attorney who intimates that all that happened between Lukas and Cora was rough but consensual sex. It doesn’t help that at no time during the encounter did Cora say “Stop!” or “No!” because instead of fighting back, she was playing along with him until she could get to her can of Mace. Later Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) deduces that the reason Ada’s clothes were not in her apartment and her fingernails had been ripped off to the roots and her hands carefully washed to eliminate DNA traces was because Mark McDaniels had done that himself, violating every rule of how homicide cops are supposed to handle crime scenes and making it harder to catch Ada’;s killer just because he didn’t want the other cops on the force to learn that his child was Trans. Fortunately Mark saved Ada’s clothes, including the dress she was wearing when Lukas assaulted her, and after DNA tests turn out to reveal Lukas’s DNA on Ada’s dress, he pleads out to both crimes to avoid trial. So justice is done, more or less, but Mark is left with plenty of guilt feelings about his role in the case, particularly since if he hadn’t monkeyed around with his daughter’s crime scnee, Cora might have avoided being attacked by the same criminal. We also get a few predictable guesses as to Lukas’s motives, including the old chestnut about him fearing his own sexuality and lashing out at the Transwomen he’s both attracted to and repulsed by. The episode also ends with a hint that we’ll be losing the fascinating character of Detective Amanda Rollins via a job offer from Fordham University, where she gave a guest lecture on forensic evidence and so impressed the faculty they want to bring her on permanently even though she isn’t a credentialed teacher/ The trailer for the next episode, which for some reason won’t air until December 8 (the fall finales of all three shows), definitely indicates that she’s leaving – which, assuming Kelli Giddish (the actress who plays her), Dick Wolf and his writers and show runners go through with it, will be a sad day indeed for the show since the chemistry between Hargitay and Giddish has been one of the best aspects of this show in the post-Meloni years.