Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "King of the Moon" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired February 23, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Alas, while the writers and director (regrettably unidentified as yet on imdb.com) behind the “Fear and Loathing” episode of Law and Order deftly combined two intersecting plot lines,the writers (David Graziano and Julie Martin) and director (series star Mariska Hargitay) of the Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode that followed,”King of the Moon,” failed to pull off their integration of separate story lines with anything like the same skill. One plot line concerned Detective Joe Velasco (Octavio Pisano, the sexiest male “regular” on this show since Christopher Meloni departed over a decade ago), who in an effort to get a heroin addict to talk not only waved a baggie of the drug in his face but tp;d jo, tjat two decades earlier he’d been a would-be gangbanger involved in two still-unsolved murders in Fort Worth. The other story concerned psychologist and best-selling non-fiction author Pence Humphreys (Bradley Whitfield), who is suffering from age-related dementia and claims to have had a murder-suicide pact with his wife Winifred, a.k.a. “Winnie,” who’s been found raped and murdered in her bed. He’s convinced that he must have killed her and then dishonored her by not fulfilling his part of the bargain and knocking himself off – he told the cops he was going to commit suicide with a shotgun but no such weapon was found in his home.

While Velasco is being investigated by internal affairs for allegedly breaking police protocol by giving a suspect drugs to get him to talk (his hands tested positive for drug residue but he said that was only because he emptied the bag of actual heroine and refilled it with powdered sugar) and confessing to a real-life murder in Fort Worth two decades earlier, Humphreys remains convinced that he killed his wife. Lieutenant Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) tries to talk him out of it, and eventually the cops discover that Winnie’s real killer is Humphreys’ scapegrace 20-year-old nephew, who apparently believed that his uncle and aunt had large sums of cash on hand in their home and was convinced to steal it to satisfy his underworld creditors. Meanwhile, Benson learns that Velasco is covering up the Fort Worth murders for the real killer, a boyhood friend of his who saved his life by keeping him out of the gangs. Benson insists that Velasco rat out his friend as a condition of being allowed to remain in SVU. The two stories really don’t intersect or reinforce each other in any way, unlike the dual plot lines of the Law and Order that preceded it, though there was a clever line of dialogue in which pence tells Benson that her face looks like an angel's and her butt looks like like Jayne Mansfield’s – Hargitay’s real-life mother. The episode title is explained as the name of a book Pence wrote in his childhood, a fantasy about going to the moon and becoming its king until he got lonely for the companionship of other humans/ Benson reads the book to Pence as a comfort to him, and this explains the opening scene showing Pence and Winnie as grade-school kids (Noah Feldman and Mariana Cay Baker) who meet when they compete against each other in a spelling bee.