Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Intersection" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired February 2, 2023)

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

After the Law and Order “Mannon” episode I watched a Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode called “Intersection,” which begins with a romantic nighttime scene . After the concert aI went in front of the Brooklyn Bridge in which a young straight couple, Josh Wagner (Michael Anderson, Jr.) and Poppy Wilson (Sarah Baskin), who appear to be interracial (the man is definitely Black but the woman is racially ambiguous, with relatively dark skin but straight black hair) met in front of the bridge, tell each other how much they love the city that has brought them together, and at the end of the sequence the man gets down in his knees and proposes to her. She accepts, of course, and the two drive off in a car – when suddenly they’re involved in an accident. Only it’s not really an accident: it’s been staged by a mystery man who has rewired one of the gizmos by which licensed drivers of police cars, fiure trucks and ambulances can have the traffic lights all turn green to let them through in case of an emergency. The culprit is George Kalazakis (Daniel Passaro), who used to work as a used-car salesman until his boss started having an affair with Kalazakis’s wife Stephanie (Bax Odorisio).

This led Kalazakis to stage a bizarre revenge plan in which he would steal his boss’s car-dealer’s license,use it to buy a used ambulance, remove all its identifying numbers while keeping the overall paint job, and use a gizmo he had reworked to cause “accidents” by making traffic lights go green in both directions. Then, before the real ambulances coud arrive on the scene, he’d pull the female victim out of the car, take her into the ambulance, and rape her in full view of her husband or partner, who’d be locked outside the ambulance, able to watch but powerless to do anything to stop the assault. The show ends when Kalazakis takes a woman hostage and threatens to kill her unless the cops agree to bring his wife to the scene so he can talk to her and she can apologize to him. She’s at first reluctant because she doesn’t want to tell him what he wants to hear – that she’s sorry for the affair and ready to come back to him if he’ll forgive her and take her back – but the SVU cops persuade her to lie so he’ll let the hostage go and they’ll be able to arrest him.

Interspersed with this is a plot thread involving officer Terry Bruno (Kevin Kane), who’s won a multi-million dollar settlement from the New York Police Department for wrongful termination, and whom Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) picked up during her brief sojourn at the Bronx Special Victims Unit helping the FBI clean up the notoriously corrupt Bronx SVU. Bruno reunites with his ex-wife Rose (Raquel Chavez) because she’s a skilled computer hacker and the Manhattan SVU needed her skills to find Kaloazakis. The implication is that Terry Bruno has been inspired by the dysfunctional breakup of the Kalazakis marriage to try to pu9t his own marriage back together.

And if that wasn’t enough, there’s also a plot strand taken over from the immediately previous episode in which Benson leaks a surreptitious recording made by a fellow officer of Detecthve Joe Velasco (Octavio Pisano), which Benson puts on a thumb drive and gives to fellow Detective Grace Muncy (Molly Burnett) because she’s falling in love with him. The tape contains a veiled confession to a murder in previous years, which Muncy interprets as a lie Velasco told to get a suspect to “flip,” but Benson isn’t so sure ahd she intends to investigate and report to Internal Affairs if the facts warrant it. This was a pretty good SVU episode but they’ve done better, and it was hardly as powerful as the Law and Order show that preceded it. There’s also an odd plot glitch in this one: George Kalacakis says he’s been married for 25 years but later the cops identify his age at 41, which would mean he married Stephanie at just 16.