Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Tunnel Blind" (Wolf Entertainment, Universal,, NBC-TV, aired January 18, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode that followed, “Tunnel Blind,” was a frustrating one in which Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), returning home with her adopted son Noah (Ryan Buggle) – a character I hate, loathe, detest with a rare level of passion and wish the SVU writers would kill off already – when she spots a brightly colored van with a young woman in the passenger seat. Benson’s trained eye spots her as the likely victim of a predator, but rather than act on it she lets the van drive off. Later she finds that the girl was 15-year-old Maddie Flynn (Allison Elaine), who was kidnapped from a toy store as her parents Peter (Zack Robidas) and Eileen (Leslie Fray) were in different parts of the store, each thinking that Maddie was with the other. The Flynns had just moved a month or so before from San Francisco to New York, thinking the Big Apple would be safer for them and Maddie than the City By the Bay (one wonders what they were on and why they didn’t move to Wichita instead). Knowing that if they don’t find Maddie in the first 24 hours after her abduction it’s quite likely they won’t find her at all – at least not alive – the SVU detectives race the clock to run her whereabouts down. They find Maddie’s cell phone and ultimately locate the van; it was stolen from an energy-drink company and abandoned in a deserted parking lot. Maddie had had the presence of mind to take off her identification bracelet and leave it in the van to document that she had been there. Later the script by David Graziano and long-time Law and Order hand Julie Martin takes a bizarre turn into unwitting surrealism. A member of a film crew brings in what he claims is Maddie’s body, but it’s really a doll the movie company bought to use as a prop.

Later on it turns out that there’s a whole factory in Taiwan turning out replicas of Maddie, anatomically correct, for sickos into this sort of thing to use as sex toys. (At the same time, it seems to me that it’s a whole lot better and healthier for these people to fulfill their pedophilic urges on anatomically correct dolls than to grab real kids for their jollies.) Apparently someone back in San Francisco got a look at Maddie and decided that she’d be the perfect fantasy object for pedophiles and secretly designed and sold a doll in her image, of which the cops raid the New York distributor and thus find there are 100 copies of Maddie’s doll in New York alone. Ultimately one of the Maddie-doll owners decided he wasn’t satisfied with the doll and wanted the real Maddie, so he hired another crook to kidnap her and deliver her to him – only he thought better of it and tried to cancel the deal, but to no avail. The cops trace the baddies to a cheap motel on the outskirts of the city and find … not Maddie, but a young Black girl named Tanya Garcia (Lelany Celeste) who’s hooked on drugs (she’s complaining that her most recent supply was not crack, as advertised, but fentanyl – a common problem for real-life drug users these days and an interesting tie-in to the plot of the Law and Order: Organized Crime episode that followed immediately afterwards). Tanya is found floating face-down in a bathtub and is barely rescued in time, but the brass running the New York Police Department decide this is enough of a feel-good story they decide to hold a press conference to celebrate Tanya’s safe return. Only the press conference is crashed by Eileen Flynn, who understandably is upset big-time that the police are celebrating the return of this other girl as a great triumph while Maddie remains missing. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if Dick Wolf and his writers return to this story and resolve it in a later episode, but as it stands this SVU is not one of the better ones: there are too many loose ends, and the one truly interesting character – the pathetic schlub who set the plot against Maddie in motion with his obsession with her doll and wanting to meet the real-life prototype – is dismissed almost as soon as we meet him and gets just two brief scenes.