Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Truth Embargo" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal, NBC-TV, aired January 25, 2024)

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

The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode that followed it, “Truth Embargo,” directed by Jean de Segonzac (an old Law and Order hand) from a script by Brendan Feeney, showed Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay, who’s been playing this role for a quarter-century by now and is visibly tired of it, though she grabbed it in the first place because it was the only part she was being offered that was not like the big-breasted blonde bimbo roles her mom, Jayne Mansfield, had played) still traumatized by her failure to find the kidnapper of Maddie Flynn (Allison Elaine) in the previous week’s episode, “Tunnel Blind.” At one point she even stops the driver of a van from the energy-drink company identical to the one Maddie’s kidnapper drove, only the driver had nothing to do with it and is nonplussed that he’s being stopped and harassed by a desperate cop with an agenda. But the main plot of this episode deals with Natalie Ross (Romina D’Ugo), who’s about to marry her partner Brooke Jaffit (Keeley Miller). They’re planning an island honeymoon and Natalie wants to pick up a sexy swimsuit to impress her girlfriend, but their plans are sidetracked when the store where she’s shopping is invaded by a gang of smash-and-grab robbers, one of whom drags Natalie into a fitting room and rapes her. (The way my mind works, I was wondering whether we were supposed to believe that Natalie was so Queer she’d never had sex with a man before and would never have done so if she hadn’t been forced into it.) The police arrest one of the gang members, a white kid named Travis Butler (Tommy Nelson), who as a sign of bravado takes off the shirt he stole at the store and throws it in the cops’ faces (and shows off a quite nice bod, clean-shaven chest-wise but with very nice, prominent nipples).

They’re able to apprehend Watson because he shot a selfie video and posted it on social media; he posed for the video with a Black friend who turns out to be Natalie’s rapist. Though he’s predictably unwilling at first to give the cops the other kid’s name, eventually they pressure him into ratting out his friend. Along the way the same gang literally smashes their way into the SVU precinct station, though they’re doing it only as a form of intimidation and we only briefly get the thrill of seeing Benson scream into an intercom, “WHERE’S MY BACKUP?” Eventually the police arrest the accused rapist, Jay Watson (Mykey Cooper), and prosecutor Dominick Carisi, Jr. (Peter Scanavino) put him on trial – only midway through the trial, when it’s time for Natalie to identify Watson as her rapist and point him out on the witness stand, she gets cold feet. It turns out that both she and Brooke feel sorry for Jay Watson – it reminded me of the old joke that “a liberal is someone who feels the other person’s point of view – when they’re being robbed,” only it turns out Natalie had a personal experience as a child that affected her in that direction. It seems that when she was being raised as a foster child, one of her foster brothers was a Black boy and the two of them would go into stores and shoplift as a prank – only one time they got caught and she, as a white girl, was let off with a warning while he had to spend a night in juvenile hall and it started him on a downward spiral that led him to career crime and drug use. Ultimately Natalie identifies Watson as her rapist and he’s convicted, and as a long-time SVU viewer I’m left with a certain anger over the kind of liberal guilt that came close to allowing a rapist to go free even though I also could tell writer Feeney was deliberately setting up his plot to make me angry about that.