Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Duty to Report" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired February 8, 2024)

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

After that I watched a Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode that was almost as convoluted – and almost as good. It was called “Duty to Report” and dealt with Shea McGrath (Grace Culwell), teenage (and underage) daughter of New York Police Department Chief of Detectives Tommy McGrath (Terry Serpico). One Saturday night, while Tommy and his wife Katie (Amy Carlson) are out of town, Shea hosts a party in the McGrath home, where she’s sexually assaulted. At first she blames her math tutor, Saagar Shah (Krishna Doodnauth), for the assault, but later she acknowledges that the real culprit was Liam Dowling (Cameron Mann), teenage son of Mickey (Max Casella) and Janice (Monica Wyche) Dowling, across-the-street neighbors and long-time friends of the McGraths. Tommy McGrath, who’s already been established as an Irish hot-head in earlier episodes, ends up suspended from the force for physically assaulting Saagar Shah for raping his daughter – until Shah shows a video he recorded from a secret camera in his bike helmet (installed by his bosses to make sure he actually makes his deliveries on schedule) that shows Shea confiding what happened to another girl at the party, Angelica König (Catherine Young), who tells police that Liam was the assailant. Liam and Shea were life-long friends until that night, when Liam came on to her and started necking – which she was O.K. with – until he pushed up her skirt, obviously intending to have sex, and she backed away and withdrew her consent.

It also turns out that Mickey Dowling has been abusing his wife Janice for years – in fact, Liam tells the cops investigating him for alleged rape that he learned how to treat women from his dad’s example. Series star Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay, who gets some world-weary dialogue about how she’s been working the Special Victims Unit for 25 years – exactly how long Hargitay has been playing this role) reports Mickey Dowling to the police’s internal affairs unit, headed by Captain Renée Curry (Aime Donna Kelly), a Black woman who’s tired of the gig and anxious to move on. At one point Katie McGrath accuses Benson of ratting out her husband to IAB because she’s after his job as chief of detectives – which she couldn’t be less interested in, not only because she’s committed to running Manhattan SVU but also because she’s well aware of the political burdens of being the chief of detectives and doesn’t want to deal with them. It all ends with the friendship between the McGraths and the Dowlings in ruins, Liam being taken into custody for sexual assault (though given that both he and the victim were juveniles it’s unclear just how much legal jeopardy he’s in) and Benson in consultation with her therapist, Dr. Heather Lentz (Tricia Paolucco), who was also in a therapeutic relationship with Shea McGrath and who told Benson about her in the first place under her legal “duty to report.”