Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Zone Rouge" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired February 22, 2024)

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

Last night (Thursday, February 22) I watched episodes of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and Law and Order: Organized Crime. The SVU show, “Zone Rouge,” blessedly wrapped up the ongoing narrative story arc of young-teenager Maddie Flynn (Allison Elaine), whom Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) first saw in this season’s opener being kidnapped by an older man in a stolen energy-drink van. She saw the girl in the front seat of the van but didn’t stop it because there was that little matter of not having probable cause, the kidnapper got away with her and ever since Benson has been haunted by her failure to find and rescue the girl. Her parents Peter (Zack Robidas) and Eileen (Leslie Fray) have also been riding her about it. “Zone Rouge” opens with Maddie and her kidnapper, whom she knows only as “George from Canada,” riding on a train out of state into New Jersey and Pennsylvania on its way to Cleveland, Ohio. A young man, Cash Bowford (Kevin Csolak), sees them and Maddie, disguised as a boy, slips him a note that says “Call NYPD,” but he sits on the note for three days and the New York police only get called when his girlfriend, Heather Pittenger (Lindsey Dresbach), spots the note three days later while doing his laundry and makes the call. Given that the kidnapper has taken his captive across a state line, the FBI is now involved (thanks to a law passed after the Charles Lindbergh, Jr. kidnapping in 1932) in the person of female agent Shannah Sykes (Jordana Spiro), who is especially determined to find Maddie because in her own teen years her younger sister was kidnapped and was never recovered, alive or dead. The two take an unauthorized trip to Pittsburgh to trace Maddie’s whereabouts, only to find that the kidnapper, George Brouchard (Patrick Carroll), has doubled back to Buffalo, where they successfully arrest him.

Brouchard’s attorney (a woman public defender) demands a light sentence in return for him telling them what he did with Maddie – he was arrested with a wad of cash on him he got by selling her – but the cops fortunately don’t have to deal with him because they are able to trace Maddie’s whereabouts via other information. Her purchaser is Leonard Fleming (Alex Parkinson), a 35-year-old construction worker with an arrest record as a peeping Tom, and fortunately for Maddie he didn’t want to have sex with her, just to look at her naked. Ultimately Benson and Sykes are able to trace her and recapture Maddie alive, and Sykes is so disgusted by the whole thing that after 10 years as an FBI agent she steps back from the Bureau and arranges for an ongoing loanout to Manhattan SVU. “Zone Rouge” was Brouchard’s slang term for an area of small towns in which he felt he could operate freely – though the only places we know of where he’s been are large or fairly large cities (New York, Pittsburgh, Buffalo). One of the points made by this episode is something I’ve already written about in connection with some of the true-life stories that have been the subjects of Lifetime movies, like Cleveland Abduction: the democratization of sexual sadistic abuse. (I’m using a rather awkward term to distinguish abuse from consensual S/M, which I’m fine with as long as both parties know what they’re doing and are aware enough of the risks to consent freely.) In the old days sexual abuse was strictly the province of landed aristocratic élites who had massive fortunes and steady incomes so they didn’t have to work; sadism and masochism are named for the Marquis de Sade and the Baron Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, respectively. But now it’s a hobby, albeit a sick and disgusting one, available to the masses, including blue-collar workers like the ones in Cleveland Abduction and here who ingeniously combine their kidnapping, torture and rape of young people (boys as well as girls) with ordinary lives and live in normal suburban neighborhoods among people who don’t know what’s going on in their neighbors’ homes.