Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "The Punch List" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired February 1, 2024)

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

Last night (Thursday, February 1) my Law and Order marathon continued with a really quirky episode of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit in which a woman comes to the SVU precinct office reporting a rape – with herself as the rapist, not the victim. The victim was Dr. Ray Goldberg (David Krumholtz), who’s in the middle of a major remodeling of his house ordered by Denise (Gabrielle Miller), his wife of 30 years. On the night in question he’s scheduled a date at an exclusive club called Galapagos (which has a wall decoration showing the ape-to-man evolution) with his old friend from medical school, Andy Burke (Jeff Mark). Only Andy bails out at the last minute; though they’re supposed to be about the same age Andy is considerably hotter and sexier, and he’s attracted one of Dr. Goldberg’s female nurses. So Ray goes to the club on his own and meets two younger men, Duvall Mathis (Ian Coletti) and Shirel Fischer (Tara Bopp). The three sit at a table together and, once they’ve all had way too much to drink, they repair to a local bodega where Duvall and Shirel use Dr. Goldberg’s credit cards to buy $1,200 in drugs and other supplies. They also buy him an “escort” for the night and order her to have sex with Dr. Goldberg, whom they’ve plied with erectile dysfunction drugs as well as rohypnol or something similar that leaves him sexually able to perform but unable to resist. They get the woman, Tess Long (Audrey Hare), to cooperate by literally holding a gun to her head – though it turns out that it was just a starter pistol and she was in no actual danger from it, though she thought she was.

The cops determine that the only way they can nail Duvall and Shirel (whom they arrest in the usual flamboyant ways for this show: one of them is taken into custody at the dog-grooming shop where works – thereby establishing that he makes his living in a weirdly similar way to Dr. Goldberg – and the other is pulled off a New York tour bus just as he’s about to lead a tour) is if they can get them back together with Dr. Goldberg in the Galapagos club and wire him to record them. Only Denise Goldberg shows up at the last minute and he has to take her aside and frantically explain to her what he’s doing there, though in the end she forgives him for his inadvertent and decidedly unwanted extra-relational activities. Along the way there’s a subplot consisting of Captain Olivia Benson’s (Mariska Hargitay) continued guilt feelings about the still-missing 14-year-old girl Maddie Flynn kidnapped in the first new episode of 2024, whose father attempts suicide in his apartment over his own grief and guilt about the disappearance of his daughter. He survives, but it’s a close call and he ends up in the hospital for days. I’m presuming that Dick Wolf, his show runners and writers will resolve this continuing story line by the time this truncated season of SVU ends, and I was struck by the irony that among the effects Maddie Flynn left behind when she was taken was a music box with one of those dancing puppet figures. The music box plays, of all things, “In the Hall of the Mountain King” from Edvard Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite No. 1 – the same song Peter Lorre as the child-murderer in Fritz Lang’s 1931 classic M whistled when he was on the prowl after a child.