Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Probability of Doom" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired March 14, 2024)

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

The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode that followed, “Probability of Doom,” directed by Martha Mitchell from a script by David Graziano and Nicholas Evangelista, features one of the quirkiest villains the show has ever had. Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) starts the episode in full dress uniform to attend the police academy graduation ceremony, in which one of the graduating officers is a young woman whom Benson rescued years earlier as a kidnapping victim of a serial pedophile. Only Benson is called away from the graduation before she can speak to her rescuee because others on her squad, including Detective Odafin “Fin” Tutuola (Ice-T) and Captain Renée Curry (Aimé Donna Kelly), who transferred from the Internal Affairs Bureau to Special Victims Unit, have found the body of a serial pedophile chopped up in pieces and left to rot in his apartment. Later a second known pedophile is found in similar condition, and though the writers made surprisingly little of the theme which I thought they would be going to – the mixed feelings between the SVU squad members’ devotion to enforcing the law and the undoubted sympathies for the mysterious killer’s motives – they eventually trace the murders to Tori Brock (Sarah Lynn Marion), a 20-something hard-assed woman of size who started her killing spree by knocking off her own father, who had been regularly molesting her throughout her childhood. She was troubled enough she dropped out of high school (though she later got a G.E.D. certificate) and went to work in construction, in which capacity she owned the sort of saw with which she cut up the bodies of at least three serial pedophiles. She recruited her victims through a “dark Web” phone app called K-Dome, which started as a site for illegal drug sales (“K” as in “special K,” the street name for the animal tranquilizer ketamine) but branched out into facilitating meetings between pedophiles and potential victims. Tori used photos of her still pre-pubescent sister Nina (Fiona Morgan Quinn) to lure her targets, and one of the men Tori later killed had posed for photos with Nina in the cab of his pickup truck – actually perfectly legitimate ones, but with a definite undercurrent of sexualization. The person I really felt sorry for in this episode is Sarah Lynn Marion, mainly because though she’s quite an accomplished actor, she’s going to be very difficult to cast. About the only other sort of part I can imagine her playing is a super-butch Lesbian. She was certainly fun to watch here: powerful, dominating, taking on a protective-mother role towards her sister and making us feel sorry for her even though we also understand how her horrible experience with her own dad (the “probability of doom” is a late-in-the-episode mention of Tori’s fear of her father, and in particular whether once he came home from work he’d be appropriately loving towards her or want to rape her) led her to her terrible program of revenge against not only her father (who not surprisingly was her first victim) but all similarly situated men.