Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Third Man Syndrome" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired March 21, 2024)

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

The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode that followed, “Third Man Syndrome,” also dealt with prejudice and Queer-bashing, though this time the victims aren’t really Gay – just perceived as such – and they are immigrants from Colombia, while they’re attacked by a gang of two whites and a fellow Latino. The principal victim is Javi Lopez (Martin Martinez), who’s just come to join his cousin Teo Garcia (Sebastian Barba) in New York. Teo previously immigrated to New York three years before; he came on a legitimate visa but overstayed it and so is technically “illegal.” He gets Javi an under-the-table job as a construction worker for his own employer, and as a celebration he invites Javi for a night on the town in Greenwich Village and buys him a white shirt which spells out “New York” in spangles. The two walk the streets of Greenwich Village vainly searching for a nighttime establishment that isn’t a Gay bar, though they settle on one which is because there’s a sing-along going on featuring Broadway show tunes and Teo figures that’s a way to introduce Javi to American culture. Unfortunately, as they’re coming out of the bar with their arms over each other’s shoulders (a quite common thing for Latino men to do with each other whether they’re Gay or not), they’re set upon by three thugs in a black SUV which they’ve stolen to go for a night of Queer-bashing. Teo gets away relatively unscathed but Javi is nowhere near so lucky; one of the assailants is carrying a baseball bat and gives him a nice hard smack on the groin with it. Ultimately he’s taken to an emergency room, where the doctor announces to the cops in charge of the case – it’s gone to the Special Victims Unit because Javi’s pants were pulled down and he was bleeding big-time from his crotch – that they’ve had to remove one of his testicles and he may never be able to have children.

The white assailants are Zach Swann (Daniel Sovich) and Mo Franks (Collin Linnville), both of whom have nicely styled longish hair that reminded me of one of our neighbors, while their Latino companion is Jordan Ramirez (Rene Moran), who hung back in the car and served as a lookout while the other two did the actual attack. It’s an indication of the extent of Jordan’s brushes with the law that when the police come to his house to arrest him, his mother Dora (Marcia Hopson) asks, “What’s he done now?” Ultimately the police can’t get a positive ID out of the victims themselves – both of whom didn’t see their assailants well enough in the dark to recognize them later – or out of the homeless man who happened on the incident but made discretion the better part of valor and ran away just after the attack started. Fortunately the whole assault was witnessed by a young woman named Anne Holmes (Caitlin Houlahan) who watched it from the window of her apartment just above the crime scene. Unfortunately, she’s an agoraphobic who won’t leave her home because she’s terrified of the world outside – though given what she’s just seen it’s hard not to be sympathetic to her reasons for not wanting to venture out – and it’s up to Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) to coax her out of the protective cocoon of her apartment and over to the police station to ID the alleged assailants. (I was wondering why they couldn’t have her do the lineups over Zoom; a lot of courtroom proceedings were held via Zoom in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, and I was a bit perplexed that no one thought of asking a judge for permission to do that in this case since it would have seemed to me to be a reasonable accommodation for a person with a disability.) She ID’s all three participants and prosecutor Dominick Carisi, Jr. (Peter Scanavino) is able to get guilty pleas from them all so she wouldn’t have to come to a courtroom and testify. While not quite at the level of the Law and Order episode that preceded it, this SVU was a good and quite chilling tale, though the person I felt sorriest for in the dramatis personae was Javi Lopez because cold, hard, unforgiving New York City gave him such a wretched first impression and at the end of the show he can’t wait to get back to the much warmer climate of Colombia!