Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Marauder" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired May 9, 2024)

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

After that NBC showed a Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode called “Marauder,” about a peripatetic sexual offender (a man who kidnaps, rapes and kills teenage girls) who works from a defined geographical location but ranges about 100 miles or so in each direction. Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay, who is definitely showing her age these days) gets involved in one of the cases because the original victim from the 1990’s was Crystal Sykes (Stella Bratcher), the younger sister of a member of her squad, Shannah Sykes (Jordana Spiro), who’s on long-term loan from the FBI to the Manhattan SVU and who still bears the trauma of losing her younger sister to a sexual predator. Benson, on her own authority and against Shannah’s pleadings, reopens the case and finds that at least five other missing children disappeared under similar circumstances, including at least one, Renée Markham, who was taken in the Manhattan SVU’s jurisdiction. The squad goes to see Markham’s parents, Lee (John Hillner) and Joanna (Blair Ross), to ask for permission to exhume Renée’s body (at least her they found!) to test for DNA and other forensic evidence in hopes that modern forensic technology could detect evidence the cruder techniques of over two decades ago could not.

But the parents, Lee in particular, refuse, so Renée’s cousin Cal Markham (Gabe Fazio, giving a rather twitchy performance that at least briefly makes us consider that he might have actually killed Renée) gives a false confession to the crime so the police are forced to exhume Renée’s body whether the parents O.K. it or not. They finally trace the killings and abductions to Richard Kincaid (Larry Pine) of Bayonne, New Jersey, and they arrest him at a family gathering that’s the epitome of suburban banality. (I remember when I first read Hannah Arendt’s book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, I thought she could have reversed the abstract nouns in her subtitle and called it A Report on the Evil of Banality, since the whole point of her book was that Eichmann, as she portrayed him, was amoral rather than immoral and so totally lacked a sense of moral compass he didn’t or couldn’t or wouldn’t see that the task the Nazis had entrusted to him – to make sure trains kept moving to Auschwitz and the other Nazi death camps – was morally wrong.) The SVU cops arrest Kincaid and he leads them to Crystal Sykes’s body – and there’s a weird scene at the ending in which Shannah stands over the remains of her long-dead sister, not sure whether she wants to look at them to make the I.D. It’s an example of the moral subtlety of Dick Wolf’s universe that makes his cop shows generally far richer and more emotionally complex than the average policiers.