Law and Order: Special Victim Unit: "The Grid Plan" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV,. aired February 27, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, February 27) I watched episodes of Law and Order, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, and Elsbeth. The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit show, “The Grid Plan” (after Manhattan’s famous street grid which alternates named and numbered streets), deals with a middle-aged woman from Council Bluffs, Iowa, Megan Wallace (Donna Lynne Champlin), who comes to New York without her husband Richard (Joe Lanza) intent on seeing at least one Broadway show every day of her week-long visit there. Things go terribly wrong for her when on her sixth day she’s accosted by a stranger in Times Square and raped in full view of the crowds that throng the place, none of whom take notice except for a younger woman who sees her pressing him against an outdoor alcove and assumes that the sex was consensual. Megan also had just been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and one of the reasons she took the New York trip in the first place was to cross a Broadway theatrical vacation off her “bucket list” of things to do before she got too sick or just croaked. Unlike some of SVU’s other rape victims, who are so ashamed of what happened to them they hide out in their rooms and refuse to cooperate, Megan is cooperative to a fault. She’s determined to track down her assailant and bring him to justice whether the police, stuck in the due-process rigmarole, can do it or not. Among the things she does is make up her own wanted posters and wheat-paste them onto lighting standards in the area where she got raped. She also remembers that her assailant shared a bottle of wine with her and afterwards threw it away, then went back to the scene of the crime to reclaim it. Then he threw it away again and it landed on the awning of a Broadway theatre, where the SVU cops recover it. The wine bottle gives the police the key clue to find the culprit: it’s an Australian bottle of shiraz, an ultra-high-end vintage worth $1,000 per bottle.

Not many bars or liquor stores carry wines that expensive, and the cops are able to trace the bottle to sales representative Gerard Ripley (Christian Mallen), who turns out to be Megan’s rapist. Unfortunately, as they’re about to arrest Ripley, Megan recognizes him in the street and hauls off and punches him one, whereupon the cops arrest her for assault and Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) uses her influence to quash her arrest. Prosecutor Daniel Carisi, Jr. (Peter Scanavino) and the police try to bolster the case against Ripley and uncover one of Ripley’s old girlfriends, who broke up with him once he tried to force himself against her, but Carisi decides that the facts are too different to get that admitted into evidence as an example of a “prior bad act.” Once the case goes to trial, Ripley’s woman attorney (apparently it’s a rule of thumb in the defense bar that a man accused of raping a woman should hire a woman lawyer to defend him), Christine Vega (Michelle Ventimilla), extracts from Megan the information that she’s been diagnosed with MS, and her husband – whom she’d intended to tell about her diagnosis when she got back from New York – understandably feels betrayed that she’d kept that a secret from him and threatens to leave her over it. Megan briefly threatens to bail on the trial and flee with him back to the relative safety of Council Bluffs, Iowa, but Benson talks her out of it and the case ends with Ripley being found guilty and Megan being able to go home with her husband secure in the knowledge that her persistence led to her rapist being punished. This was an O.K. SVU whose most remarkable aspect was the sheer power and energy of Donna Lynne Champlin as Megan; it’s a pity that she’s middle-aged and homely, since there are not going to be that many parts available for her, but she’s damned good and plays with rare authority as well as dramatizing by her very plainness that rape is a crime against women and not a matter of sex. At one point she even expresses wonderment that anyone would target her for sexual assault when she was not only not conventionally attractive but she wasn’t dressed in a “slutty” or especially revealing manner – and Benson, who throughout the show’s 25-year run has been the voice of social consciousness, explains to her that that doesn’t matter: men rape women (or, more rarely, other men) to exert their dominance rather than for sexual gratification.