Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Calculated" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired February 13, 2025)

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

The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode that followed, “Calculated,” was just as chilling in its own way even though it did a couple of swerves in direction over its running time. It begins with a high-school student named Leah Hayward (Victoria Russell) whose friend Eli Sanders (Theodore Olsen-Johnson) receives a text containing a photo of Leah’s bare chest. The school principal catches him with the tittie text on his phone and reports it to the police, threatening disciplinary action against him that will end his chances to get into an elite college. The Special Victims Unit detectives investigate and find that there’s a whole selection of sexually explicit photos of high-school students online. They try to find who could have had access to all these pics and the name they come up with is Adam Parker (Jared Canfield), who’s a college admissions counselor. He’s the sort of person parents hire if they’re worried about their kids getting into elite colleges and need paid-for help to get them through the entrance process and in particular to coach them on writing their application essays. Parker has also developed a side hustle of sending lonely teen kids texts, posing as fellow students they already knew, and extracting sexually explicit photos of them he then sells to a secret network of pedophiles on the “dark Web.” Parker offers to rat out his customers in exchange for a lower sentence for his own crimes, insisting he’s not a pedophile himself but simply a capitalist making money off them. Leah Hayward’s mother Sharon (Kelly Frye) isn’t helping matters much with her insistence that the cops not only bust the people who took advantage of her daughter online but make sure every copy of the Internet image of her breasts is erased. The SVU officers actually tell her they’ve done that, but anyone who knows anything about the Internet is thinking, “Yeah, right.”

District attorney Nicholas Baxter (Tony Goldwyn) and the assistant assigned to SVU, Dominick Carisi, Jr. (Peter Scanavino), set up a sting operation with the SVU cops to attract various pedophiles to a rendezvous at the Baronet Hotel, where they’ll arrive thinking they’re going to get to have sex with underage partners and they’ll really be arrested. The cops pick Detective Kate Silva (Juliana Aidén Martinez) to act as the decoy, presumably because she’s the youngest member of the force. For some reason they set the number 50 as their quota of pedophiles they must bust to make the operation worthwhile, but Detective Silva has second thoughts about one of the people caught up in the sting. He’s Matthew Daly (Nik Sharp), and though he’s 32 years old he’s developmentally disabled (or whatever the au courant euphemism is for the “R”-word). When Silva, in her persona as a young girl named “Amy,” asked him to bring condoms (required as the sine qua non to prove intent – which suggests that one of the pedophiles could have escaped justice simply by insisting that he wasn’t going to use them and was going to go bareback), Matthew asks, “What’s a condom?” Silva texts him back (they’re communicating through a Web site consisting of animated avatars for the users) that he can get them at any deli (which struck me as odd because if I were in the market for condoms I’d go to a drugstore, not a deli). When Matthew gets busted he sees Silva in the police station and says, “Hi, Amy!” He has no idea either that she’s busted him or what he’s been busted for. Eventually Silva and her boss, Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), get D.A. Baxter to drop the charges against Matthew because he clearly isn’t guilty of anything more than making a friend online – he doesn’t even know what sex is, let alone wanting to have any with a presumably underage girl – though they literally have to ambush him in his chauffeur-driven SUV in a parking lot to get him the case file. This episode suffered from a couple of really severe turns in the plot line, but it was also a good warning for teenagers perhaps too willing to trust any potential predators online simply because they’ve assumed the identity of people they know, or think they know, well.