Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Extinguished" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired February 20, 2025)

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

The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode that followed, “Extinguished,” was in its own way pretty good. It starts with a young straight couple going through a park in their neighborhood, Washington Square, looking for rock specimens for their high-school class. (The young man playing the boy in this couple is quite haunting-looking and would be good casting for a biopic of Michael J. Fox if anyone makes one.) Suddenly they’re set upon by an unseen assailant; he’s knocked out and she’s tied with a yellow lamp cord and raped. The central issue in the story is the overall distrust residents of Washington Square have for the police, especially since many of them are immigrants who came from highly repressive countries where the police are feared as agents of doom. As it so happens, one of the SVU detectives, Joe Velasco (Octavio Pisano), has just moved to Washington Heights four months before, and he’s already crossed swords with Danny Rocha (Ethan Jones Romero). Danny is being raised by his grandfather, a retired New York police officer, and he has ambitions to become a cop himself – only he’s written three application letters and none of them have got a response. On the basis of a sketch drawing made by the female victim’s description of her rapist, Danny and a vigilante gang of which he’s a member target a suspect and beat him – but later it turns out he was innocent.

The cops (the real ones) then identify another suspect, James Aquino (Glen Llanes), after the woman victim says her assailant looked “more Asian” than the person in the police sketch. But they have to act fast to catch him before the vigilantes at best rough him up and at worst lynch him. Ultimately the police arrest Aquino before the vigilantes get to him, and Danny makes a plea deal by which he’ll plead to a misdemeanor and still be eligible for the police. Velasco even arranges for Danny to join a police auxiliary unit that, though it’s not allowed to do the work of sworn officers, can participate in crowd control and other “soft” police tasks. The lesson Octavio learns is to be more outgoing towards his neighbors instead of adopting the typical New York attitude of mostly ignoring them. There’s a marvelous scene early on in which Octavio is walking through the neighborhood posting leaflets showing the suspect’s face as shown in the police drawing, and a man shows his basic hostility to the police by ripping down the poster and crumpling it up. Octavio even threatens to arrest him for littering before he thinks better of it. And there’s an odd meet-cute between him and Danny in that Danny lives in the building just above Octavio’s apartment, he’s just got a new Bluetooth speaker and he’s blasting obnoxious music (the dialogue identified it as heavy metal but it sounded more like rap to me) and keeping Octavio awake with the volume. Later at the end Danny is once again playing music that’s once again disturbing Octavio (though not only is the music considerably better – something Latin, reflecting Danny’s origins – he’s playing it softer than whatever it was, metal or rap, he was playing earlier), though this time the encounter between them is much more neighborly and comradely.