Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Let Me Bring Pardon" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired March 20, 2025)

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

The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode that was on just after that, “Let Me Bring Pardon,” was in its own way just as powerful as the “Folk Hero” episode on Law and Order. It was a sequel to “Rorschach,” aired November 7, 2024, which picked up the story of Ellie Hughes (Jen Parker Davis), who was traveling across the country with her boyfriend Chris Becker (Graham Patrick Martin) shooting a “vlog” (a video Web log) and telling their followers how happy and how much in love they are – until it all went south one night in Rockland County, New York. Ellie took off to cruise a bar, Chris had a jealous hissy-fit, and ultimately he attacked her and put her in a permanent coma. He tried to weasel out of it by claiming a third person had attacked both of them, but the cops discovered there was no such person. That’s all in the backstory; as “Let Me Bring Pardon” opens, Laura Hughes (Jama Williamson), Ellie’s mother, and Virginia Becker (Gina Costigan), Chris’s mother, have formed an uneasy alliance. Ellie is now in a long-term care facility but the doctors there discover that she’s pregnant. They estimate the time of conception as between 12 to 16 weeks before, which leaves it uncertain as to whether the biological father was Chris or someone who sneaked into her room at the trauma center she was in before she was placed in long-term care and raped her. The SVU detectives want to take DNA from the fetus to run a genetic test, but Laura Hughes flatly refuses, saying that Ellie has had enough needles stuck in her for several lifetimes and she won’t authorize one more. So they have to go to Chris, who’s serving a 25-year sentence for attempted murder, and ask him to file a petition requesting a fetal DNA test on Ellie and her offspring.

The test comes back and definitively proves that Chris is not the father, which leaves the SVU cops with the chancy task of finding out who is. The detectives ask the staff at the trauma center for a list of all their male employees during the time Ellie was in there, and they get a list of 150 names and ask them all to take DNA tests. The only one who refuses is the head of neurosurgery there, Dr. Isaac Haimes (Mark Shapiro), who says he can’t be bothered because he’s on his way to perform an important and elaborate emergency operation. Naturally this zooms him to the top of the suspect list, but he turns out to be a red herring. The real rapist is the trauma center’s volunteer chaplain, Caleb Hartwell (a really sexy actor named Garnett Coffey), who turns out to have a wife, Lilith (Madeline Anîfé), and a four-month-old baby, Zachary (everyone in his family would have a name from the Bible!), himself. When the cops finally arrest him – in true Law and Order fashion, in the middle of a service he’s leading at his church – he insists that Ellie’s child is a “miracle baby,” fathered by God, and he was just the instrument through which that was possible. It’s not clear whether he came up with this as just a B.S. rationalization or he’s crazy enough that he truly believes it, but either way that’s the defense he’s going with. Indeed, the writers, old Law and Order hands David Graziano and Julie Martin, leave it powerfully ambiguous not only what Caleb’s motives were but what’s going to happen to Ellie’s child once it’s born. Though before the paternity was definitively established, Laura Hughes and Virginia Becker were talking about co-parenting even though one of them only has a part-time job and the other is a temp, I found myself wondering if Lilith Hartwell, whose understanding passes understanding (as Nora Ephron put it in her essay about Trans person Jan nèe James Morris and their wife’s insistence on staying married even after they transitioned), would ask for the baby herself and raise lt alongside her own. It is her husband’s biological progeny, after all!