Law and Order/Law and Order: Special Victims Unit crossover event: "Play with Fire" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired April 17, 2025)

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

Last night (Thursday, April 17) I got to watch a so-called “crossover event” between Law and Order and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, a two-hour show called “Play with Fire,” as well as the welcome return of Law and Order: Organized Crime to the airwaves (for some reason the fifth season has hitherto been available only on Comcast/Universal/NBC’s “Peacock” streaming channel, and I’m not sure whether last night’s telecast is an indication that Organized Crime is returning to NBC’s airwaves or it was just a loss leader to get more people to shell out for Peacock subscriptions) with a series episode called “Lost Highway.” The “Play with Fire” episode began with a scene in a youth shelter featuring two young women, Ana Machado (Marisela Zumbrado) and Sofia (Dani Montalvo). Sofia gives Ana her phone and punches in the number of the Manhattan Special Victims Unit, with instructions to call it if anything happens to her. Then Sofia goes to check out a warehouse, only hours later Ana goes to the warehouse to check on her friend and finds a corpse of a young woman literally burned to a crisp inside a metal barrel. Ana calls the police but then hangs up on Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) as soon as Benson asks for her name. The M.O. reminds both Benson and Lieutenant Jessica Brady (Maura Tierney) of the 2-7 precinct where the flagship Law and Order show is centered of an earlier rape in which the victim was similarly burned to the proverbial crisp. The cops thought they had a suspect, but he fled to Mexico and the Mexican government not only refused to extradite him based on lack of evidence, they also utterly ignored the NYPD’s entreaties. The New York cops weren’t particularly worried about that because he was in custody in Mexico for unrelated crimes, but as soon as he was released he high-tailed it back to New York. The police actually arrest him, but he turns out to have firm alibis for both rapes/murders, the one from two years before and the one now.

When Benson and Brady both learn of the new victim’s identity, it’s a shock, especially to Benson: “Sofia” was really Detective Maria Recinos, whom Benson had personally rescued from human traffickers when Maria was just a child. Benson had personally made sure she was taken care of, and when she grew up Maria decided to become a police officer and worked her way up to detective until she was assigned to go undercover at the youth hostel run by Father Alberto Garcia (Al Vicente). The SVU and 2-7 police apprehend Ana and bring her back to a police station for interrogation, and Benson and Brady have an argument that goes far beyond “good cop/bad cop” tactics in how to deal with her. Benson ultimately asks Brady to leave the interrogation room because Brady’s hardball tactics are making Ana nervous, but as Benson is called out of the room herself briefly, Ana takes advantage of her absence to escape. Later Ana’s body is found strangled in the park; like the other two victims, she was raped before she was murdered, but unlike the others she wasn’t burned as well. Both Benson and Brady start to suspect that the mystery rapist/murderer must have inside knowledge of the case to have targeted Ana so quickly, and they start to suspect Father Garcia. This is one Law and Order show that seems to be copying the Midsomer Murders formula of having the police unearth other criminal conspiracies on their way to solving the main intrigue; in this case they stumble on a hotel where women are kept locked up in rooms and sexually enslaved to a sequence of “Johns.” The cops bust that one by assigning Detective Terry Bruno (Kevin Kane) to call the phone number provided on the gang’s “Dark Web” page and pose as a would-be john, and ultimately they catch on to who he is and the cops have to raid the place, but they take into custody a few rather confused teenage women who, like Ana, are undocumented immigrants sent to the U.S. by their parents in hopes of landing good (or at least well-paying) jobs and sending money back home as remittances.

The cops then pay a visit to the church were Father Garcia is pastor, and they find him in an armed confrontation with Lieutenant Paul Gomez (Reinaldo Faberlie), Maria Recinos’s supervisor on her undercover assignment. Garcia grabs Gomez’s gun and the two are both reaching for it when Benson and the SVU cops arrive and demand that Garcia drop the gun. “I can’t,” he says, and Gomez reaches for another gun strapped to his leg and uses it to kill Father Garcia. Ultimately the police realize that [spoiler alert!] Gomez is the real rapist and killer they’re after. Benson has her jacket, with its bloodstains from the gun battle, secretly tested and it reveals that Gomez’s DNA is a match for what was found on the victims’ bodies, courtesy of a new technique that allows police lab scientist Libby Wagner (Natalie Liconti, a fascinatingly butch woman with starkly pulled-back hair) to extract DNA even from burned corpses through looking for it in the victims’ vaginas. Earlier the cops had been led on a red-herring chase for a recently released ex-con named Miguel Pinto (J. Anthony Pena) because his semen was found on Anna’s corpse, but that turns out to be yet another frame-up from Gomez. When Pinto got out of prison, Gomez hired a sex worker to “do” him with instructions that she make him use a condom and retrieve it from the hotel bathroom’s trash can once they were finished so Gomez would have Pinto’s semen to use in a later frame-up.

When the case goes to trial, a key witness balks on the stand after yet another corrupt cop, Mueller Hayes (Charles Edwin Powell) – though his corruption only extends to fixing traffic tickets for his friends in exchange for bribes, not outright rapes and/or murders – walks into the courtroom and stares her down as she’s testifying. We’ve also seen Hayes accost Benson’s adopted son Noah (Ryan Buggle, who’s played this character since he was introduced and we’ve seen him naturally age over the years) on his way out of school and threaten him. In a remarkable cameo appearance, Detective Elliott Stabler (Christopher Meloni) confronts Hayes in a court restroom and tells him he’s on to him and there will be dire consequences for him if he pulls any more such threats. Ultimately Benson has to go back to a woman who formerly lived at the homeless shelter and knew the earlier victim while she was still struggling with drug addiction. Since then she’s got clean and sober and has fallen in love with a nice young man who knew nothing of her past, but Benson has to visit her and talk her into testifying even though she risks losing everything she’s fought for if her past is exposed publicly. Ultimately she testifies, Gomez is found guilty of all three rapes and murders, and the woman and her fiancé are shown together inside Garcia’s old church. While this Law and Order “crossover event” is something of a compendium of both Law and Order and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit clichés (something I became more aware of while writing the above than when I was actually watching it), it was also quite powerful, well staged drama. The two episodes had different directors – Jean de Segonzac for the Law and Order portion and Juan José Campanella for the SVU segment – but the writers, Rick Eid and Art Alamo, were the same and the two episodes meshed well into a quite powerful and moving two-hour extended event.