Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Post-Rage" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired May 15, 2025)

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

The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit show that came on after that, “Post-Rage,” was an unusually kinky one even by their standards and had a quite impressive performance by the principal villain. The Special Victims Unit detectives are dealing with the rape and attempted murder of psychiatrist Dr. Gretchen Stewart (Betsy Brandt), who was posed with a blanket over her and had one eye gouged out by her assailant. Fortunately she survived and was available, after she recovered enough to be able to talk, to tell the SVU cops just what had happened to her, though she refuses to give them the names of her patients due to confidentiality (what I jokingly call “medical omertá”) and the police have a hard time tracing her assailant. The task is complicated by her practice of giving the first session free as a “consultation” and not recording the names of her patients until they actually sign on for a long course of therapy. Later another woman therapist who works at a free clinic in Harlem is also found raped and with an eye gouged out, but unlike Dr. Stewart, she actually died at the hands of her assailant – as did a third victim who was attacked in another jurisdiction prior to the other two. Eventually the police trace the killer: Ted Schramm (Brian Krinsky), a.k.a. “Keith Sparks,” with a particular grievance against women psychiatrists but also enough guilt feelings that after he rapes and (in two cases) kills them, he feels remorse and covers them up with blankets so the police don’t find them in compromising positions (the meaning of the episode title). The centerpiece of the episode is an intense interrogation scene between Schramm and Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) during which she finally breaks him down into confessing. Brian Krinsky’s performance in this scene is excellent as Benson unravels the onion layers of his twisted psyche. While all this is happening, one of the most problematical people on Benson’s squad, Joe Velasco (Octavio Pisano), is being given a promotion to detective, second class despite his troublesome reputation (he’d been a gangbanger before he turned his life around and became a cop, though he insisted he’d never actually killed anybody in his gang life). The ritual of his promotion features Department Commander Gavin Sullivan (Jerry D. O’Donnell) giving him and about 14 other people diplomas conferring their new rank.