Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Monster" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired May 14, 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode that followed, “Monster,” was a pretty good season-ender, maybe not as powerful in its ethical conflicts as the Law and Order show that preceded it May 14 but with its own set of intriguing moral issues. The show begins with a scene in which two young uniformed officers, Frank Rodriguez (Joseph Elliot Rodriguez) and Jess Acosta (Darilyn Castillo), stop a car that’s been involved in a fender-bender and offer to help out the driver. Unfortunately, the driver turns out to be Richard Caine (Daniel London), true name Michael Parker, who tried to wave the cops away until Rodriguez spotted a gun under his front seat. Rodriguez demanded the right to search the car, and in the trunk he found a kidnapped boy, Bobby Deboer (Matthew Anthony Pellicano, Jr.), and returned him to his parents. Unfortunately, in searching the car Rodriguez leaned his head into the open driver’s-side window, and thereby the judge in Caine’s case, Walter Conover (Paul Guilfoyle), ruled the search and all the evidence garnered therefrom inadmissible. The Manhattan Special Victims Unit, led by Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), is incensed by the fact that Caine has been set free and figure it’s only a matter of time before he kidnaps another child and tortures him or her to death for his sick jollies. Benson repeatedly watches the videotaped confession Caine made to her which was ruled inadmissible as “fruit of the poisoned tree,” and her long-time associate and friend, Sgt. Odafin “Fin” Tutuola (Ice-T), worries for her sanity. Benson also has another issue to deal with, a jihad against her by the newly appointed chief of detectives, an officious African-American woman named Kathryn Tynan (Noma Dumezweni), who is bound and determined to get Benson off the NYPD by any legal means necessary. She’s bound up with SVU’s newest assignee, Detective Jake Griffin (Corey Cott), who’s the son of her former police partner. Griffin père was involved in the shooting of an unarmed suspect years before and Tynan has covered for him all these years. Griffin fils launches a sub rosa investigation of his dad’s case and realizes that his father was indeed wrong: he committed cold-blooded murder, and Tynan has covered up for him all these years because she figures the victim he shot was an habitual criminal and by shooting him Griffin’s dad did the world a service.

Meanwhile, SVU gets a visit from a now-retired police detective from Jacksonville, Florida named Donald Torres (Michael J. Harney), who says that before Caine escaped their grasp and moved to New York, he worked in Jacksonville similarly kidnapping and killing kids under the name “Michael Parker.” Since all his victims in Florida were along the route he drove regularly as part of his job, Benson and the other SVU detectives hit on the idea of investigating his current job route to see if there are any missing children belonging to families who live alongside it. They also have the reluctant cooperation of Caine’s ex-wife Jocelyn Fronczak (Monique Gabriela Curnen), a hard-nosed woman who was married to him for only six months but was bitterly traumatized by the experience and just wants to put it all behind her. Ultimately they trace Caine’s burial ground to a local beach just under a pier and send a forensic team to look for bodies. They find plenty of them, including one that they can prosecute him for because, though the victim lived in Pennsylvania, he was buried in New York and therefore the city has jurisdiction. Just when Manhattan SVU seems to have the case wrapped up, in comes Chief of Detectives Tynan once again threatening Benson and saying, “I’ll have your badge,” and while writer Michele Fazekas (an old Law and Order hand) never quite makes it clear just why Tynan hates Benson so, it sufficiently demoralizes Benson that towards the end of the episode (as she did in last week’s show as well) she confides in Fin that she’s not sure it’s worth the trouble anymore and maybe she should just retire. I’m wondering if this means that the real-life Mariska Hargitay is considering stepping down from her role on this show and Dick Wolf’s writers are creating an “out” for her in case she decides not to re-up for another season. Frankly, this show suffered so much from Christopher Meloni’s departure 13 years ago (though Meloni’s career suffered even more, in particular because he didn’t get the role he was born to play: Jack Reacher in the feature-film series based on Lee Child’s novels which instead went to short, shrimpy Tom Cruise, a piece of miscasting so atrocious that to this day I won’t watch a Reacher movie with Cruise) that I’m not sure it could withstand the loss of Hargitay as well.