Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Volition" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired October 8, 2026)

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

Last night (Thursday, October 8) NBC brought back the two remaining shows in Dick Wolf’s Law and Order franchise, Law and Order and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, though in order to make room for one of their skanky “reality” shows, The Traitors, they didn’t start them until 9 p.m. and reversed their order so SVU came first. It was an episode called “Volition” and started in an otherwise deserted New York subway car which contained two people, a young blonde woman named Emily Dawson (Lizzy DeClement) who was clearly several sheets to the proverbial wind with acute alcohol intoxication, and a tall, heavy-set, bearded man (Axl Prophett) whom, based on our experience with previous SVU episodes, we were sure was going to rape her. In fact he turns out to be a good guy who comes over to help her after she’d already been raped by three other guys somewhere else. The three other guys turn out to be Josh Berger (Matthew Nikitow), who’d long had a crush on Emily; Daniel Sutcliff (Danny Hayward); and Scott Paletta (Eric Nelsen), and the rape took place at the town-house apartment Josh shares with his mother Stephanie (Lisa Bostnar). There are also a few other characters who show up, including an emergency-room nurse (Amanda Schoonover) who irritates Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) by kibitzing in on her interrogation of Emily and trying to get her to, shall we say, shade the facts to make her rape claim more believable (Benson literally orders her out of the room so she can talk to Emily directly); a new young Black assistant district attorney named Aidan Hawkins (Jelani Alladin) who sits second chair on the voir dire examination of potential jurors and attracts the ire of established ADA Dominick Carisi, Jr. (Peter Scanavino), who calls him a spoiled rich kid who won’t stay with the office; and Gwen Sharpe (J. Smith-Cameron), a jury consultant who tells Benson to have Carisi and/or Hawkins strike jurors four and 11. Gwen also says that prosecutors in a rape case shouldn’t want women on the jury because women are more likely than men to believe a victim “brought it on herself” by drinking too much or wearing too revealing clothing or being too sexually out-front or whatever.

The case goes to trial but results in a hung jury, and not surprisingly Emily is so traumatized by the whole experience – not only having been gang-raped but by having to relive it in court – that she refuses to testify again. Benson has to pull a rabbit out of a hat, and she does so by ordering the arrest of Stephanie Berger on grounds of obstruction of justice. At first Stephanie had done just that; she’d furiously changed the sheets and cleaned up after the party to make sure any potential DNA evidence linking the crime to her son or his friends was obliterated. Later on, however, she cooperated and contributed a security videotape that showed the three young men indeed conspiring to gang-rape Emily before they entered the town house. Carisi is furious with Benson for ordering the arrest of an innocent person just to “flip” her son into testifying for the state in a trial for the other two. He’s so furious I suspect Wolf and his writers (here, old Law and Order hand Michelle Fazekas) are setting this story arc up to write Peter Scanavino out of the show and have Jelani Alladin’s character replace him as the unit’s new ADA. (One of the principal innovations behind the New York Police Department’s Sex Crimes Unit, the inspiration for this show, was to have an assistant district attorney permanently assigned to it so he or she – and at least in the early days of SVU, it was always a she – would develop the needed expertise to prosecute sex crimes successfully.) There’s a lot of cold-shouldering between Benson and Carisi, but in the end Benson gets the outcome she wanted: after she and Hawkins got the court to appoint a separate attorney for Josh Berger (in the initial trial all three had had the same counsel, and the judge had made sure they’d all signed the release forms to prevent them from claiming a conflict of interest later), Josh’s new lawyer negotiates a plea deal where he’ll serve a two- to three-year sentence in exchange for his testifying against the other two.