Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Forsaken" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired November 5, 2026)

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

Last night (Thursday, November 5) I put on NBC for the latest two episodes of Law and Order and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. They’re showing them in reverse order these days, with SVU first, to make room for that abominable “reality” show The Traitors they’ve scheduled for 8 p.m. The SVU episode was called “Forsaken” and opened at a much-publicized wedding of a major male comedian who’d been living with the same woman for years but had finally got around to tying the knot legally. At first I assumed that the comedian would be the principal perpetrator and it would be a story about how he raped a woman to get his rocks off one last time before he got hitched, but writer Justine Ferrara took her plot in a quite different direction. The victim is Chloe Davis (Lauren Cole, turning in an impressive performance), who’s found lying unconscious in a pool of her own blood at the wedding party. The investigating police detectives, including Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) and Detective Amanda Rollins (Kelli Giddish), have to deal with Chloe’s overbearing mother Monica (Jessalyn Gilsig) and even more overbearing stepfather Rick (Bill Heck). Chloe gives a description of her assailant as a young man in his 20’s, tall, white, and with red hair. As things turn out, a man matching that description, Scott Germon (Harrison Ball), was actually at the event and is arrested for the crime, but he turns out to be innocent. We don’t feel too badly for him, mainly because he was at the wedding party to sell cocaine to one of the other guests and there was already a bench warrant outstanding on him for violating his probation on a previous offense.

It turns out that the Davises are a monumentally dysfunctional family even by SVU standards: they consist of Rick, Monica, Chloe, her stepbrother Tyler (Sam Cusson), and her seven-year-old half-brother Evan (Emmett Moss). Evan is the only direct offspring of both Rick and Monica; Chloe is Monica’s daughter by her previous partner (who’s in prison for a long stretch of his own) and Tyler is Rick’s son by his earlier wife. So Tyler and Chloe have one of those weird sort of relationships that is psychologically incestuous even though it isn’t literally (sort of like Victor Frankenstein and Elizabeth Lavenza in Mary Shelley’s original Frankenstein, who grew up together as virtual brother and sister even though they were not biologically related). What’s more, Tyler is literally a psychopath and Rick has been actively covering for him, intimidating the rest of the family into endorsing his evil. It turns out that Tyler was Chloe’s assailant, and he attacked her for revenge after another woman whom he was cruising at the wedding party turned him down. Prosecutor Dominic Carisi, Jr. (Peter Scanavino) has the problem of convincing the trial jury of this, particularly since Rick Davis was a quite persuasive witness for Tyler’s defense. Monica offers to break spousal privilege and testify for the prosecution about what’s really been going on in their household, but Carisi decides that she’s changed her story so often that she won’t be credible to the jury.

Instead he calls seven-year-old Evan, and after the usual rigmarole involving a child witness as to whether or not they will be “swearable” – whether they understand the difference between the truth and a lie well enough to comprehend the oath – Evan testifies. While his son is on the witness stand Rick stalks out of the courtroom, and that’s where Dick Wolf and Justine Ferrara end it. We don’t see the jury return a verdict either way, and we are left with a sense of dread as to just what’s going to happen to the other Davises after Evan broke Rick’s omertà about Tyler’s psychopathology. I’m guessing they’re setting us up for a sequel. The most remarkable aspect about this episode is Sam Cusson’s chilling performance as Tyler. He’s of medium height and has an angelic face reminiscent of the young David Cassidy (he’s close enough he’d be good casting for a biopic, especially if he could sing), and he projects just the right sort of affect (or lack thereof) I’ve seen in TV documentaries about real psychos. Incidentally this was the 599th episode of SVU, and afterwards they announced that Christopher Meloni is going to return for the 600th episode next week. That will be a treat, even though he’s become too old and grizzled to do much for me the way he did when he was on SVU for its first 12 seasons and I literally lusted after him (as, I suspect, did much of Gay male America; when he was on the show I used to joke that SVU had two different fan bases: Gay men who thought Christopher Meloni was hot and straight men who thought Mariska Hargitay was hot).