faithie

As another poster mentioned, having brand-new stepmom so heavily invested in this case rang a false note So an adult male took a picture of two strangers embracing in a pool and sent it to his girlfriend? Who writes these scripts. Bruno carries around a deep dark secret for 25 years and of course he confides in Olivia the Victim Whisperer. The entire conversation was highly unrealistic.

So if I randomly walk into a big city police station to report a crime, a person with the rank of captain will stop what she's doing and come over to ask if I need help? Even though there's already an intake officer at the desk? And this captain will not only give me her business card, but when I call she will personally drop everything to run to my house instead of just sending a couple of patrol cops? I know that Wolf's objective is to center MH whenever possible, but you can't have it both ways: if you want to center her, you can't also promote her to a position in which it's highly unlikely she's personally doing all this legwork.

Somebody already mentioned two recent Colombian immigrants not having accents. To add insult to that injury, the writers had a guy who just landed in this country refer to his attackers as a "couple of meatheads from Jersey". How would he have learned that kind of informal local language so quickly? The writing seems to get worse every year. But my crush on MH keeps me coming back.

I've come to realize that Reyes and Velasco from SVU are essentially the same guy. You could switch actors and barely notice. Brooding, short-tempered Latino with a sketchy adolescence that seems less than law-abiding. Impulsive behavior lands him on desk duty.

A bunch of college kids keeping score of their sexual encounters? Extremely plausible. The kids collecting DNA samples and keeping vials in a Hi-Tech lab? Preposterous.

The only people at Kathy's funeral were Elliott, the kids and of course, St. Olivia. I guess Kathy was an orphan? I was waiting forvo e of the kids to ask Olivia: why the hell are you here?

I'm hoping it's revealed that the kidnapper "George" is actually William Lewis, who's secretly working in Rob Miller's sex doll factory. The cliffhanger certainly leaves the door open for an OC crossover, with Stabler going undercover as a doll purchaser and Bell looking chronically constipated. And the voiceover narration was brutal.

Is there anything to Bell making goo goo eyes with the female Chinese detective? It was clear from the dialogue that they have a lot in common. (Very attractive lesbian cops who lost their marriage to the demands of the job)

As a huge fan of the early seasons, this season so far is a bit too convoluted and boring. There are too many characters with too many storylines - earlier seasons were easier to follow. Anyhow, I've already invested the time so I will watch the second set of episodes in March. The commenters who notice that Rhys never interacts with any other characters are probably on to something - the guy may not exist outside of Joe's fevered imagination. Who knows who locked Joe and Roald in the dungeon and set the fire? Can Joe go back to the dingy streets of New York and his job as a bookstore clerk?

When Reyes spoke to the CI, she did mention his wife being her niece. For a minute I thought Wolf was desperately trying to save money on casting: the actor playing the prisoner looks a lot like the actor playing Capt. Duarte on SVU. What was the point of red leather coat lady? For the second time this season, Stabler has mildly flirtatious interaction with a woman who strongly resembles Benson but is not actually Benson. (Remember the pointless Italian lady?) Why?

A couple of posters made an excellent point: a serial rapist attacking vulnerable deaf women could have been a strong stand-alone episode. Instead it got mixed into a this jumbled mess. When do we find out that Oscar Pabo secretly works for one of the following: Rob Miller Richard Wheatley William Lewis

When is Noah being sent to boarding school? There are several in Northern New England hours away from NYC. Thanks to those who clarified the graffiti scene. I had no clue what was going on. I had forgotten about the subway attack. I think the best therapy for disappointed longtime fans is to watch really old reruns on the Ion Network. You get a glimpse of an excellent ensemble drama, before it turned into the beatification of St. Olivia of Manhattan.

When did NYPD stop carrying radios and start relying solely on mass market cell phones? An absolute train wreck of an episode. Time to drop the casino owner storyline. There's just nothing there. Maybe I'm wrong but wasn't the actor playing the lead hit man the same actor who played one of the leaders of the Albanian gang?

The pendulum has swung wildly from being way too focused on one character (Wheatley) to being a disorganized mess. Now they're all over the place to the point of being incoherent. It seems that somebody in the writer's room woke up one day and realized "this casino developer story is very thin and kind of boring so we can't build entire episodes around it". And for the love of God, I hope we've seen the last of that annoying Italian detective. It's almost as if the writers said "if we bring Olivia on for crossover, a lot of fans get alienated - so let's bring on a female detective who kind of looks like Olivia". Fights with the police bureaucracy have always been among the weakest parts of the entire franchise. Twenty years ago I was ready to click off when Lt. Van Buren started yammering about her lawsuit against the Department management.

SVU had something like this just a couple weeks ago. Not one but TWO adult women confessed to murdering their kidnapper in order to protect a little girl - (she looked about 10-11 years old).

congratulations - you were able to follow this awful plot much closer than I was. this was about as realistic as those Marvel movies. a boss trading sex for jobs/promotions? sure that part was believable. But prosecutors being able to connect the unqualified lifeguards to 10 drownings was preposterous unless each case was like the one where the lifeguard was specifically instructed to leave his colleague in the water. absolutely dreadful from start to finish. the only thing that would have made it worse was Olivia walking down the street with Noah and she bumps into William Lewis AND Richard Wheatley.

Is it true that millennials are a key demographic for any Law & Order show? Given the literally hundreds of options out there via cable and streaming, I find that very hard to believe but I could be wrong as I don't have any statistics.

Like a couple others have mentioned I immediately knew "Stonewall" but had no clue if it was called the Stonewall Inn/Bar/Restaurant/Tavern etc. Does anyone know for sure if "Stonewall" would have been acceptable?

I hope my daughter never gets a cushy corporate job in a fancy NYC office building. Those places are absolute rape factories. I attended college with a load of upper middle class white males from the NYC metro area. I'm trying to understand why not a single one is in jail for sexual assault.

Is it safe to presume that Richard Wheatley is a Hudson alumnus?

I was going to commend Wolf for courage for depicting inner city black drug dealers as the bad guys. In 2021 it's so easy to get accused of racism for any "negative representation" that it's understandable when creatives just shy away from it. But then I had to temper my enthusiasm when I realized the "real" bad guys are Denis Leary and his mostly white band of dirty cops. The black drug dealers are just a conduit.

It's not fair but some actors can never outlive one iconic role. It's hard to buy Bubba the shrimp guy as a murderous thug. Everytime he's onscreen all I can think is fried shrimp...boiled shrimp...gumbo shrimp...shrimp cocktail

I guess I'll join the chorus and express my extreme disappointment that Wolf left the door open for the return of Wheatley. I didn't think any character arc could be worse than William Lewis but but I was wrong. Someone mentioned the James Cromwell character: his reaction to the break-in was confusing since he was apparently in on the scheme. My guess is this - as far as he knew, he was paid only to infiltrate the family to gather intelligence on Stabler's whereabouts and mood. But Cromwell was NOT told that there would be a violent kidnapping, so he was genuinely surprised by the break-in and instinctively acted to protect the mom, for whom he had developed feelings. If anybody has a better explanation, I'm all ears.

So this convoluted episode was a mixture of Chris Cuomo (famous media guy accused of sexual misconduct against a colleague at an event where the colleague's husband is present) and Joe Rogan (the media guy is a loud, polarizing podcaster who likes wearing t-shirts). As others stated earlier, the backstory of the media guy being a former lawyer was very poorly executed - it didn't fit at all with the character and did seem like it was a last minute addition to the writer's room. Was it intentional that both SVU and OC contained a shocking gunshot murder caught on video (Wheatley killed his son in front of a bunch of cops, politicians, emergency management personnel)?

I generally hate SVU diversions into family/personal lives. But I would love to see Carisi's mom and/or nonna come barging into his office, grab him by the ear and ask why he picked such a trainwreck for a girlfriend. Ideally, this would occur right after Carisi finds out Rollins cheated on him while he was babysitting HER kids.