S24.E05: Breakwater

[WendyCR72]

Airing October 27, 2022:

Quote

A young man asks the SVU for help when he suspects his boss is preying on his sister. Velasco tries to convince a reluctant witness to testify in court.

[Ms Blue Jay]

Me looking for posts 😄

[Xeliou66]

This was, for the most part, better than the previous episodes this season. The idea of the lifeguard trading sex for better training scores and as a result having unqualified lifeguards was unique and interesting, something that the show hadn’t done before and it was a different kind of plot that worked well.

Fin finally got some good scenes and was used well, and Velasco was really good also in this episode. Carisi had some good court scenes and legal material, and even Benson was better than usual, no one was worshipping her and she wasn’t doing everything. Rollins wasn’t in it much but I liked her scene with Fin at the start. And there was no personal soapy drama which was nice.

What was with the brief shitting on the DA’s office again, in the scene right after the arraignment? That’s such a pathetic, cheap plot device and I figured when Warren left that would end, especially since the Mothership is back. That made no sense and really irritated me, but fortunately after that brief dialogue it wasn’t mentioned again and Carisi did his job without interference and the trial scenes were solid.

I get tired of episodes where the perp is known from the beginning, but there were enough twists and a decent enough plot in this one to make it better than most modern day SVU episodes. This season hasn’t been good but this was an improvement, because of the more original plot, good use of each character with no one absent, plus all the things that weren’t there such as Benson worship and personal soapy shit. Now if they could only knock off the trashing of the DA’s office, that was my only major complaint about this one, and having a new SVU episode with only one major complaint is pretty good given how the show has declined in quality.

[illdoc]

So, let me get this straight....Mid-October, there's enough people swimming at the beach (in NY!) to have a couple of lifeguards (here in Chicago we only have lifeguards at the beach Memorial Day thru Labor Day), but July is the "off season" (the raped woman said that he had gotten her a lifeguard interview "the middle of last summer" when she lost her job and the defendant told her it was the "off season")???????. And why were they doing lifeguard qualifications in mid-October? Wouldn't it be better to do it closer to the "on season"? A lot could happen in 6 months (assuming the beach season would start in April)?

[nittany cougar]

The story was creepy. A lifeguard instructor intentionally drowning people makes no sense. No one noticed these suspicious drownings before?

I would love to know where they are going with Rollins and Carisi. I liked Finn's gift to Rollins. Rollins seemed in a better place mentally this episode. If she's getting better, why will she leave.

Mariska Hargitay looked really beautiful in this episode.

Edited October 28, 2022 by nittany cougar

[faithie]

4 hours ago, illdoc said:

So, let me get this straight....Mid-October, there's enough people swimming at the beach (in NY!) to have a couple of lifeguards (here in Chicago we only have lifeguards at the beach Memorial Day thru Labor Day), but July is the "off season" (the raped woman said that he had gotten her a lifeguard interview "the middle of last summer" when she lost her job and the defendant told her it was the "off season")???????. And why were they doing lifeguard qualifications in mid-October? Wouldn't it be better to do it closer to the "on season"? A lot could happen in 6 months (assuming the beach season would start in April)?

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.

[MaryHedwig]

Hudson has the best law school in the country? Is that why there are so many jokes about unscrupulous lawyers? 

[Iguessnot]

2 hours ago, nittany cougar said:

The story was creepy. A lifeguard instructor intentionally drowning people makes no sense. No one noticed these suspicious drownings before?

I would love to know where they are going with Rollins and Carisi. I liked Finn's gift to Rollins. Rollins seemed in a better place mentally this episode. If she's getting better, why will she leave.

Mariska Hargitay looked really beautiful in this episode.

He wasn't intentionally drowning them. But people drowned because the lifeguards he shoehorned into the job, weren't qualified, thus he was responsible. However, I thought maybe he had drugged the lifeguard who drowned. I didn't understand the order not to intervene unless he did something to ensure that the guy would drown.

I really liked the episode. Good acting, case work and court drama. When the guy (Diego?) announced he had been raped, I kind of smirked and said we sure won't be getting St. Olivia today. 

[illdoc]

27 minutes ago, Iguessnot said:

I didn't understand the order not to intervene unless he did something to ensure that the guy would drown.

They said that there was a riptide. Maybe he knew about it (he denied that at one point) and the lifeguards didn't. Riptides cause a lot of drowning.

[Iguessnot]

13 minutes ago, illdoc said:

They said that there was a riptide. Maybe he knew about it (he denied that at one point) and the lifeguards didn't. Riptides cause a lot of drowning.

Ahh, so just a lucky coincidence for the boss.

[wknt3]

The Good:
Fin is back! After a string of episodes where he was technically there, but either in a glorified cameo or badly misused or both, he actually got something worthwhile to do. We still could have used a little more, but this was at least not a total waste.
Velasco. He has developed nicely into the Carisi role of being a skilled and empathetic professional who shows that the writers CAN actually still write classic SVU characters and focus on inner turmoil and emotions without forgetting that they are supposed to be elite detectives.
Carisi. Some decent legal material this week. Including some good courtroom material. Plus one nice thing about Carisi as ADA is that the show doesn't try to depict him as the bad guy for seeing that they need to make an actual case beyond a reasonable doubt.
Muncy, and Rollins. Ordinarily I don't think they would merit a mention here, positive or negative, but after the rest of the season it was a blessed relief that we were not beaten over the head with clumsy scenes of new girl cluelessness or poorly realized PTSD.
The guest cast. As usual they keep finding much better actors than the scripts deserve. They mostly managed to sell it without going over the top wtih the possible exception of the chief testifying that he ordered the code red, although re-watching it seems that might be a matter of editing and sound mixing more than performance.

The Bad:
The script could have used another pass. There were a lot of points where things were a bit hard to follow and it felt lth ike something was cut out or they had never bothered to try to make their intentions reality. It was a good concept and I liked that they didn't jump right into murder or having the squad win through Benson persuading the original victim to testify or the perp to confess, but it just fell flat due to not wanting to take the time to actually do things right.

Overall this was inoffensive. B+ idea, C- script, A- performances and at least it was different from the previous episodes. It does feel like they are mostly marking time until either Mariska or NBC decides to put us our of misery. It's hard to muster much of a reaction to this, good or bad.

Edited October 29, 2022 by wknt3
fix typos

[DaynaPhile]

Mariska’s hair:positive. Kelli’s hair:negative. What on earth is going on with the one side being shaggy longer than the other?

oh yeah, there was a plot in there somewhere. If the guy was trading sex for scores and was blackmailing them about it, why did he still go ahead and qualify them resulting in beachgoer’s deaths? It’s like there were three things going on but he really only needed two. Whatever. Mariska is looking pretty. New hire always looks like she’s been crying. 

[slowpoked]

I think this was a solid episode. For me the plot twist was that the chief lifeguard sure didn’t discriminate for rape. He would assault anyone in exchange for the job. When the victims repeatedly said: “I thought he was only into guys..” or “I thought he was only into women…” I thought it was interesting - sometimes with serials, you only think they only like certain types. This certainly wasn’t a predator that they encounter regularly.

No personal drama too, which I like. Focused on the case, no personal crusades, etc. The squad all working together and got enough screentime. Enough investigation and also enough courtroom scenes. Hopefully more of these types of episode this season.

[Ms Blue Jay]

The plot was too convoluted for me.  Why would people who can't even swim, are nervous to go into the water, and unqualified to be lifeguards, be so desperate to be qualified that they would agree to this sexual assault quid pro quo?  There are other jobs you could take, why this particular job which is so specific and which only a certain type of person could do?  Why would you put yourself in charge of these peoples' lives?  I just think people desperate for work don't automatically jump to "lifeguard".  Why not work at a fucking coffee shop?  Perhaps I missed the explanation.

It would have been so much more believable if the Villain/Perpetrator was simply assaulting and grooming his students.  That's incredibly believable to me.  Once it got to the part of the plot where he was qualifiying unqualified lifeguards, and the victims were agreeing to this in exchange for being taken advantage of?  That's when it got soooooo weird.  So you get assaulted, AND you have to be a lifeguard in charge of people who you can't even save?  It's such a specific, high skills, specific personality type of job for this premise.

Was this Perpetrator some kind of hot shot/respected person in the community as well?  I also missed that explanation.

Edited October 29, 2022 by Ms Blue Jay

[hookedontv]

Noah wasn't in this episode so it was a win for me!

[gesundheit]

On 10/28/2022 at 2:51 PM, Iguessnot said:

He wasn't intentionally drowning them. But people drowned because the lifeguards he shoehorned into the job, weren't qualified, thus he was responsible. However, I thought maybe he had drugged the lifeguard who drowned. I didn't understand the order not to intervene unless he did something to ensure that the guy would drown.

I think it was more just like, "Fine by me if mother nature intervenes" rather than an intentional killing.

On 10/28/2022 at 11:57 PM, DaynaPhile said:

Mariska’s hair:positive. Kelli’s hair:negative. What on earth is going on with the one side being shaggy longer than the other?

THANK you. I do not understand this asymmetrical 'do at all! For a couple weeks I just thought that was the way it "fell," like the longer hairs were pushed behind her right shoulder, but nope. It's dramatically shorter on one side than the other.

The main thing that cracked me up in this episode was the defense attorney thinking he'd really done something there when he asked that one witness why he didn't care about the fudged scores prior to the DA offering him a deal. Yeah, and? He literally recorded proof of the fudged scores and the bad guy admitting he was qualified unqualified swimmers in exchange for sexual favors. Pointing out his own questionable motivation didn't undermine his proof at all! I was dying at the attorney's smug little "that's what I thought" moment. So what!

[CrystalBlue]

Re:  Amanda's Hair Care:  I noticed the chopped off higher on one side asymmetrical hairdo as well when she first appeared with it.  I don't know why Kelli got her hair done that way and I don't think it lends itself to a professional look in the world of law enforcement.

[tennisgurl]

This Baywatch remake is way darker than I expected it to be...

I thought this was a good episode, even if there were some things that could be a bit tighter. The amount of power this guy had seemed to be a bit ridiculous and I wish we had followed up a bit more with the girlfriend of Diego, but the case itself was interesting, the guest cast was great, and while we knew from the start who the bad guy was, there were still a lot of twists and turns. I really was surprised when poor Diego said that the guy had raped him, but in retrospect that makes total sense looking at the scene between him and the lifeguard creep, and them using his underqualified lifeguards not saving people to get him charged was an interesting way to take this kind of story. 

I was really glad to see more Fin at last, even if we could have used more of him in the back half. We also got some good scenes with Carisi and Velasco, especially Velasco, and minimal needless drama and lecturing. Of course, some of that lack of lecturing is because St. Olivia didn't take the lead on this one, which I saw coming as soon as Diego said that his boss raped him. Olivia only uses her victim voice and takes over cases because "victims are important damn it" when its an attractive woman as the main victim. 

I thought it was really interesting that two different people commented that they assumed that the guy only targeted men or women when he didn't target based on gender at all, most people assume that predators always have a gender preference. It seemed like another way this guy got away with this for so long, and its a decent lesson that most predators really don't care about the gender of their victims and you shouldn't make assumptions.