S26.E20 Shock Collar

[Xeliou66]

Episode description 

When a car with a young girl in the backseat is stolen, the SVU investigates whether it was a crime of opportunity or a targeted abduction.

[Diana Berry]

Good episode though quite depressing.  Actress portraying the mom was very good. 

[wknt3]

The Good:
We actually saw canvassing! And interviews with witnesses who weren't secretly perps or accessories! It's a May Day Miracle!

The direction was pretty good. There was a fair amount of action and location shoots and they did a good job of shooting it without needing a lot of quick cuts or heavy handed musical cues. This was a pretty pedestrian script, but it was very well executed despite the current shoestring budgets.

The Bad:
No Fin and no Bruno? I guess they didn't want anyone with the charisma to accidentally uspstage the Super Mommies. I miss the old days when even when they pulled this budget bullcrap on us they at least had the professionalism to give us a line of dialogue to explain why people weren't there for a big case.

Mariska's acting at the farm. When did she decide that they way to convey emotional depth and empathy was to make faces like she is experiencing gastrointestinal distress?

Carisi's role here seemed kind of pointless and rushed. The legal case took up less than 4 minutes of screen time and he added nothing that couldn't have been done by someone else during the investigation. Not even any Rollisi action of note. I'd rather have had her and Fin get some scenes together.

Overall this a perfectly cromulent episode. Nothing overly objectionable, but it also didn't do more than fill out the episode order. Hopefully next week will be something more than a blandly competent mix of SVU tropes.

[Xeliou66]

This should’ve been more compelling than it was, a race against the clock to rescue a kidnapped girl and two really evil sicko perps, but it was just kind of bland to me. Probably because of the lack of Fin and Bruno, big mistake to have both of them miss the same episode since they are the two most compelling characters on the squad, their absence kind of took me out of the episode, it was basically the Benson/Rollins super mommy hour and that just doesn’t appeal to me. It made no sense for Fin and Bruno to both be absent for an all hands on deck investigation, couldn’t they have missed earlier episodes where time wasn’t as crucial? Carisi’s role was minimal as well. The investigation was good and I liked how they tracked down the perps, who was amongst the most evil of modern SVU, but it was just a middle of the road episode, kind of bland and I attribute that mainly to the heavy dose of Benson and Rollins and everyone else taking a backseat. Not a bad episode by any means but not as compelling as it should’ve been.

[EtheltoTillie]

I call baloney on the bark identification expert. Come on. 

[MerBearHou]

4 hours ago, wknt3 said:

cromulent

A new word on me — I had to look it up and was delighted to learn that it was coined in just 1996 for a Simpsons episode, and it means “adequate”.  Thanks for the new vocab!

[preeya]

A multitude of dogs running and barking in the background, and St.Olivia yells, "Get the canine unit!"

It made me laugh 🤣

[Sake614]

13 hours ago, preeya said:

A multitude of dogs running and barking in the background, and St.Olivia yells, "Get the canine unit!"

It made me laugh 🤣

My first thought: you’ve got a whole kennel full of them. Take your pick! 🤣

this was a good but VERY disturbing episode. I’ve kind of become immune to the kiddie porn and alike, but damn this was something…extra. 

[MediaZone4K]

This episode was especially heinous. Early SVU level sick. At the very least no sexual abuse was involved.

Im glad this episode went beyond a typical rape, but it was still disturbing.

As much as I get tired of seeing Olivia's personal life, I appreciate seeing the pizza shop end with her, Rollins, and their children as a positive note.

I got confused and thought the husband of the perpetrator was the victims father. They looked alike.

Edited May 9 by MediaZone4K

[faithie]

As another poster mentioned, I was really thrown by the very strong resemblance between the kidnapped girl's father and the dog breeding perpetrator.  Did Wolf pull a fast one on the audience?

I know it's fiction but I was annoyed by the mom seeming to know little to nothing about the father of her child.  So in an emergency, Dylan goes silent for a day - does Dylan have a mom? Dad? Brother? Sister? Grandmom?  Friends? It seemed unbelievable that Mom had no one else to call to track down this man.  If the mother of my children went silent, I have a list of four people to call right off the top of my head.

[tennisgurl]

That felt very old school in a way that a case will start off as something that seems pretty routine, like a possible custody abduction, and then halfway through turns into something utterly batshit crazy. I think that with a big more urgency this could have been a classic, especially with such fucked up villains, but it turned out to be "just" pretty good and not great. 

That couple was next level fucked up, especially the deranged wife/mom, even by this shows standards they were monsters. Their poor daughter, at least they saved the other girl in time, hopefully that kid gets a whole lot of therapy after this whole mess.

The guest cast was all really good, especially the mom, although I was also taken aback by how much the dad looked like the dog trainer creep, I kept waiting to find out that he was his cousin or brother or something and that's how they met but I guess it was just a weird coincidence. 

I like that they actually got to do some canvasing and talked to some people who really didn't have anything to do with the case, I especially liked the one guy was was like "I'm actually into guys, so..." when they kept trying to ask about women he could be living with. 

No Fin and Bruno, which felt really weird considering this was supposed to be this big time crunch, its one of those things that kept this episode from being as good as it could have been. I would have rather had them than Rollins, it was so silly watching the show try to make her look like some kind of Criminal Minds style profiling genius, as if her brilliant deductions of "this lady is probably sadistic" and "she likes dogs" aren't the most obvious things in the world to gather. 

[Zaffy]

That was actually a good episode even, as others here have already mentioned, quite disturbing.

I am still not sure what on earth Rollins is supposed to be doing, she is some kind of a profiler?

 

[GiandujaPie]

On 5/4/2025 at 6:31 PM, faithie said:

As another poster mentioned, I was really thrown by the very strong resemblance between the kidnapped girl's father and the dog breeding perpetrator.  Did Wolf pull a fast one on the audience?

I know it's fiction but I was annoyed by the mom seeming to know little to nothing about the father of her child.  So in an emergency, Dylan goes silent for a day - does Dylan have a mom? Dad? Brother? Sister? Grandmom?  Friends? It seemed unbelievable that Mom had no one else to call to track down this man.  If the mother of my children went silent, I have a list of four people to call right off the top of my head.

I too was wondering why she didn't have any other paternal family members to contact when they couldn't get a hold of the father. A lot of times even if the dad isn't that involved, there are paternal grandparents around. Then we find out the father is a "trust fund kid" so why wasn't the mom getting adequate child support to pay for childcare???

[MediaZone4K]

On 5/6/2025 at 9:06 AM, Zaffy said:

That was actually a good episode even, as others here have already mentioned, quite disturbing.

I am still not sure what on earth Rollins is supposed to be doing, she is some kind of a profiler?

 

I'm still confused why Rollins was removed from SVU as a series regular if she's just going to be on as a guest all the time. From my understanding it was not Kelly Giddish's choice to be demoted.