Members of an Elite Squad
by Scott Hardie on October 14, 2012
When I started watching Law & Order: Special Victims Unit a year ago (!!), I predicted that I would never write about its good episodes because it was a mediocre series. Along the way, it turned out to have plenty of mediocre hours and some lousy ones, but it had a lot more good or even great hours than I expected. I've just finished watching the series (through season 12 anyway -- that's where it runs out on Netflix streaming, and it's where Chris Meloni exited, so that seems like the best place to quit). After a year with this program, saying something about it after all would feel pretty good. Here are the ten episodes that I liked most. I would recommend any of them for someone looking just to sample the series.
"A Single Life" (1.2) - The pilot episode was pretty good, but when the first regular episode really knocked it out of the park, I had a feeling this series had the potential for greatness. A murder investigation drudges up long-forgotten family secrets that lead to an emotionally devastating confrontation. When the characters broke down crying, so did I.
"Countdown" (2.15) - The tension just keeps building and building in this chase for a molester who kills after 72 hours and has just abducted another little girl. The detectives work nonstop, fraying nerves even further. Weak by the standards of later episodes ("911" did even better by a similar premise), but one of the best hours of the early run, with a surprise casting choice for the molester.
"Fallacy" (4.21) - An overly twisty episode, and one of the many where the show's liberal politics played too big a hand, but what a heart-breaking story. When a woman kills a rapist in self-defense, the detectives discover prior abuse in her past and just keep peeling back more onion layers of how horrible life has been for her, and will continue to be. "Special" victims indeed.
"Poison" (5.24) - The legal system gets personal for ADA Novak when she is humiliated by a judge and begins digging into his past. The villainous judge was a little too evil and Tom Skeritt's performance a little too broad (all he needed was a cape and a long mustache to twirl), but still made for an interesting tangent to the show's usual caseload. The show repeated the same idea five years later with Swoosie Kurtz on the bench, but it wasn't as memorable as the first.
"Scavenger" (6.4) - It's a cliche that stretches suspension of disbelief: The killer leaves puzzles for the police to solve like he's a Batman villain. But this episode does it especially well, with mounting tension and the always creepy Doug Hutchison in a guest role, and the show is wise to denigrate the "puzzle master" rather than elevate him like a lesser (and less responsible) show would have.
"911" (7.3) - A young immigrant girl calls emergency services and is transferred to Det. Benson, who listens to her account of repeated rape and tries to keep her talking while the department locates her. Most of the episode is just their dialogue, as Benson's defining strength (her rapport with victims) is stretched to the limit. Some great performances (Mariska Hargitay won an Emmy) and some wild cinematography (for this show anyway) add up to a great hour. IMDb voters rate it the best of the series.
"Gone" (7.16) - Lots of good twists in this episode, which just keeps pulling the rug out from under the characters, especially ADA Novak, as if testing their will to go on. It's not an especially flashy or noteworthy episode, just a solid hour of entertainment with a great conclusion.
"Fight" (9.8) - Nobody liked poor Det. Lake, who only lasted one season and seemed to be despised by fans and producers alike, leading to his unflattering exit. But I thought the character had potential, and this episode proves it. I was deeply moved by the story of two brothers fingered for a crime solely because they're black and poor, and the final spoken line of dialogue is hilarious and tragic at the same time. Too bad the episode also featured one of the show's most irritating cliches, [spoiler alert] a suspect's sudden shooting in the precinct. It happens so often that it begs the question of why metal detectors aren't mandatory.
"Zebras" (10.22) - I wouldn't call this a good episode, but it was damn sure entertaining, as one ridiculous twist piled on another and the series dabbled with soap-opera insanity. Nick Stahl plays a delusional paranoiac (what a stretch) who seems to be targeting the SVU team and their associates for murder, but that's only the beginning. Crazy stuff. I'm not familiar with Homicide: Life on the Street, but apparently it was a casting coup to get Carol Kane to return as Richard Belzer's ex-wife for one more appearance.
"Behave" (12.3) - This episode has one of the cruelest rapists in whole series and one of the most sympathetic victims (played by Jennifer Love Hewitt), and is one gripping hour of TV. It also happens to feature a crossover with Law & Order: Los Angeles and an awkward "very special episode"-like discussion about unprocessed rape kits, Mariska Hargitay's personal cause, but those don't diminish the episode's considerable power.
The worst of the series is easily "Chat Room" (1.18), the only episode I couldn't bear to finish. Its depiction of the Internet is laughably off-base (sexual predators exchange "cyber bucks" that are untraceable? WTF?) and I just felt sorry for anyone who knew better and had to go through with filming this script. The series took enormous artistic license with its portrayal of technology in later years, such having the detectives hit a few keystrokes to make a big screen light up with animated blueprints of crime scenes they had only just visited for the first time, but I accepted this as a narrative shortcut to condense a complex case into 43 minutes and make it understandable for the audience. "Chat Room" felt like the work of a clueless hack who actually really believes that technology works like that.
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