Law & Order: Special Victims Unit/Fridge

Fridge Logic

• This often tends to crop up when things deemed unnecessary to the flow of the story are ignored by the writers. For example, it is never explained where a fifteen year-old boy who had slept with dozens of hookers was getting the money for the high-priced call girls he was seeking out.
• Tempered by occasional Fridge Brilliance and Shown Their Work. For example, what was the name of the radical group in the season 10 episode "Transitions"? Children of Ariel. Many transgendered children, especially mtf children, express an affinity for mermaids.
  • Didn't Ariel want to have one more thing coming out from her waist?
• Elliot Stabler frequently bends or outright breaks the law to torture suspects (who more often than not turn out to be innocent and are often killed as a result of this), but for some reason the only thing that's brought up to internal affairs is the fact that he sometimes wishes rapists would die.
  • Quite possibly because if his crossing the Moral Event Horizon in that manner did come to their attention, he would be fired. Assuming, of course, one believes there are actually decent people in this Crapsack World who would care about that...

Fridge Brilliance

• One episode of Law and Order SVU goes like this: Benson and Stabler suspect a recently-released ex-con that Stabler put away some time back for a series of rapes. For the first half of the episode, Stabler hassles the guy while looking for evidence to connect the dots. Finally, the suspect is found dead of a heroin overdose - just as they get word of another rape and attempted murder which had been committed while the guy was a corpse. After Stabler angsts for a bit, the second half starts up with Fin Tutuola going to meet and informant who gives them a lead on the real culprit. It was only after several viewings that I realized the episode was a Take That against Stabler, and a Deconstruction of the show's own abuse of It's Personal. During the first half, Stabler does his typical Rabid Cop routine and fixates on this one guy he had a personal history with, convinced he must be their man. Meanwhile, Tutuola was offscreen, slowly cracking the case by doing his job. - Bellos The Mighty
  • Oh, and on the subject of Take That moments, Dani Beck's existence makes a lot more sense when you realize she is essentially the manifestation of everything fans - especially Benson/Stabler shippers - complained Olivia Benson should be. Be Careful What You Wish For, fanboys. –Bellos The Mighty
  • Something that's always bothered me about the show is Benson and Stabler having the habit of jumping into cases that aren't theirs, especially when the FBI are involved; there have been several episodes where the victim or suspected perp are involved with an FBI investigation, and they either jump in or treat the FBI as the bad guys for not assisting their case. It took me a while to notice, but it's actually the opposite! 9 times out of 10, Benson and Stabler's interfering actually makes things much worse. In the episode where reoccurring agent Dana/Starr was raped, they went into such a frenzy assuming (incorrectly) she was in trouble/over her head/kidnapped after seeing her willingly enter a car that they indirectly caused several deaths (by being so obvious in their policework and frightening the baddies) and almost ruined months of undercover work. In another episode with a rapist in the witness protection program, if they had been content to let the FBI handle it, a shootout with the mafia that killed a dozen people would have been avoided — not to mention the deaths of both the rapist and his father. Even the first episode with Dana has shades of this — the detectives got so caught up on the (totally unrelated to the case) white supremacy angle that it prompted a court shooting and blew Dana's cover, even if Dana was able to finish her job without incident that time (and they didn't know she was undercover until the end — still managed to almost ruin her case though!). There's no way this is an accident since it keeps happening; the show is very subtly showing either a Deconstruction of what really happens when you jump into a case over your heads... or an outright Take That at the assumption time and time again that only the SVU detectives can solve the case. - No Account (Yet)