Law & Order: Special Victims Unit/Headscratchers

Huang's been in the show for how long and what do we know about him?

I was doing a report on Asian characters in the media and while doing a write up on George Huang I realized reading his wiki page there's probably more information about some reoccurring cast members then him, a main cast member. What do we know about him in general? He's a FBI psychologist, speaks Mandarin Chinese, a firm believer in human rights and earlier in his career he worked as a counselor for sex offenders. For awhile the only things we knew about his private life was he had a sister and grew up in a strictly traditional home (which just seemed like a ham-handed attempt at character development). Sooo...what have we got after how seasons since he first showed up? He's gay. And it's just kind of another thrown in line like Serena Southerlyn "Is this because I'm a lesbian?" (Granted there was the whole-is-he-isn't-he? going on for awhile opposed to her suddenly!LESBIAN)

• This Tropette is annoyed by it too. If NOTHING else, this is a chance to score huge points with the LGBT community who want an actual gay relationship on the show, and instead they just pretend it never happened so they don't have to expand on it. Very frustrating indeed, especially considering all the storylines Benson and Stabler got.
• I don't really mind the lack of expansion regarding his sexuality, as it's nice to see a show treat it as being entirely incidental rather than making a huge deal out of it. However, the absence of character develop is rather annoying.
  • It doesn't need expansion. He's an FBI Pyschologist. He's also asian and homosexual, but that doesn't define him (nor should it have to). They are under no obligation to "score points" with any community and if people are frustrated by it, that is their problem and has nothing to do with the actors on the show or the creators of the show. He's also a recurring character in a series highly focused on ignoring people's personal lives...it's a headscratcher as to why someone would think this is a headscratcher.
    • We know more about Melinda Warner and she start the same season as Huang. It would've been nice to have expanded a little on his character before B.D. Wong left the show after ten seasons. It's not about appeasing the LGBT or minority community, it's about wanting to have gotten to *known* a character we've watched for so long better. We hardly knew Dr. George Huang; personally or emotionally. This could've easily been done in just one episode that focused on his past as a former sex offender counselor and the detectives were investigating one of his former patients (which I think would've had a lot more potential that another 'ripped from the headlines' episode). And I have to disagree on what you say about the show being about ignoring people's personal lives. Look at how deeply the detectives must go into the victims', sometimes even the perps', personal lives investigating a case. If you're referring to the detectives' themselves, while the episodes may be spread out, there's plenty of them that deal with the personal lives and sometimes even the emotional issues (Rage- Elliot, Inheritance - Olivia) of the detectives.
    • But the show really doesn't ignore people's personal lives. We've met Stabler's family many times, Benson and Cabot have both been seen going out on dates, we've met Fin's son, and we've seen Dr. Warner dressed up for a date with her husband. The fact that Huang very rarely gets even a tiny throwaway moment like this is an Unfortunate Implications cocktail of Hide Your Gays mixed with Inscrutable Oriental.
    • ^This. It feels exactly like hide your gays.
    • The show should ignore personal lives, though. I could not physically give less of a shit about Stabler's family or Olivia's mommy issues. Huang is the Only Sane Man on the show. Delving into personal drama for him is the perfect formula for destroying that.

When will there ever be a good Male Military person?

Lets look back, There is an hero astronaut who killed his crew mate so he could go up in space, there is the doctors drugging war vets into suicide, and it makes the Military Sexual Harassment policy look like it was designed to get female service members raped. The writers obviously do not know how much sexual harassment is pounded into new recruits heads while the're at boot camp, and in job training, and every time they change locations AND every few months. This Troper is tired of being labeled a drug peddling rapist just for having to salute the flag.

• Well there was the one episode where the Female solider went AWOL after being raped. and One of her Squad mates Not only tracked her down to try to bring her back for help. and tracked her attacker Down to bring about justice and Risked his Career even to the point of almost being court martialed. He went a little over-board with guilt he couldn't help her. I think that counts even a little.
  • Presumably the war vets and the killed crew mate were decent people. Really, most of the people who appear on such shows are killers or victims.

In "Transitions" How come when there is a man bleeding from his groin lying on the hospital bed with a fake fingernail EMBEDDED in his back, Benson automatically assumes that he is the perp?!

I mean he is nearly dead from blood loss in terrible shape and unconscious and Benson believes that he got it cause he got rough with a stripper and she put him in his place, I mean if it was a woman lying there it would have been a completely different story, she would have stayed up all night to catch the attacker and would make runs to the hospital so she could be there when the victim awoke, but no if he's got male genitalia he is the monster who got what he deserved.

• Benson showing bias against males? What else is new? Seriously, the more I watch, the more I'm find myself liking her less and less due to her borderline Misandry. (The earliest of this, as far as I can remember, is in "Pique" ^[1]) Makes you wonder if her Near-Rape Experience may have something to do with her behavior as of late.

Is it just me, or is the show inconsistent on the whole issue of occasionally locking up or charging victims? This comes up when a victim won't cooperate with an investigation by lying or withholding evidence. The victim is charged and then offered a plea bargain wherein they cooperate in exchange for having the charges dropped.

For example, there was one episode where a woman who described having been attacked by an unknown man on the street turned out to to have been a victim of domestic violence of a very severe nature. In spite of this, the team could not get her to cooperate in staying at a safe house or enforcing a restraining order, and so she went back to her husband who stabbed her in her heart that very same night of her going back to him. They could have arrested her on filing a false police report, but someone (Cragen, I believe) came out very strongly against it. However, I have seen them do this in other episodes, one of which involved a 15-year-old girl who had been raped and later beaten, somehow in connection with nude photos of herself that she'd taken and sent using her cell phone.

• I admit that the latter example is a poor one, since it involved a corrupt judge who wanted to send said girl to juvenile lock-up for possession and distribution of child pornography, i.e. pictures she'd taken of herself. But I know that there have been others where they locked up the victim for noncompliance in their investigation.
  • A good example is the episode where they were after the guy who attacked the same women repeatedly in order to try to get them pregnant. They arrested one of his victims who had actually become pregnant by him in order to get her to admit what had happened and consent to having genetic testing done so they could prove that their suspect was the perp. She'd reported the first rape but not the subsequent ones because she didn't want her husband to know that the baby was the rapist's, and not his, so they charged her with obstruction.
• Adding to the confusion, the same issue has come up in at least one episode of Law and Order as well.
• I agree, the show is inconsistent on this issue. But then again, it's a complicated question that people are prone to disagree on, and the writers of L&O are no exception. In a way it's an unintentional stroke of genius because it mirrors reality so well. In real life people don't form one opinion and stick to it forever. They rationalize, they deconstruct, and they waffle. In fiction we call that being Out of Character, but in real life it happens all the time.

Did anyone else get really really pissed when Oliva was almost raped?

Maybe I've been jaded by comic books, but it felt like a half-assed attempt to make her DEEEEEEEEEEEEP. It just rang with some unfortunate implications with me. "Is your female lead running out of plot-steam? HAVE HER RAPED/ALMOST RAPED!"

• To be fair, she works in the Special Victims Unit, which means she deals with sexual predators on an almost daily basis, putting herself out in the field against sexually violent and aggressive individuals -- this is one of the few cases where it would be surprising if she never had a Near-Rape Experience.

In "Alien", an 8-year-old girl stabbed a 12-year-old boy with scissors. They played up the fact that he was harassing her for having lesbian parents. The reasoning was that her response (stabbing) was violently disproportionate to the stimulus (harassment) and used this to charge her, stick her in jail, and claim that she's violent. However, at one point during the investigation, it also came to light that the stabbing "victim" had grabbed her, tried to kiss her, then cut her hair off. Apparently she managed to wrestle the scissors from him and used them to stab him. Far be it from me to question the impeccable legal logic of a Law & Order episode, but that kind of sounds like self-defense against a sexual assault.

• What episode did you watch? There was no sexual assault. He attacked a girl with scissors and called her a dike, and she finally retalliated. And the show portrays her in a sympathetic light; it's the prosecutors who force the detectives to arrest her and claim she's violent.
  • Watch closely; her statement is exactly as I said. He grabbed her and tried to kiss her, before yanking back her hair and cutting it off. Grabbing somebody and trying to kiss them is sexual assault. (Had he only grabbed her, then it would have been merely assault.) Now, the weapon she used was the same pair of scissors that he used to cut her hair; she struggled with him to get the scissors and then attacked him with them in self defense.
    • So, little boys trying to kiss little girls is sexual assault now? When I was a kid, we called that "recess".
    • It's sad how things have changed. Still, you have to wonder if it would be sexual assault if the shoe was on the other foot.
    • Look, if a boy I hated called me a dyke, grabbed me, kissed me, still tried to grab me and cut my hair off, I'd call sexual assault. Especially if they made reference to it before.
  • No, I have seen that episode recently. You got everything right except the sexual assault part that never happened.
    • Many people would argue that that constitutes sexual assault. Children younger than 12 have been charged with sexual assault for far less serious acts.
  • And she never wrestled the scissors from him, him cutting her ponytail off and her stabbing him where a few days apart.
• Did everyone miss the comment he made that was something like "I'll make sure she's really a girl?" That's pretty damn rapey to me.
  • Exactly. He makes a remark like that, tries to kiss her, she pushes him away, then he cuts off her hair to "make her look like a dyke." And before and after that encounter he was sending her emails in which he threatened to force some kind of sexual activity on her in order to make her straight. There is a difference between a little boy trying to kiss the girl he likes and what this kid was doing.
• Yeah, I really don't remember the sexual assault part. Maybe I'm just not remembering things correctly, but I could've sworn that all the boy did was constantly bullying the girl for having gay parents and eventually cut her hair. Then I remember the girl finally snapping and taking the scissors used to cut her hair and then stabbing the kid. This stuff about a forced kiss is news to me. Did the episode only make a very brief mention of it or something?
  • Just because you don't remember it doesn't mean it wasn't there. It was actually a very big part of the episode.
  • You seem to not understand the difference between "I don't remember this happening. Perhaps I'm remembering things incorrectly." and "I don't remember this, so that means it didn't happen."
  • It happened. I watched the episode just last night - the boy DID try to kiss her. She claimed not to be a lesbian, and the boy said, "Prove it." Then went for a kiss.
    • He also made an implied rape threat to her in an email, were he threatened to 'cure her from being a queer'.

Our 'Shocking Swerve' entry refers to an episode where Elliot puts a guy away in Rikers, then after that guy is exonerated by someone else who confesses, the real perp dies. The ADA tells them they can't get the guy out now because the real perp isn't available to confess. But in 'Criminal', the exact same case arises: they put a guy away, and it turns out he's innocent; the difference is that once they figure out who the real perp is, they get the guy out almost immediately. Wat?

• Two possible explanations come to mind; however, I imagine this was just an oversight on the part of the writers:
  • I can't remember that one ref'd in Shocking Swerve, but it could have been that the only evidence implicating the real perp was his willingness to confess. Maybe they hadn't yet contracted a confession from him and had no evidence besides that? Still, it seems a bit weak.
  • They couldn't free the wrongfully convicted man based on the advice of that ADA who had a lot more friction with the main cast and who eventually lost her job for showing up to court drunk. When they successfully freed the guy in "Criminal", Novak was the ADA. Could be that the former ADA just didn't care enough to get thing moving.
    • They had forensic evidence in addition to the confession in "Criminal"; in "Shocking Swerve," all that had happened was that Stabler had personal knowledge of another person's guilt. He arranged for the guilty person to make a formal confession, but he had not yet done so. Once he died, the only evidence of his guilt was Stabler's say-so. The confession was on tape, but it was an audiotape, not a videotape, and had not been authenticated, which is to say, the person making the confession had not signed a notarized paper acknowledging that it was he on the tape, or otherwise signed a transcription of the confession. The big deal for Stabler in "Shocking Swerve" is that he jumped the gun in telling the innocent person he would be released, before his release was in any way secured. It might seem as though in the other episode the prisoner was out "almost immediately," but that has more to do with the way the show compresses time, and omits or expands scenes or details for dramatic reasons.

Do the writers really expect the audience to think of Stabler and Benson as professional and respectable cops?

• Why not? Being professional doesn't mean not having feelings. Imagine if they didn't actually have that flaw... I'm already hearing cries of "MARY SUE!"
  • Having feelings is not the problem, the constant rule breaking and assault is, I know they try and justify it by saying I Did What I Had to Do, but doing stuff like physically attacking a kid that had gotten in a fight with the detectives son and groping the genitalia of a male suspect during interrogation to get him to confess, are not the things professional and respectable cops do
    • Agreed, the problem for me is that there are never any long-term repercussions for all of their clearly illegal actions. The cops in this show have probably broken the law more times than all of their suspects combined. Immunity to firing is not a very believable form of Plot Armor.
    • Not to mention freakin' STALKING rape victims until they finally agree to file a report. That, or stalking suspects with little to no real evidence beyond a "gut feeling". Olivia is the absolute worst for this.
• First of all, they want them to be emotional human beings that the average joe can relate to. Secondly, they want to evoke all the emotions that rape usually evokes in people. So the main characters have to react strongly to that, probably more so than is realistic for actual cops. And thirdly, going against the rules is such a staple (no pun intended) of cop shows, it's pretty much unavoidable. Especially if the show loves its open ends and some gray/gray morality. So I think they want us to think about the dilemma and emotional torment that goes with having to watch intense violence every day and sometimes being kept from solving problems the easy way by "those stupid rules" (aka the law...).

In 'Baggage', a serial rapist was caught in the act of attempting to hog-tie a woman in what turned out to be a police sting. But because they couldn't indisputably connect him with the earlier crimes, they had to let him walk. Um, what? Didn't they just catch him in a sting with clear intent to commit rape?

• That episode had quite a few problems; I wrote a small rant about their treatment of a suspect which included a large amount of Police Brutality and denying him a lawyer and resulted in the poor man committing suicide instead spending more time with SVU. Other things include being uncooperative with the detective that had been working the case for six month because they thought he would take all the glory for it, finding killer by finding his sisters dna in a non criminal database, and that they finally convicted him by saying that the victim used more electricity than usual that day proved he used a kilm to set her on fire.
• From what I remember, the guy opened the window or something so the victims body would decompose slightly faster and make it seem like she was killed on a day he was visiting his mom. The judge then said if they couldn't prove he wasn't at his moms house, she'd dismiss the entire case against him.
  • Actually, victim's body was left in her own ceramics studio which contained a kiln. The perp activated the kiln to heat the room, thereby quickening decomposition, which had the effect of making it seem like she'd been killed a couple days earlier. But he also knew that the CSU and ME would be able to compensate for the effects of the kiln in their analysis if they happened to walk in while the room was still very hot, so he went back later to shut down the kiln; he opened the window to release the heat. The more ya know!

Did Olivia or Melanie shoot Abraham in "Charisma"?

• Melanie did. I can see why you'd be confused because of the camera angle, but based on their reactions, and Melanie's dialogue explaining why she pulled the trigger at that particular moment, it's apparent that it's Melanie who fired the shot. That takes a careful viewing, though, because the camera isn't on Melanie when she does it.
  • I thought they intentionally tried to confuse you but ultimately it was supposed to be Melanie, except Olivia grabbed the gun by the barrel afterwards before tossing it aside. Shouldn't it have been hot to the touch if it was just fired?
    • Actually, given the situation, a little heat (or even hand burn) isn't the problem she'd be focused on.

Seriously, why hasn't Cragen transferred Stabler and Benson out of SVU by now?

Yeah, we know the "real" reason, but in-story it makes no sense that Cragen would keep two ticking time bombs like them on the roster. ESPECIALLY Elliot "Punch first and ask questions when forced" Stabler.

• Who else is going to want their job? Not the most comfortable unit to work in. "Honey, today a man cut a baby out of his wife's stomach. Pass the gravy."
• Olivia is at least somewhat stable. Elliot is going to snap any day now and either turn into a pedophile himself, a murderer, or both.
  • ELLIOT a pedophile? I expect him to spontaneously combust and regenerate from his own ashes before that happens.
    • Yeah. My money is he's going to come across a kiddy porn racket, then beat someone or a lot of people to death. But turn into a paedophile? No.
    • Personally I'd like to see them switch up the casts, without removing characters. Move Stabler and Benson to the main Law
  • This troper actually stopped watching SVU because Stabler is such a Jerkass now; I'm not up on recent events, but I agree that if he doesn't do something, he basically has Falling Down in his future.
  • Elliot's obvious instability aside, The Other Wiki lists his case completion rate at 97 percent. That may have something to do about it. And lets remember every character on that show has serious issues, Cragen included. Elliot may remind him of himself at his lowest point, and he figures he can keep Ellot under control. Maybe.
    • Do I get a special version of SVU on my TV or something? Stabler has issues from time to time, but is hardly the drooling psychopath he's made out to be on this wiki.
      • This is the internet. People Accentuate the Negative.
        • He's clearly stated in-universe to be having anger-management and stability issues, precisely because he's been in SVU for five or six times as long as the average detective.
          • Olivia at least got a bit of break when she was seconded out to the FBI, Elliot really needs some time in another unit before he goes nutso-psycho bananas. Send him out to the PR dept to do talks at schools or community events where he is forced tot al about the upside of policing for a couple of days each week at least.
            • ???
            • PROFIT!
    • It may have something to do with the fact that Elliot and Olivia are the SVU's best detectives, according to both their case completion rates and at LEAST one psychiatrist who spoke to Cragen after their psychological reviews.

Why hasn't anyone used Elliot as a murder weapon yet?

• Seriously, they'd just have to pay a few small children to slander their victim, make him think a small child's been left alone with said victim and let Stabler lose his temper.
  • The reason they haven't done that is because Elliot Stabler is not a moron. He's a New York City police detective with a >90% case closure rate. He is not, by any definition, someone who can be easily fooled.
  • He's been shown to consider a suspect guilty on a lot less evidence. Besides, he's been getting crazier and crazier as th show goes on (and I mean Dr. Stein Crazy, not the funny kind)
    • Considering a suspect guilty and marching off to kill said suspect are two different things.
    • If the guy being framed had a Big Secret and was trying to hide it Elliot would not hold back attacking him and he would kill him if he thought the guy was reaching for something
      • Because he's one detective in one precinct in New York City. The fans of the show may be very familiar with him, but most people in New York are not.

Why did no one notice that Rebecca Hendrix is the World's Most Incompetent Shrink?

• In "Contagious", an innocent man's life is ruined, and it never seems to occur to anyone that IT IS HENDRIX'S FAULT. She's the one who browbeat a terrified nine-year-old child into making a false accusation. Into naming someone, anyone, JUST TO SHUT HENDRIX UP. And later she seems genuinely surprised to learn that a molestation victim might actually give a false answer just to put an end to the constant, endless, intolerable verbal pounding of "Who did this to you? You have to tell us! Say who did it!"
  • Truth in Television. Raymond Buckey's life was ruined after he spent five years in prison just awaiting trial because a therapist named Kee MacFarlane, who wasn't even a psychiatrist or a psychology Ph.D, browbeat a group of children into claiming he had molested them, and the kicker was that these children had not even been molested by anyone. MacFarlane just decided they had been, because a few of them fit her definition of children with post-molestation trauma, something she made up after no research, and the rest of the children happened to go to school with the first few children. It was the school where Buckey worked, but many of the children who claimed he molested them (and forced them to drink blood in satanic rituals, eat excrement, killed animals in front of them, and fed them to lions that lived under the preschool, the list goes on) went to the school before Buckey worked there. Basically, MacFarlane refused to stop questioning the children until they told her what she wanted to hear.
  • Then, there's the story of the teenagers who confessed to raping and beating almost to death a woman in Central Park ("The Central Park Jogger"), after hours and hours of questioning, because they just wanted to go home, and didn't really understand the finality of their confession, since it wasn't actually true.
  • And Another Thing Why was Hendrix interviewing Elliot and Olivia to see if they should continue working together? Surely, Cragen would have plumped for someone more impartial and more competent.
• Not to mention in the episode with the twins, where she immediately diagnoses one of them as paranoid and emotionally disturbed after less than five minutes into his interrogation, because he was being accused of something he really didn't do and got upset over it. The whole blurting out that they're both boys thing is just the icing on the cake. And on top of that, how did she not know that identical twins are always the same sex to begin with?

When did the show become "Stabler and Benson and Sometimes Fin"

• Seriously, what happened to Munch? The most I see of him nowadays is the odd line every few episodes. He's a cross between a ninja and a sarcastic old man, yet Unstabler and Benson feature in most of the episodes, with Fin popping up for an episode once in a while.
• Since they chucked Hero for a Day episodes altogether. This Troper's best guess is that "Uncle" was Munch's last one.

Where did Casey get that t-shirt?

• The "Sex Crimes" one in "Night".
• NYPD Softball league.
• Zazzle.com

Why, when Olivia is shown as being really traumatized by events in Undercover over several episodes, did they not show Casey not even being vaguely freaked out or upset by events in Night (discounting the scene in the hospital), Raw or Alternate?

• Because people respond differently to trauma and not everyone reacts the same. It's also possible that she did have trauma but the show didn't see fit to feature it, as they tend to do with characters not named Stabler or Benson.
• In Night, Elliot mentions that Casey has taken time off work and doesn't want anyone to see her while she's out; that sounds like she's upset.

In "Authority", how come Munch never commented on how Merritt Rook looked a hell of a lot like an older version of a man in Baltimore whose wife got shot?

I know it goes way beyond Celebrity Paradox (celebrity who guest starred on two shows in the same continuity as different characters paradox?), but that would have been a (darkly) funny moment if he did. Hopefully this could happen if "Authority" gets a sequel... And I'm fairly certain it will.

• They never mention when actors pop back up again. Diane Neal (Casey) played a rapist in a previous episode, and no one mentions how the new A.D.A. resembles a prior perp.
  • Not limited to SVU, either. Jerry Orbach played a defense attorney in an early episode of the main L&O before being cast as Lenny Briscoe. Alfred Molina was a perp on SVU before becoming one of the main characters of L&O: LA.
  • S. Epatha Merkerson was a cleaning woman who was the mother of a victim in an early episode of regular L&O. Plus, there are non-celebrity actors who have popped up repeatedly. Anne Dowd is a character actor who had played nine very different characters over all the different series. Some perps, some victims, some witnesses, some background characters. Denis O'Hare played six, including two priests, a schizophrenic who represented himself, and a retarded man who ended up institutionalized. Lindsay Crouse played a judge who was shot and paralyzed, and then sued for her right to die, before the person who shot her was brought to trial. McCoy opposed her, because he wanted her as a witness. She eventually does die. Then she shows up six years later as another judge, plus, she is on SVU as a third judge. Think of it as a repertory theater.

In "Sugar," the second episode of the eleventh season, ADA Sonya Paxton threatens a witness with rape to make her testify. The cops watching say nothing. What the hell.

• This is one of the cops' favorite threats with the regular perps. Paxton was a Froot Loop, but threatening the innocent with rape is not new. Still very painful to watch, though.
• This particular practice actually comes back in one episode to bite one of the team members in the ass. In "Perverted", a man Olivia had threated would be raped in Rikers was raped in Rikers, very severely and constantly, and so he frames her in a murder. Don't think they stopped using the tactic after that incident, though.

Why did the episode "Doubt" end with the viewers left to decide on what the verdict was? All evidence obviously pointed to the man being innocent and the girl committing perjury.

• A poll was held and more than 60% of the viewers sided with the professor.
• I think the idea was supposed to be that with a case like that, which was nothing more than he said/she said, things aren't clear-cut. So they decided not to actually give the ending.
• Yeah, I think this question may be Completely Missing the Point. In Real Life, a lot of cases do end up like this because of insufficient or conflicting evidence.
  • Well I don't know, I mean I think they tipped it just slightly toward making the alleged victim a shakier witness than the alleged perp, just to convey the idea that the emotional trauma of rape may cause the victim to become very unstable and difficult to believe, leading to a mistrial or not guilty verdict. Somewhat inadvertently then, in that sense, the person who posted this topic reflects in their question that intent of the writers.
    • The interesting thing about that episode was that it exposed each individual viewer's subconscious prejudices. Those who believe rape victims should act a certain way or remember details correctly will side with the professor, while those who have difficulty accepting that a woman could lie about being raped will side with her. In reality, the episode didn't give enough information to determine who was telling the truth. The only unbiased answer would be "I don't know which side to believe".

Is anyone else really annoyed by that episode were Stabler beat up that pedophile website owner?

Seriously. The man did nothing wrong and Elliot barged into his house and beat him senseless. I get that he was sexually attracted to children, but he didn't molest any or even have anything that could be considered pornographic. The pictures he had were of children completely clothed and in no sexual situations and he was careful to stay well within the law. I know that was Elliot's kid, but damn. What's more, even though he was suspended, Stabler's attack on him seemed to be viewed as "He deserved it, but you shouldn't've done it anyway." Then the Captain mentions they'll delay the assault charge filed against Elliot until the guy he beat up heals and he has no case. Oh, but then the pedophile kills someone so everything Elliot did was a-okay. Seriously, putting an unarmed man in the hospital when he didn't technically do anything wrong should've gotten Elliot fired.

• • Probably because pedophiles, even ones who do not act on their impulses, are Acceptable Targets from the point of view of the show's creator, writers, and target demographic.
  • He put a photo of Stabler's daughter on a pedophile website for pedophiles to enjoy and masturbate over. If someone did that with a photo of my little sister, I'd kill him!
  • To quote Fin;

"If it had been my kid, I'd have done it."

• • • It wasn't treated as the right thing to do, but it certainly wasn't treated as an unrealistic reaction, because quite frankly it wasn't. I know if pictures of my young cousins showed up on a website like that, there would be at least seven grown men competing to do even worse to the person responsible.
  • Personally, my problem wasn't so much with Stabler doing it (it was well within his character, at least) as it was his coworkers backing him up on it and flat out making the man delete the pictures. The whole damn department should've potentially gone down for that one.
    • It's not that hard to understand why he did what he did. That alone is enough of a reason none of them would hold what he did against him. I can imagine any of the higher ups would have had a hard time blaming him either if the issue had been brought to him. It's not professional, no, but when have any of them been known to be 100% professional for more than a few episodes at a time?
    • It was wrong of Stabler to do, but it was't just coincidence that his daughter appeared on the website. The site owner got the picture after his first run-in with Stabler, and posted the photo to bait him. I'm not really sure what the site owner thought would happen-- that he'd get beat up, and then he'd get Stabler fired, or Stabler would sue him, and he'd get his day in court, vindicating the legality of what he was doing, but he did try to provoke Stabler.
  • He's a cop. He's supposed to have more self-control than that. Yet he never gets more than a slap on the wrist. He should've been fired years ago.
    • Or at least get some anger management...
• What bothered me most about that episode was how nearly every single bad thing that happened was either directly or indirectly the team's fault. That kid came to them crying and begging for help, horrified by his urges and not wanting to hurt anyone. Their inability to see him as anything more or less than an unrepentant child rapist led to every single tragedy in the episode, and they are NEVER called on this or realize their screw up.
  • That was the point. SVU is about sex crimes. It isn't designed to help people who are potential criminals, but don't want to be. Someone who can't afford food doesn't go to the robbery unit and say they feel they might commit robbery to get food, but they haven't yet. But there are places for people without enough to eat, to go (maybe inadequate, but they exist). There's really nothing out there to help someone who feels pedophilic urges, but doesn't want to act on them. This was one episode that wasn't as anvilicious as is typical for the show, and maybe should have been.

In Dependent the guy that Elliot killed could not have been the rapist and murderer.

When the little boy gets home his father is attacked from behind, he then runs across the house into his parents' bed room and sees someone else raping and killing his mother. He later identifies the monster that attacked his dad as his sister's boyfriend and he said he also saw his sister there. Also, why would a man need an object like a candlestick holder to rape somebody, if he was as high as they said he was I doubt he would have worried about leaving DNA. Finally they made remarks earlier that the person who did it had anger issues with the mother and it was a personal crime yet the boyfriend had never meet her before. It seems the only thing they were able to prove was that the boyfriend was also there and attacked the father, but since Elliot accidentally killed him they decided to pin the crime on him and let the girl that raped and killed her own mother go free.

• • As far as this Troper knows, Elliot did not "accidentally kill" the boyfriend. Warner had confirmed there was something wrong when she examined the body, saying the boyfriend stopped taking medication. This troper hasn't seen the episode for a while, but it was something along those lines.
    • But Elliot did kill him, the kid not taking his medicine just made it a lot easier for him to do it.
    • Warner's assessment was that the kid had quit taking his heart medicine, which controlled a palpation syndrome; without the medicine, he suffered a heart attack due to the pursuit and confrontation with Elliot. Although he was attacking Elliot at the time of his heart attack, Warner determined that Elliots return blows were not the culprit; it was just being in that situation caused a heart attack. (Or maybe something more technical, but that was the gist of it anyway.)
  • Being high is a good enough reason someone might need to rape someone with a candlestick holder instead of performing the act themselves. Some people don't have as easy a time performing when they're drunk or high.
    • Well even if they don't need to use a candlestick, if he was as high as they said, then he may have just been in a delirious state of mind, which can cause ... very erratic, bizarre, and unpredictable behavior.
  • Also the story the girl gave was full of holes and contradicts evidence from earlier that episode. She was telling them what happened during a drug induced blackout which she should have no memories of with the help of sodium amytal a drug that Huang had said in an earlier episode is useless for truth telling and memory recovery. It is usually used to get the person to say what the questioner wants to hear and they gave it to her after constantly asking if she remembers her boyfriend raping and killing her mom.

Who the hell would let a proven child murderer go free based on brainwashing?

In "Anchor" a murderer has been killing "anchor" children. They go to his house and find pictures of the three dead children marked off, and pictures of three more children to be targeted. They arrest him AT THE HOUSE of one of the children, having knocked out the father and tying up the mother. How the hell does any jury let him go free on three counts of child killing. On a claim that a Right Wing Radical brainwashed him (through a t.v. show no less) made him do it.

Not only that but it also bugged me that of the show's two strawman politicians, the liberal one (who goes way over the top for media coverage and defending immigrant rights) actually DEFENDS the murderer at his trial. All in order to make the other strawman look bad.

He does kind of redeem himself at the end of the episode, when his client says "thanks, now I can kill more kids" he has a What Have I Done moment. Straw Liberal kills the man himself.

Am I the only one annoyed that they didn't go with the idea of Olivia's mother lying about being raped?

• It would of totally destroy her mother's character if they went with that. She at least had a excuse for being a pathetic drunk and an abusive mother. She would of have to of been some sort of super monster to falsely accuse n innocent man and make Olivia believe that she's a rape baby.
  • Not to mention the fact that it would have had some very Unfortunate Implications in regards to rape victims that would have pissed off a large chunk of the viewers.
  • The fact that some people lie about being raped is just an unfortunate truth. Pretending it doesn't happen hurts real rape victims as much as the falsely accused.
  • Can you imagine how much it would emotionally destroy Benson if she found out her mother lied? This show just couldn't handle something like that. I know that seems weird, considering the horrific crap they usually write about, but they almost always drop the ball when they have their regular cast going through a traumatic event -- e.g., Benson's magically disappearing PTSD, people going way out of character, etc. Doing their standard "one episode and then I'm over it" thing just wouldn't cut it, and the writers couldn't pull off an ongoing plot arc for something like that. It would make for a good episode (if written by someone competent) to have a guest star whose mother abuses her by telling her she's a rape baby when she isn't, though, so they wouldn't have to deal with all the leftover baggage in the next episode.

The Amoral Attorney trope in full swing makes it hard to take the show seriously on an entertainment level.

Knowing this being Law and Order, a show where the main characters are the NYPD and the Attorney's at Law, they couldn't possibly avoid showing the Defense as complete monsters with an agenda while the Prosecution is exercising their Major in Great Heroism which lets them be outright rude to the Defense while making themselves look more righteous. Meh, it's probably just me thinking in absolutes again.

• No, I wouldn't quite say that. When Elliot and Benson (and often the ADA) are having episodes where they're really on the rampage for breaking rules and ignoring human rights, the defense attorney, if shown, is usually even smarmier and sleazier than usual (which says a lot). When they're more conflicted, the attorney typically seems more professional, or even outright sympathetic. When needed, the defense can be outright bastards to make the SVU look better by comparison.
• Barry Moredock (the civil rights attorney from various episodes, including the one with the teenager whose medication sent him into a manic episode) is one of the few to have been portrayed in a positive light, often taking on cases for free and actually giving a damn about his client's well-being, rather than their money. Even Alex, who practically eats defence attorneys for breakfast, showed genuine affection for him, despite going up against him in court several times. Most of the other regulars have had an occasional Pet the Dog moment, with Oliver Gates being the possible exception.

NY State hasn't performed the death penalty in decades. Can someone tell the SVU that?

Every episode has the ADA threatening the death penalty. Which NY hasn't used since 1963. Then one episode revolved around a man wanting to go back to his home state to be given the death penalty. What?

• Law and Order may be based in a place that's a lot like New York, but it really isn't. All Myths Are True, republicans have magical powers, the death penalty exists in New York, and the government experimented on inner city black kids.
• Actually one of the suspects did mention that NY hasn't used the Death Penalty in years, but the detectives handwaved it by saying that they could make an exception.
• Except they can't make an exception now. It's gone beyond just not being used now- the state of New York declared the Death Penalty unconstitutional in 2004. Nobody can use the Death Penalty anymore. It might just be a case of the ADA or Elliot trying to use ignorance about the death penalty in Perp Sweating to make the guy talk, letting them think they could be sent to the chair if they don't do exactly what they say (Jerkass behavior and bullying like this isn't unheard of for the show). Of course, that doesn't explain why they use it when there are other lawers present....
• In the L&O universe, New York has had an execution in the past couple of years. It was shown on-screen in the main series, and was the subject of the sixth-season finale (the same episode where Claire was killed by a drunk driver).
• Having the death penalty in the show gives the viewers a sense of closure. Plus, it's an easy plot device for the writers to fall back on when a character needs motivation to share information. This is L&O, creativity need not apply.
• In a recent episode, Elliot told a suspect who said NY hasn't done the death penalty in years that he could still be convicted of a capital crime and have to sit around until they change the legistation.
• New York did briefly restore the Death Penalty, and did sentence some people to it, although no one was ever executed. So the regular L&O, "Teenage Wasteland," where Nora Lewin debates whether to do what she believes is right, and not ask for the death penalty, or to do her job, and ask for it, as it has recently been reinstated, is actually very good. Now, while no one has been executed in New York in many decades, the death penalty exists in statute. This means that a DA can ask for someone to be sentenced to it. What is currently unconstitutional in any method of execution. It is possible that at some future date, a method will be adopted which will be constitutional in New York, and theoretically, someone sentenced to death in 2004-2011 could be executed. It's pretty likely that a lawyer would argue that since the person under sentence wasn't sentenced to the method under question, they can't be executed by that method, and that would probably work, given the reluctance of the state to use capital punishment, but it is all theoretical.
• L&O is set in New York. Aside from the fact that Mayor Giuliani made a guest appearance, and the 9/11 terrorist attack happened there, there are other very specific things mentioned. When the detectives are in Central Park, they correctly talk about going "down" to Alphabet City, or "over" to Riverside Dr. They talk about real subway stops, and even eat at real restaurants. It's actually one of the most accurately-depicted cities on TV.
• Plus, even though the New York Court of Appeals had declared the death penalty unconstitutional, a future Court could reverse that decision. True, a judge who sentences a person to death will stay the sentence indefinitely due to the Court of Appeals's ruling, but who wants to be the test case for revisiting that question?
• As mentioned, the original Law & Order actually had a few of the defendants go on to be executed within the context of the show. Aside from the one that was shown in the episode Claire died, there was a woman who shot a cop and later converted to christianity while on death row, and probably a few more besides that. I was actually coming here to post a headscratcher about the episode where the defendant claims New York hasn't executed anyone since the sixties; while true in real life it isn't true via the show's continuity.(Before anyone says the guy could have just been uninformed, Casey confirmed it, and she should know better.)

Suggesting that they show a woman in the midst of a psychotic break the body of her dead son? Is Huang just trying to give them bad advice now?

Sure, it might have made it 'real' for her, but there is no way that it was going to end well for anyone. Not that that was the only problem with the episode, of course.

• Don't feel bad. The whole episode was terrible.
• In his defense, it wasn't seeing her child that threw her over the edge. Had the father not barged in, knowing full well everything was his fault, she might not have caught the rookie cop off guard and threaten to shoot people.

Whatever happened to Finn wanting a transfer because of Elliot's general douchebaggery? I feel like it was mentioned once and just magically never brought up again.

• The transfer paperwork was held up due to red tape. The guy handling his paperwork was an ex-colleague of Finn's who held a grudge against him, and stalled his transfer to get back at him. All of this was mentioned at some point in season ten. They haven't said anything since, so I guess we're to assume that one guy can stall his paperwork indefinitely. The whole thing about Finn wanting a transfer was probably done as a cliffhanger, in order to draw in viewers and boost ratings. Kind of a lazy and cheap ploy, but there you have it.
  • Actually it was mentioned in the first episode of the new season (And from his reaction of being told to work with Stabler, they were still not at the best of terms).

Does anyone else find Alex's non-answer about why she didn't contact Elliot and Liv between getting out of Wit Sec and coming back to SVU really, really frustrating?

• Yes, but the dumbest part was her explanation for why she was able to leave witness protection. Even worse was the way they shoehorned her into Ghost, which STILL makes zero sense.

Has this show ever had a non-sympathetic female go to jail for raping or sexually assaulting a male

• I can think of 2 non-sympathetic women that raped men and one was acquitted and the other not charged. I can also think of a few sympathetic women that went to jail after statutory raping boys one was sympathetic because she had a brain tumor which made it hard for her to repress the urges, others were shown to actually love the much younger boys they were sleeping with. Have there ever been any examples that I cannot remember.
  • Sharon Lawrence's character in "Chameleon" was vaguely based on Aileen Wuornos. she solicits men as a prostitute, then kills and robs them, and claims they tried to rape her, so it was self-defense. When she finally gets caught, she has a sob story about having been abused as a child. She is quite evil, although I suppose what she does is not technically rape, but you can still call it a sex crime. And she turns out to be even more evil than that. She commits suicide in jail, but the detectives and lawyers are perfectly prepared to try her to the full extent of the law, and have no sympathy for her. She has no redeeming qualities whatsoever.
    • Except they did not charge her with any sex crime she went to jail for killing about a dozen people while she was horrible she did not go to jail because of anything sexual
• I've seen the majority (if not all) of the episodes and really don't remember it happening at all. If it did happen before, then it must be so much of a rare occurrence it's ridiculous. It's Double Standards and The Unfair Sex at work.
• I recall one episode with a non-sympathetic woman who would drug men, get pregnant, try to "sell" the unborn baby to various different adoptive couples simultaneously, and eventually accused the person she had nonconsenting sex with a raping her so she could take his money. Was an outright con-artist and the show didn't sugar-coat it..... Except for the fact that she was having non-consenting sex with various partners and the word "rape" was never even utterred in relation to it, and she wound up getting off scot-free by making a deal.
  • They got her in the original Law and Order, thankfully.
  • However they said that the only thing they could charge her with was theft because there were no rules how to retrieve a man’s sperm when he is unconscious. They did not like her and said that There Should Be a Law but they never even considered charging her with sexual assault.
• I recall an episode where a psychiatrist falsley diagnosed a male teenage patient she fell in love with, ruined his relationship with his girlfriend by telling her parents he raped her, drugging him to make her false diagnoses seem true so she could have him stay at her house, just so she could drug and have sex with him, and GOT PREGNANT AND DELIVERED THE PRODUCT OF THE RAPE AND RAISED HIM AS HER OWN BABY. When they arrested her, her only (stupid)excuse was that she had a few boyfriends who hit her and she wanted one who wouldn't. When she was found guilty and sentanced to prison(I forget how long, but it wasn't short, and she lost her license), she said she wasn't sorry for what she did and she was still in love with the teenage boy.
  • They still gave her a Freudian Excuse that was supposed to generate some sympathy for her
    • Except she only mentioned it once, and it was never brought up after that. If they were gonna go that route, they would have had her lawyer exploit that, but it's never referenced again and she gives a creepy speech about how she didn't believe what she did was wrong in any way and she's still in love with the boy.
• There was one on regular L&O, as well, very early on, before there was SVU to handle the sex crimes.
  • On what episode of the mother ship did this happen, if you do not know the title could you describe it
• Then, there's the episode "Ridicule," where Diane Neal and some friends rape a male stripper at a bachelorette party, when she played another character, before she came on to play Casey Novak.
  • And she was acquitted of that crime at the end, they might have tried to get her but she did not go to jail for it

The episode Babes in general.

• First off, a guy kills someone because he thinks he raped his sister. It confuses me that anyone would do this without investigating anyones side of the story.
  • People act without thinking all of the time, especially if they're enraged. A significant portion of real-life murder cases involve this kind of thing. Would you be level-headed enough to get the other side of the story if you believed a loved one had been raped?
• Then, a girl appears to commit suicide. In an earlier episode, they find out that someone who appears to have hung herself was strangled and then hung up. But here, they make no effort to investigate this, and instead go after a woman who insulted her over the internet.
  • Blame the idiot ball for this one.
• At the end, when the mom gets off, Greylek insults her enough to get the mom to attack her. Then Greylek says she's gonna get her for assault. Any sensible person in the room would ingore these charges and report Greylek to the ethics committee or whatever. Instead, we see the moms daughter crying that her mom is going to jail.
  • Episode was a terrible (or stupidly funny). I especially hate how they tried to work in so many subjects at once (Schitzophrenics don't get the right treatement, how bad it is that bums get beaten up, how bad it is that the homeless attack people, why abstinence is bad in the long term, ect.) But I guess it you want a semi-justification for everything, For one, the guy wasn't thinking clearly and was in a fit of rage. And for the third part, how many cases in this show should be thrown out due to the police or DA getting evidence with ignoring basic ethics ("As you can see from the interrogation room camera, Your Honor, my client made his confession without a lawyer present and whilst having Detective Stabler crushing his scrotum in his fist.")? I think we're supposed to ignore that and just assume it went through anyway before she deserves it according to the show. No idea about the second one, though.
  • As far as Greylek provoking the mom, provocation is not a legal defense to assault and battery (which is what the mom did), and what Greylek did did not violate the ethics rules for lawyers. IIRC, Greylek said that the jury may have found the mom not guilty, but that doesn't make her blameless, and that the general public would realize that, to which the mom responded by hitting her. The mom's trial had already concluded, and what happened could not prejudice a jury, cause a mistrial, or otherwise affect her case. At worst, the mom might have an entrapment defense (which rarely works, because you have to prove that an ordinarily law-abiding person was lured/baited/provoked by law enforcement into committing the specific crime) and, while YMMV, what Greylek said may not be considered offensive enough to be considered an ethics violation or to provoke a physical assault.
• The thing that made this episode even more terrible was the way it combined three real-life news stories (and their subsequent moral panics) into the single more blatantly Ripped from the Headlines episode in the history of the universe. The news stories in question:
  • People beating up the homeless and posting it online: Based on the Bum Fights website, as well as a number of other videos that have been posted online.
  • Pregnancy pact: A bunch of idiots in a Catholic school made a pact to get pregnant, supposedly getting the idea from the movie Juno. Thankfully, the episode did this one justice by focusing on the Sex ed. issue instead of finding an easy scapegoat.
  • Suicide after internet harassment: Based on the very tragic case of Megan Meier, a 14-year-old who killed herself after the mother of a so-called "friend" created a Myspace account to harass her. The mother in question, Lori Drew, has had her information posted all over the internet, and received endless harassment. This was the case that started the recent resurgence of the internet bullying panic (later becoming a bullying-in-general panic due to other high-profile cases, such as the Phoebe Prince and Tyler Clementi incidents).

Something that just bugs me to no end. In "Manogamy," if Nicole had been sexually active with both Richard and her lover around the same time, why on Earth would she tell Richard he wasn't the father of her child? There was no possible way she could have known that and she turned out to be wrong.

Truth in Television. A lot of women do the same thing in Real Life. It happens for one or more of the following reasons:

• She's an idiot who doesn't know how how conception dates work, leading her to either miscalculate them, or assume that they're accurate down to the exact day (in reality, there's a margin of error of a couple of weeks, so if even if she didn't have sex with her husband on the estimated date of conception, he could still be the father).
• Some nonsense about woman's intuition, as if a woman can feel who the father is.
• Wishful thinking. She wanted to have the baby with her lover, not her husband.

Am I the only one who thinks that Olivia came off as a Karma Houdini in "Blinded?"

She deliberately informed the feds of the perp-of-the-week's location knowingly that he would be shipped off to Louisiana where he would be executed for his crimes. And when Casey, after finding out that he was suffering from mental illness that made him (unknowingly) perform those heinous actions on those girls, threw the case so he would get mental help instead of being sent for execution, she told Jack McCoy about it. The reason she did all of this? Because the perp slammed Elliot's head into a car window which temporary blinded him (Her saying along the lines of "He's my partner, I'm supposed to look out for him" to justify her actions doesn't help). While they both called each other out on their actions, at least Casey got an earful from McCoy.

• That wasn't the only problem with the episode. In every other episode where it was revealed that someone had a mental illness, Novak was always a total hardass about it... and then this case comes along, and suddenly she's sensitive about mental illness because her ex-fiance was schizophrenic? Riiiight. Of course, she went back into hardass mode in all subsequent episodes. Was Blind set in opposite-land or something?
• Not exactly. Liv was mad because Casey got Eliot to testify despite the fact that he was still recuperating (which was Eliot's choice, fair enough) and then used Eliot to throw the case and get the perp who had blinded Eliot off. Whether that changes your reaction or not is up to you, but she didn't rat out Casey just because she threw the case.

In Ridicule, why is Elliot, the male cop, unsupportive of the man who is claiming to have been raped by women, while Olivia, the female cop, defends him from the people they question and the other male detectives?

• Because Elliot and the other male detectives didn't believe it was possible for a man to be raped by a woman. Yeah, they were holding the Idiot Ball that week.
• The issue is why only females support the notion that men can be raped by women in this episode.
• Both Dr. Huang and Captain Cragen supported the man and Munch didn’t really say anything about it. The only people who attacked him and claimed he was making it up were Elliot and Fin who are both giant Jerkasses
• In my experience (which admittedly isn't enough to be definitive), I've noticed that men usually are less likely to be sympathetic when a man is raped by a woman. Whether that's reflective of the overall population, I have not idea.

Why include Huang, Warner, Munch, Fin, and Cragen in the opening credits if they appear in 25% of episodes, and for only 5 minutes in those episodes?

They still appear frequently enough to be considered part of the main cast. Cragen is the captian, plenty of reason to be in the opening credits. Munch and Fin are still important detectives, and in Munch's case, around the whole show. Warner is their go-to ME for every dead body they find, and Huang interviews every suspect/defendant that seems to have issues.

• There's a difference between important and main characters. Huang is my favorite, but he just isn't a main character on the Elliot-and-Olivia show- I mean SVU.
• Because they needed filler material to make the credits match the length of the song.
• Um, 25%? Are you serious?
• (Sigh) 35%. Is that better?

In that episode with the trans-sexual woman, why do they assume that both she and the boyfriend planned a killing of his brother and that the boyfriend knew she was born a boy?

Even Huang, the smart one, said something like "She's the master here, so break the other one first."

In Turmoil how come Olivia assumes Alex is the one who reported her and Elliot for misconduct and not the kid they assaulted a few hours earlier

In Turmoil Captain Cragen is reprimanded and suspended because of actions by Elliot and Olivia. Olivia blames Alex for it and claims she turned her back on them. Why douse she think that Alex was the one who reported there misbehaver, when a few scenes earlier Elliot was seen jumping and beating a teenager while she stood around and watched. Elliot even identified himself to the kid. I think it would be more reasonable of her to assume it was the kid complaining about being attacked by 2 detectives. Also I do not remember if Cragen was removed before or after Elliot attacked his son in the squad room with Olivia again just standing around and watching (luckily for Richard his mother was there to stop his father). If it happened afterwards then there is a whole room of witnesses that might have turned Elliot in.

• • Conflict Ball, if I had to guess.

In Baggage how come nobody seemed all that concerned that Elliot and Fin tortured, denied constitutional rights to, and caused the death of an innocent man at the police station who was a suspect on a case they were not working on?

In that episode they arrested a petty thief named Stefan who was being attacked by an angry mob on suspicion that he was a serial rapist that major case was trying to catch. After their typical Perp Sweating tactics which included Lying to the Perp claiming they had his DNA was found at the crime sceen, the man requested a Lawyer. The two detectives (who knew that the suspect Hates Being Touched) responded to that request by holding him down and threatening him with rape until he wet his pants. They then leave and the suspect kills himself with a small knife that they had somehow had forgotten to take away from him.

After the interrogation but before the suicide Craigen did point out that they had just assaulted him and Fin just brushed it off saying that he would like to see an attorney make that stick. When it was pointed out he requested one they justified not giving him legal counsel by saying that he said he needed one not that he wanted one. Cabot did also show some doubts about his guilt and said that she could not charge him on what they had but defended them not giving the suspect an attorney. To make matters worse the Chief of Detectives was also in the building and complaining about how badly SVU was handling the case which they were taken off of.

After the innocent suspect committed suicide Fin claimed that he had confessed to the rape and murders despite the fact that he didn’t and he had told the Chief of D’s that a few moments earlier. At the hospital they meet up with the detective who had been working on the case and learn that his daughter was now comatose after a car accident. They then learn that the man who they assaulted and drove to suicide was completely innocent and the real culprit had struck again. The Chief of D’s dose mention that they screwed up and threaten them, but when the other detective request to work SVU everybody seems to forget about all the laws they broke and the man they killed.

• ..... Wow. I'm more curious why this isn't on Moral Event Horizon.
  • The reason it is not on Moral Event Horizon is because they just glossed over it and hoped people would forget about it, the scenes with Stefan lasted only about 5 minutes in the middle of the episode, and what they did to him was dismissed by the detective that had been investigating it as what he would have done in that situation. Also their arrest of him was ridiculous because a witness had identified the perp as a black man and both the suspect and the eventual killer were Hispanic. Really they break several laws and abused there power in that episode like using a non-criminal database to find the DNA of the killers family members (which Munch, who was absent from the above interrogation, was opposed to because it violated peoples rights), and threatening to arrest one of them because she did not want to tell them about her family. Craigen did say right before the suicide that all one pp cared about were results and it did not matter how they got them, but really the SVU should have been at the very least suspended no matter how bad the killer was.
• In real life, Fin and Stabler would be lucky if they didn't end up in prison for the crap they pull, let alone still working in the NYPD.

In Baggage who on the team was leaking info to the press.

I know this episode has already been mentioned twice on this page but in it the thing the chief of detectives seemed angriest about was that one of the detectives was talking to the press and giving them classified information. He gave Cragen an ultimatum to find this person but nothing ever came of it.

• There are always a gazillion people running around in the background in the squad room, chances are that one of them leaked it.

In Outcry, the press wants to use a video of the victim at a party and they say the cops can't prevent them from airing it because of the First Amendment. If I recall correctly, the Supreme Court ruled that the press can't withhold evidence in a police investigation, so why was this an issue?

• Because SVU exists in a universe where laws exist solely for the purpose of making the NYPD's lives harder, apparently.

Shattered. Would it have been better if the Mom was the one responsible for everything, instead of the Dad?

When I was watching this episode, I had thought it was the mom who was responsible for kidnapping her son, which led to his death. Then, she snaps and after some horrible Sharon Stone acting, we find out that, OMG it was the DAD! I called bullshit on that. EVERYTHING in the damn episode suggested that the mom was behind everything. She had even tried to hire someone else to kidnap the kid. But all of a sudden, the Shocking Swerve shows up and the one reasonable character in the episode was the bad guy. Does anyone else feel this way?

• They only believed the mom was behind everything because the dad got to them first and poisoned the group into thinking the mom is the only one with a motive to do this.
  • But literally, the dad had NO reason to do so. He had already won custody of the son, the wife was not allowed to see him. FFS, the mom tried to hire a mercenary to abduct the kid... kinda like what later happened! Sorry, but even though the dad was responsible for everythig it would have made much more logical sense for it to have been the damn mom, who wanted to kidnap her son and take him with her to work in foreign countries.
    • You just explained why he did have reason to do so. If mom goes to jail, dad has their son all to himself.
      • Except no. If the dad wanted his son all to himself, all he had to do was pick up the phone, call the police, and say the mom is breaking the court order. Like she did giving the kid that necklace.

Behave.

• They have the suspect's stalker shrine of the victim, complete with video footage of her through the years, her underwear, and a freaking photo album with the dates of the first four times he raped her. They also have proof that he checked into a hotel the night of her fifth rape and drove the exact distance of a round trip from said hotel to the crime scene, climbing through his window so the hotel staff wouldn't realize he'd been gone. But because there isn't conclusive DNA evidence linking him to the fifth rape, they can't even go to trial?! And all for the sake of a Writer on Board about better staffing for crime labs? WTF?
  • Also, now that I think of it, after Benson's trip out west, what did they even need that old DNA evidence for? To prove that he committed the earlier rapes? Because that really wasn't in any kind of doubt after the shrine showed up. If they needed something to match against a sample from the most recent rape, why not just take a blood/skin/urine sample from him after his arrest? What would the old sample prove that they didn't have other evidence to show?
  • The disregard of the evidence isn't the only problem with that episode:
    • Benson's stalking of the rape victim was utterly ridiculous, particularly since the poor girl's rapist was a stalker. Way to further traumatize her, Liv. Not only that, but asking the victim to trust you isn't exactly brilliant when you've got a god damn gun pointed at her.
    • And then we have them stalking the perp., handing out fliers that call him a rapist, crashing private parties, and practically going around with a bull horn, screaming it to the world. When he got into his car, I half expected the driver to turn around, revealing that it's Munch. The guy could have easily sued the department for multiple counts of harassment, slander, libel, and so on. All of the detectives would have been in huge legal trouble, possibly costing them their careers. And not only that, but the case probably would have been thrown out because the cops were harassing a man who was innocent (because of his alibi) in the eyes of the law -- any evidence they collected would be considered highly suspect.
    • While they were wasting time stalking the victim and then stalking the stalker, how many open rape cases went uninvestigated? How many of those had victims who actually wanted to file charges? The one-case-per-episode format does require some suspension of disbelief, but having them follow a man around 24/7 just killed it.
    • More than anything, the episode proved that all of the detectives, especially Olivia, need to get a life.
    • And it also proves that Cragen is incompetent. What police captain would allow his detectives to go on what amounts to personal vendetta against a single suspect? Had the the perp made a single call to One PP,Cragen would have found himself quickly retired and the Manhattan SVU would staffed w/ new detectives shortly thereafter.
      • See the Progeria theory under WMG for a possible explanation.
    • This is the episode where this show left reality far behind it.
    • All of that at least falls under UnAcceptable Breaks From Reality; it may be utterly wrong with regards to the modern legal system, but at least it's clear what happened. I still can't follow the train of logic that leads to the ending, no matter what universe it takes place in.
    • They somehow magically found another sample or something like that. It didn't make a lot of sense to me, either. I was really disappointed with that episode, especially since the backlog of rape kits is such an important issue -- they didn't come close to doing it justice.
  • Jennifer Love Hewitt's acting was pretty good, though. Too bad it was wasted on this piece of crap.

This wiki's page for this show says when Liv was framed for murder, the others did all they could to stonewall her. Did I miss something? Were there two episodes where she was framed for murder?

• It's probably referring to the fact that they were all holding the idiot ball for the entire episode.
  • Explain plz.

In "Bullseye" why didn’t they ask the little girl anything about her rapist?

She was alive and functioning through out the episode, I know the child was traumatized but if they asked her to describe something about her attacker she might have said young, longhaired or Scottish, which would have ruled out the innocent man whose life they ruined and was Driven to Suicide. Instead they never even showed her a picture of the man and need the kid to pee on the floor before considering the dead man might be innocent.

• The attacker had a ski mask or something on, so they couldn't see any of his features. They could have done a voice ID, but at that point they thought they had the guy since he had the pictures of the rapes on his computer. Sure, they were hacked on by the real perp, but still...

In "Branded" Olivia sided with the mentally unstable woman who raped and tortured 2 people and was about to do it to a third and seemed offended that they might prosecute her, and because of her she ended up a complete Karma Houdini

At the beginning of the episode Elliot was being a dick to the victims like he usually is but Olivia seemed less sympathetic then usually. After they found out the perpetrator was a woman and the men did not want to file charges she pretty much said it was because he had it coming for doing something bad to her and not because they found the experience traumatic or humiliating. Huang even pointed out that she was blaming the victim. It then turned out that two of the men had forced her to have sex with them when they were camp councilors 15 years earlier. Olivia apparently thought that meant she should not be tried because she was also a rape victim, and accused the new ADA Hardwick of not caring about victims of crimes despite the fact she was the one who was trying to dismiss the case. She was also angry that a judge redacted portions of her confection because they were irrelevant to the case and claiming they were sending an innocent woman to jail. She eventually convinces Hardwick to pull some dirty tricks by bringing in the daughter that was produced from the rape, which caused one of the victims to have a Villainous Breakdown in court saying he delivered to be raped and tortured. This somehow got the woman off for her brutal crimes with nothing more then a few minor trespassing charges and they acted like this was a good thing.

• • The judge's redaction of the confessions was Truth in Television. The woman may have had a sympathetic reason for her actions, but that reason (revenge, even for being gang-rapeed as a teenager) doesn't count as a defense under the law. Leaving the explanation in the court record would have inflamed the jury and resulted in her being acquitted, even though the law would consider her guilty. Had she tried to mount an insanity defense, for example, by claiming PTSD, she might have been able to get her account of the rape back into the court record.
• Olivia was bothered that the men who raped her got off scot-free and are allowed to lie about what happened in court, and that the judge decided her motives for commiting the assaults weren't relevent. Uh yeah, these guys raped me and I decided to take my revenge. How is her sole reason for attacking them irrelevent? And she didn't convince Hardwick of anything. Olivia went to her office to call her on what she was doing, then Hardwick gave her something to give to the defense, which turned out to be the DNA reports on the woman's rape daughter.
• But Olivia was against them and convinced they were guilty before she found out they raped her and like Huang said she was blaming the victims. It’s not like it was an impulse crime it was thought out, carefully planned and executed. While I do not agree with the judges decision to reduct the tape I understand it considering that the rape happened 15 years ago and she had obviously put it behind her. If this was a man who tracked down raped and tortured women that abused him when he was a kid he might be seen as somewhat sympathetic but he definitely would not be getting off scot free like she did.
  • I recall that happening at least once (The Norman Bates-esque killer who murdered women with hatpins), and it played out nothing like this episode. The attitude of the SVU squad was basically, "We gotta arrest the abuser too," not "We gotta let the abused go."
• The reason she was being skeptical of the men was they weren't being helpful. "I've never met the men who she also went after and I argued with earlier today", "I've never seen her before and have no idea why she'd go after us". And if the rape was her motivation to attack them, she obviously hadn't put it behind her.
• They've had plenty of female victims who weren't cooperative. If anyone behaved that way towards a woman instead of a man, Benson would have been up in arms. Until they actually knew what had really happened, their behavior was completely hypocritical. Total double standard (not that anyone should be surprised -- SVU always does this with adult male victims).
  • Benson's actions shouldn't be so surprising at this point. If the offender's a woman, expect her to look for any justification (read: excuse) for her actions. Otherwise, it's an open-and-shut case as far as she's concerned.
    • What happened to you, Olivia? You used to be cool.
• The girl shouldn't have gotten off with trespassing charges. She branded and sodomized two men, for god's sake. Her past should have been treated as mitigating, not expunging -- being a victim doesn't give one the right to harm other people, even your abuser(s). They could have at least placed her in a psychiatric facility, given that she'd shown herself to be capable of violence. How do they know that she's not going to have her PTSD triggered and end up attacking an innocent person? And would they have been so eager to let her off on trespassing charges if this had been a man who was raped by three women at 14, and then came back to brand and sodomize them? I can understand opting against punitive measures, but the girl needed to be rehabilitated before she rejoined society. Letting her out onto the streets with probation was completely idiotic.
• This episode reminded me - again - how rape appears to be the only crime Benson cares about. That one goes all the way back to the first episode, where the victim of the week was the leader of an Balkan ethnic cleansing squad; the fact that he was a mass murderer only rated one passing mention.
  • Yeah, the really messed up thing about the episode was that Benson was actually in character, for the most part. She was a self-righteous bitch to begin with, and the recent seasons have cranked it Up to Eleven.

Do any of the writers that work on this show having anything more than a passing familiarity w/ either law enforcement or American jurisprudence?

• The legal aspect of the show was a bit more realistic (in the Acceptable Breaks From Reality sense) in earlier seasons, but they traded in all semblance of reality at some point in season 6 or 7 in exchange for melodramatic plots. I think it's more an issue of They Just Didn't Care than Did Not Do the Research.

Locum, in general.

• First off, there are so many insane twists that M.Night would call stupid. Second, how come these parents NEVER have to answer to the fact that they were basically trying to turn an orphan into a Replacement Goldfish for their presumably dead daughter? The episode just ends with "We found your daughter! She's back with you now! Here's your reward for smothering, abusing, and surgically remodeling a little girl you don't love!" These two (especially the mother) are NOT stable people, why should they get her back? And finally (and this is my biggest problem with a majority of the series), it takes what COULD have been and interesting case that has *gasp* A FEMALE VILLAIN that has NOTHING TO DO WITH SEX, but they take the safe route and shoe horn in exploited girl working in porn crying about "MY EVIL REDNECK PEDO DADDY MADE ME BE BAD!" and the generic redneck pedophile #37. I guess it's ok to be totally mentally unstable, as long as you're not a pedophile.
  • Oh, didn't you know? The episode was set up so that the Special Guest Star that appeared in this and the following episode wouldn't be the main suspect when they did the whole "Child Rapist & Twitter Mob" thing. He was, but I suppose that was the point.
    • (original poster) They could have done that without making the episode suck so hard.
  • Those two were total KarmaHoudinis. They should have had their custodial rights for both children taken away (although for their Replacement Goldfish, I doubt they'd care), given Stabler and Benson's madness for putting kids in decent homes. The episode seems to be one of the ones that lets you make up your own ending, so maybe you're supposed to assume that's what happened.

In the episode Identity there are two twins, and one of them is really a boy even though he's been made to look like a girl since he was unintentionally castrated when he was circumcised. The doctor handling them was molesting them and the twins kill him, by having one of them stay at a movie theatre and the other kill him so they can't use their DNA to identify which one of them did it. But the mutilated one had been on drugs for years to make him look like a girl, so that would show up in any DNA samples at the scene!

• Besides the above plot hole, there's also how the team treated the situation when they found out. They chew out the parents a little bit until they understand it was an accident, although they're in a bit of a corner because they spent the whole episode telling the "girl" that she couldn't have been orally raped because the DNA they got off the perp (who had died after "she" bit down and he fell off a roof, don't ask) was male. So how do they handle this sensitive information that he's been living his entire life as the opposite gender? Why, the doctor's nurse barges in and flat out says that he's really a boy. But instead of treating this as a serious situation, where the nurse would be sued for causing god knows what level psychological distress, the detectives support her for telling the truth. Even though it would later get the molesting doctor killed, showing that the twins did not take this revelation well.
• Gender drug therapy doesn't affect DNA, it affects hormones. His chromosomes would still be male, regardless of how many hormones his parents gave him.
  • Yeah, but traces of the drugs would show up in whatever secretions/body parts they tested for DNA. So they could just run those tests after the DNA and find out which twin it was.
    • They dealt with that. It was explicitly stated that enough time had passed since he stopped taking the hormone therapy that it had worked it's way out of his system by the time of the murder.
    • However, they just said "perfect crime" and gave up without at least trying or jailing them both for conspiracy after the fact.
    • It would have been a waste of time to charge them with anything, since the simple fact that the other one could have done it is more than enough for reasonable doubt.

Am I the only one who didn't mind Stuckey so much?

Maybe it's because I don't take the show as seriously I'm probably meant to, but I didn't see what the big deal was. He was kind of a dork, but it was refreshing to see someone willing to be funny when the rest of the cast are almost contractually obligated to be killjoys. Yes, he was pretty insensitive, going into dickish territory on certain cases, but did that really make him less likable then Benson or Stabler? Elliot pushing him around every time he showed up (with Cragen even looking the other way when he shoved him) just made me feel bad for the guy.

• Admittedly, I didn't really mind him either. But from the moment he made his debut, the first thought I had of him was "Yep, he's gonna be The Scrappy."
• I found him somewhat annoying, but he could have made an interesting comic relief if they toned him down a little bit and hadn't gone with the evil mastermind thing. I mostly felt sorry for the little twerp until his Face Heel Turn.

Trophy

For one, why reuse an episode title from the main series? Two, how do you have an expectation of privacy when you are intimidating the owner into letting you stay? What happened to inevitable discovery? Why not hold the guy on the stolen credit card? Can't you do a paternity test on the woman the criminal is taunting and try her mom's case? Also, very awkward casting.

• For the first one, it's a different series, so I think they can do that if they want. The rest, I got no clue.
• The thing that annoyed me was that they didn't think to check his last cell mate until partway through the episode, yet my first thought (and that of the people watching it with me) was, "Check out who he went to prison with, and see if anyone got out recently, idiots!" The detectives suck at their jobs these days. Also, can you even make someone a legal guardian without getting their permission first?
  • An explanation for why they didn't check at first could be that they were so pissed off at the guy for shooting at them they didn't care about anything he had to say. Once they calmed down a bit, they checked his old cell mate.

What happened to Jo Marlowe?

Yes I know she was a Creator's Pet and everyone hated her and blablabla... But why is there no in-universe explanation for why she left? The new season starts and we see this random new ADA without any explanation.

• I'm a bit shocked that we got nothing about Marlowe's whereabouts. And to be honest, I never had any problems with her. Personally I always thought people hated her for the same reason they hated Dani: She dared to be a woman with a close relationship/history with Stabler not named Benson.
  • Can't speak for anyone else, but I've never been a fan of the Benson/Stabler ship and I actually liked Dani, but I disliked Marlowe from the get-go. She was self-righteous, she treated everyone else like crap, the character dominated the show as soon as she turned up, and Sharon Stone's acting was abysmal. There was nothing likable about the character whatsoever -- I liked Stuckey better than I liked her. That being said, I was annoyed that we didn't get an explanation for her sudden absence, despite being glad she's gone.

Gray. At one point, they say that if a girl is drunk, she can't consent to sex, even if she's into it at the time. Yet, when it's pointed that a guy can be drunk too while they're having sex, they respond by saying that being drunk doesn't excuse a crime...

... which makes perfect sense if the girl was half-passed-out, but they seemed to be implying that even if a girl was into it at the time and the guy was drunk too, then the guy is still somehow committing a crime (based on the flow of the dialogue). Moreover, nothing is said about a scenario where a man might be drunk and the girl is sober. So, men are just a bunch of perverts and predators who can never be victims themselves when they're drunk, and women are too weak and stupid to consent to sex when under the influence, even if they're fully conscious. Way to insult both genders there, SVU.

• What annoyed me most was them saying "A perv like him WILL MOST DEFINATLY rape again" and acting like he should be thrown in jail for life just over a thing like this and the girls in his school being allowed to treat him like crap. The kid could never catch a break.
• I was pretty annoyed too. I mean, I'm ok with the consensus that most people think men are assholes, but come on, not ALL of us are potential monsters, that's just as sexist thinking as saying women are too emotional. It's like the show doesn't care about portraying the Light and Dark sides of both genders, if the man is the suspect, HE MUST BE EVIL!
  • • It wasn't implied, Olivia stated it outright. I wanted to ask Olivia if she thinks women who drink one too many and run over pedestrians while driving on the wrong side of the road should be given a free pass since under her worldview, women aren't responsible for their own actions while drunk.
    • It seems to me that if you’re culpable for driving drunk because you chose to do it, then anything else you did in a like state of intoxication is likewise a choice. If the argument is that the person didn’t have a choice, being drunk and therefore incapable of choice, then the drunken driver didn’t have a choice either.

The product placements are starting to get a tad overly conspicuous.

I just have trouble believing that gritty city detectives would be such conspicuous consumers. The most egregious example was when Liv whipped out an iPad and held it up Truman Show-style while it played video footage.

• Tell me about it. She also made a big show of using an iPhone to get an image of a license plate at one point.

The way Benson handles the case in Beef bugs me

• First she instantly declares that the victim’s boyfriend was guilty of raping and killing her without looking into her background or work and despite the fact that he seemed like the nicest gentlest man they ever had on the show and he had no history of violence. After finding another mans seamen in the victim she pretty much said that it proved the boyfriend did it because he was a nice come person and all men are apparently naturally violent, thus he discovers she was cheating on him he instantly rapes and kills her. Luckily for the poor guy he got into a small fight with his neighbor or ells they would have declared him guilty on the spot and the elaborate frame job the killer set up would have been completely wasted. After he was cleared they began seriously investigation it and discovered that the man who looked pretty good for it was framed. They talk to his wife and she tells them that another woman had sent her letters and called her saying that she had an affair with her husband and now this other girl was, so she gave her the supplies to frame him. They zero in on the foreman without even looking for a female even as an accomplice despite the fact she said she spoke with a woman on the phone. At the end they determined that he was covering for his boss/mother because The Killer Was Left-Handed and she was killed by a right handed person. While they did eventually get the killer it would have been easier if they actually looked for a woman along with him.
  • There is also the fact that they could not tell that the seamen had been frozen despite the fact that in an earlier episode they were told by a lab tech that it is easy to till if it was because freezing sperm causes their tails to be bent.
    • The guy's wife never talked to anyone on the phone. The "mystery woman" just communicated to the wife in letters. As for the semen, I think she said it had been "collected" that night, so I guess it wouldn't have had time to totally freeze.

In the episode "Asunder" they acted like the wife was in danger despite the fact that the husband was the one who was regularly beaten and sent to the hospital

In the beginning of the episode the wife claimed her police sergeant husband raped her after they got into a fight. They talked to his coworkers and neighbors and discovered that they had a very turbulent marriage and that she liked to physically and emotionally abuse him. However since All Abusers Are Male they just treat this information as motive and as him being a battered spouse or (with the exception of Munch) that he might not have actually raped her. After he is sent to the hospital because of her abuse and he fills assault charges against her SVU general reaction was that Abuse Is Okay When It Is Female On Male and the guy was a scumbag for filling charges against her, now imagine if the genders where reversed. The wife eventually dropped the charges but they continued on as if it was still a rape case despite a lack of evidence and the supposed victim recanting sighting her safety as there concern. It was pretty clear that it was the man not the woman who was in danger in that relationship.

Since when has it been legal for a woman to drug and analy violate a man

• This first brought up in the episode Design when a women wanting sperm used a cattle prod on them, at the time they treated this not being sexual assault as a hurdle to arresting her and that There Should Be a Law. Later in the episode Branded they apparently use this gaping loophole to get a woman that branded and sodamised 3 men off after finding out she was raped by 2 of them 15 years earlier.
  • Actually just saw that episode (Branded) a little while ago, and found myself quite angry. For one, they wasted a perfectly good chance to show how men can be victims too, especially since they had Elliot and Oliva seem sympathetic with the men at first and not the jerkasses who say "Men can't be raped, derp". But no, Dick Wolf it seems doesn't want there to be male victims, not unless they're underaged boys who can't possibly stand a chance to fight back. I know it's about the drama, but do they really expect us to just accept that if a man is attacked, he probably deserved it all along? That's just asanine.

The whole show bugs me...

But what really gets to me sometimes is the darned endings. You'll have a fun episode like Doubt which actually takes the idea of how rape can be wrongfully used, or rightfully depending on who you think was telling the truth that just end with no real resolution. Sure, they're tyring to leave it up to the viewers, but it seems like too many episodes do this where things just "BAM, END!" and that's all there is. And that's not even mentioning the flipflop logic of the characters. It's like Elliot is meant to be only sympathetic when the perp is truly guilty, and Oliva can only be tolerated when the suspect has no true redeeming factors, otherwise, it's fair to say that both are A-holes have the time who get what they want (Elliot will pound any pervy man, evens the really harmless ones; and Liv just seems to dead set on locking up anyone who so much has been fingered for the slightest accusation). I know the show has largely become more dramatized in recent years, but that's hardly an excuse for such broken characters.

• Agreed in regards to the show becoming less likable. My thoughts:
  • Personally, I didn't mind Doubt. Some aspects weren't carried out as well as they could have been (such as the stairway scene and subsequent complaint, which would have worked better if she hadn't behaved seductively towards Stabler), but it was one of the better episodes since SVU's slide into fervent melodrama. The concept worked, and the ending helped to hammer in the point. It was one of the few times SVU kept a controversial topic controversial, instead of turning everyone into a straw man in order to back up the writers'/producers'/actors' opinions, or tipping the scales towards someone being guilty. In many ways, the events of the episode (excluding the melodramatic stuff) ended up being a lot more realistic than the straight-forward guilt seen in most other plots. Most real-life rape cases come down to whether or not the judge/jury believes the testimony of the alleged victim/alleged rapist.
  • When they used the same gimmick again for the Mischa Barton episode with the brain-damaged newborn, however, it ended up being total crap, since the episode barely touched on the issue of whether or not the kid should be kept alive up until the final couple minutes of the show. Moreover, they'd already done an episode earlier where the show pretty much sided with turning off life support for a child in that situation (the shaken baby episode from season 5). The ending was so out of left-field and anti-climatic that it just left me scratching my head and wondering what the hell the writers/producers had been smoking.
  • Yes, the characterization of the so-called protagonists is getting extremely sloppy. Both of them used to be likable, despite having their flaws, but the smug, self-righteousness has gotten out of control. Doesn't help that Benson has turned into a completely different person, and Stabler has become a parody of himself. Fin was always a bit one-dimensional, but even his single dimension has been thinning these days, when they actually bother to include him at all. Munch's appearances have turned into something resembling Where's Waldo?
  • I think the main problem is that this show is becoming more and more like CSI as the seasons progress: Smug characters, overuse of melodrama, gimmick episodes, there-should-be-a-law and ripped-from-the-headlines becoming the status quo for script-writing (both of which were mainstays of the L&O franchise to begin with, but it's been so overused and poorly handled lately), no semblance of reality, etc. SVU has always had some unrealistic elements, but they used to fall within Acceptable Breaks From Reality (mostly). Nowadays, they've left reality completely behind, and turned it into the Benson and Stabler do CSI variety hour, complete with tasteless one-liners every five seconds.

Just how old is Calvin supposed to be?

The kid looks, sounds and acts like he's around 12, maybe a year or two younger, yet they occasionally have him do something that only a kid much younger would do -- drawing that picture in art class is already an odd thing to do for a kid his age, and it doesn't help that it looks like it was drawn by a 7-year-old. Olivia calling him "sweetie" doesn't help, either. Any kid over the age of 9 would resent that. I would chalk it up to SVU being clever and having him regress to childlike behaviors, since he never got to experience being a little kid with his mother, but there is zero confirmation of this in-universe -- they act like he's being a totally normal kid. Which leads me to...

Mother-Benson sucks.

"He's doing really well!" she says, as the kid regresses into early childhood, picks fights at school, has identity issues ("Calvin Benson"), and so on. Not to mention that she's unbelievably patronizing towards the kid ("Oh, sweetie, don't worry.") Plus, this has pretty much sealed her slide into Chickification.

• Seconded. Thankfully child services took him away -- let's hope for good. Talk about a jumping-the-shark dynamic.
  • Chickification? Are you serious? Or are you thinking about something else?
    • Yes, I'm serious. They've definitely made her more stereotypically girly in latter seasons, likely due to Actor On Board. My entry was not Real Women Never Wear Dresses because Benson literally wore a dress and did several girly things from time to time in earlier seasons, and few people complained. The problem isn't some Straw Feminist issue regarding what "real" women should act like, it's the fact that Benson has morphed into a completely different person in recent seasons, becoming girlier in the process -- she was portrayed as being more of a tomboy back when the show was in its prime. The character has been completely derailed because they're trying to make her more feminine, in response to viewers thinking she was a closeted lesbian. The show has become more and more focused on Benson having a serious case of My Biological Clock Is Ticking, which wouldn't be an issue on its own, except it just-so-happened to coincide with the onset of the Chickification. Mommy!Benson was even more out-of-character than Chickified!Benson, basically becoming the Lighter and Softer version of the character, which is the very essence of Chickification.

Why does the main cast treat the regular defense attornies badly?

One of them even defended Olivia when she was accused of murder, but the detectives keep on saying "Oh look it's the enemy."

• The logic of the show seems to be that all defense attornies know that their clients are guilty and try to get them off anyway, so they're just as bad, if not worse, then the people they defend, and only stand in the way of justice. Keep in mind that Stabler and Benson never make any wrong accusations or finger the wrong suspect (except for those few cases when they do), so the defense must obviously be trying to keep the guilty from getting punished. It didn't count when Olivia was on trial because she so obviously didn't do it.
  • That attorney in that specific ep who defended Olivia was a private one who was hired to defend Olivia (did they ever explain who hired him?) so the anger is also rooted in the fact that his clients think they can screw the rules cuz they have money. But that attorney specifically was always polite and professional, unlike some of the other ones on the show who utterly delight in keeping Complete Monsters on the street so Liv's attitude toward him was clearly biting the hand that was feeding her.

About the episode Confession, where the teenager came forward because he was developing pedophilic feelings towards his brother

Was I the only one who was annoyed with how they treated the kid like he was a Complete Monster, even though he had done the right thing by trying to get help before he ended up acting on the impulses? I mean, yeah, child molesters (as in pedophiles who actually molest children, rather than merely having the urge to do so) are utter scum, and it makes sense to do some investigating to make sure he was telling the truth about not having done anything yet, and that he wouldn't have contact with his brother, but it wasn't like the kid had chosen to have those urges -- it was obvious that he didn't want to be attracted to children, and knew it would be wrong to act on his impulses. Not only that, but the fact that he came forward was incredibly brave and selfless, given that he was pretty much damning himself to a lifetime of scrutiny. Most adults wouldn't have had the moral sense to do that, let alone your average teenager.

• That was kinda annoying for me, too. The first thing Olivia does is tell his parents he's a pedophile and act like he's acted on his impulses, then they act like he never did a thing and that Grayleck is a bitch for prosecuting him.
• Yeah, that episode drove me nuts- I guess you could argue that Olivia and Stabler have seen so many child molesters, they'd get paranoid over the mere suggestion of someone being attracted to children, but here they just seemed like lunatics. The fact that he was outright-terrified of actually doing something to his step-brother, who he cared about and seriously didn't want to hurt, should've treated them better. They even have a speech where they discuss how therapy and even castration doesn't stop a pedophile from being a pedophile and that they'll always be a danger to society. They wind up telling his parents about his urges and his step-father kicks him out of the house. The end of the episode winds up with him getting killed after having molested someone somewhere but the detectives don't know who. The fact that he molested after all was treated as something inevitable that was going to happen no matter what, but it could easily have been avoided if they just listened to the kid's pleas and gotten him help instead of telling his parents and getting him thrown out on the streets. To cap this off, the reasoning for why they couldn't give him psychological help was because pedophiles can only get therapy after they've become child molesters. Not a cop, but pretty sure that's not true.
  • • The worst part is that there are some effective treatments for libido driven pedophiles out there available to people who have NOT molested children. According to the Other Wiki chemical castrations combined with other treatments have proven highly effective for removing urges when the urges are driven by libido as they are with guy in Confession. For sadistic/violent offenders who rape children out of anger or the desire for control these aren't effective, but the same goes for regular rapists as well. Had Olivia and Stabler been willing to help that teen everything that followed could have been fucking prevented, but no. They chose to be huge fucking asshats instead.
    • The idiotic thing about assuming that most or all pedophiles eventually act on their impulses is that any studies done on the subject only include the ones who have already been convicted of molestation; it's common sense that someone who has done something in the past is more likely to do it again, whether we're talking about molestation, robbery, or jaywalking. Figuring out the stats for all pedophiles, instead of just the ones who have been charged with a crime, is damn near impossible. There is simply no way of knowing how many pedophiles are actually out there, since people aren't exactly inclined to come forward and identify themselves as such. For an accurate study, you'd need a group who hasn't been charged with a sex crime in addiction to the ones that have, and it's highly unlikely that enough people would be willing to out themselves as pedophiles to make up a proper sample pool. The messed up thing is that pedophile-hysteria actually hinders the fight against child molestation by making it so difficult to properly study the problem. That episode was an example of a larger societal problem: The inability to distinguish having an urge from acting on it. If we changed our way of thinking, maybe more of them would come forward and get help, possibly reducing the incidence of child abuse. Conversely, those who actually do molest children deserve every ounce scorn they get -- having an urge doesn't give anyone the right to act on it.

Was anyone else bugged by the portrayal of Kathleen's bipolar disorder?

Granted, no two people suffer from this disorder quite the same way, and there are indeed some very extreme forms of mania. What bugs me the most is the rapid diagnosis of her condition. Bipolar disorder is very complex, and can often easily be mistaken for many similar mood disorders. As someone who is currently keeping a mood chart for the purposes of diagnosis, I can say firsthand it takes weeks or months to make a certain diagnosis and determine which medication would be appropriate to start with. It seemed as if the moment Kathleen got to the hospital, the doctor instantly said "Well, she's bipolar!" after examining her for five minutes.

• They do that with other disorders too, particularly personality disorders. You're right, it's very irritating -- you can't just walk into a room, chat with someone for half an hour, and then know that they're bi-polar/borderline/sociopathic/etc. The description Huang gives of these disorders is also quite irritating.
• You are forgetting about Huang's psychic abilities and general omniscience, which allow him to diagnose perps from five minutes' observation (not even interviewing them directly, just observing them through the glass), or even from bits of crime scene evidence.

All through out the episode where the teenage pedophile (Who has yet to commit a crime, mind you) turns himself in, the detectives are going on about how "no one is born a devient" but then Olivia tells the kids mom "You didn't make him a pedophile. Thats who he is." So...um...what?

Does every episode have to involve a big dramatic situation involving a hostage scene, detectives getting shot, some big, dramatic personal drama on the part of the detectives, etc.?

It's bad enough that the season finales have to involve fake kisses and crazy AD As handing dead children to their delusional mothers, but every single episode seems to involve a hostage scene or something equally over-the-top these days. We have Elliot running off to meet up with a kidnapper after the guy texts him, an ADA being murdered, a TV host being held at knife-point, all in two episodes. This season, we've had Benson doing a standoff with a victim who had just bought a gun, Benson hallucinating after being an idiot and inhaling the vapour of cooking mushrooms, Eliot pretending to hallucinate in open court, Benson briefly awarded a kid and then getting the child taken away, Benson thinking she's hunting down her dad (AGAIN), that annoying FBI agent being raped, Stabler being shot (AGAIN), the detectives walking in on a rapist after he rapes a girl in the hospital, Stabler going undercover (AGAIN) as a sex addict and having a creepy girl try to seduce him, Stabler's daughter inserting herself into investigations several different times, plus some other stuff I've probably missed. And then there are all of Elliot's random injuries over the past few seasons... temporary blindness, getting shot roughly a thousand times, getting blown up, etc. And now, in every episodes, it always ends up being personal. Oh, and the "turns out the good guy was really the bad guy" twists are so common that it's shocking when a character turns out not to be secretly evil (I half-expected it to turn out that that news reporter murdered her own sister and killed Sonya). What the hell, SVU? Drama is great, but melodrama is bloody annoying and will ultimate get you cancelled.

• And let's check out the It's Personal episodes this season, which amount to almost EVERY SINGLE ONE: E1, everyone is pissy because the neighbourhood watch guy steps into their territory. E2, neighbourhood watch guy turns out to be evil, shocking everyone (except the viewers). E3, Benson stalks a rape victim, and then the whole teams stalks her rapist. E4, Papa Wolf Stabler is mad because a dad unknowingly gave his kids to a sex ring. E5, everyone is pissy because Benson accidentally got high, and then suddenly hates cola for some reason. E6, everyone bonds with the rapist female just because she happens to also be a rape victim. E7... oh boy, yet another Oliva Child of Rape dramafest. E8, Star is raped and Stabler gets shot, obvious It's Personal connection there. E9 involved Elliot's daughter, albeit in a very loose way. E10 had Calvin's mom turn up again, and supermom Benson lose custody. E11 saw the return of Papa Wolf Stabler. E12 didn't have any It's Personal crap, as far as I can remember. E13 has the usual "I'm undercover, so now I'm involved" schtick going on. E14 had the team upset because of all the crooked cops. E15 also avoided the It's Personal stuff, again, as far as I can remember. E16, Elliot runs off to deal with the perp one-on-one, resulting in him getting attached to the case. And E7... ohe boy. It's Personal for Paxton because it's the case taht haunts her and makes her drink and It's Personal for Benson because her buddy got murdered. So that's two out of 17 episodes that didn't involve this overused ploy.

"Baggage" ^[2]

After they find that the serial rapist/murderer has been using his job delivering luggage for an airline to troll for victims, they go to arrest him. He's freed on bail while they check his alibi and when they break it, they have to rescue him from another rape attempt because he's still delivering luggage for the airline. WTF? The airline didn't put him on paid/unpaid leave or fire his ass? Seriously, the airline didn't seem to even know he'd been arrested on suspicion of rape. Why didn't the detectives or anyone tell the airline to stop sending him out? If they hadn't broken his well-crafted alibi in time, he would have killed another woman.

"Doubt": Novak's closing argument

In it, she said something to the effect of "Why would the victim accuse the professor if he weren't guilty?" You Fail Logic Forever Casey: assuming that all things being equal the alleged victim was telling the truth, didn't she make a false complaint of sexual harassment against Detective unStabler? Why would she have accused him of touching her if the video footage we saw of him catching her innocently on the apartment steps was clearly doctored to fool the viewers?

• • Actually it was more her saying that why would the victim go through all of the embarrassment and hell of a trial if she wasn't telling the truth but point taken.

Are the DAs contractually obligated to spar with the detectives at every turn?

If the perp is a Complete Monster with a long rap sheet and a horrific killer, they have to chew out the detectives for trivial mistakes, find fault with every piece of evidence, pull explanations out of their ass for why they refuse to charge the suspects under the assumption "The defense will claim his penis detached itself and ran free; you need more than a DNA match, witness statements and surveillance footage" and drop the charges at the drop of a hat. If the perp is a sympathetic, sweet, innocent suspect with a childlike personality who was brainwashed and traumatized and their victims were assholes, they have to throw the book at the defendant and fight like a dog to get that allmighty conviction by accepting perjured testimony and redacting the slightest bit of evidence that would give the jury a reason to see them as anything more than a cold-blooded killer.

Why does nearly every episode seem to make a point of mentioning how attractive everyone finds Benson?

Seriously, she's alright, but it's gotten to the point of looking like she insists this be written into the show (or one of the writers has a fetish for her).

• Might be in the actress's contract. I notice a lot of women come onto Elliot as well.

The end of Screwed bugs me.

The detectives did some questionable things in past episodes, so the guy didn't kill anyone? And why is Novak in trouble? She didn't do anything.

• Don't think I've seen the episode you're talking about, but if you can raise large enough concerns about the legitimacy of the police working the case (such as finding evidence of racism, excessive violence, planting evidence, ect.), it can throw their entire investigation into doubt. During the OJ Simpson trial, doubt was cast on the legitimacy of the case because of taped evidence of some of the detectives using racial slurs in an unrelated case. If the defense attorney working the case could draw attention to the mountains of misconduct the SVU detectives perform week after week, it would cast doubts on the whole affair.

The episode Strain

Ok, so a man kills two homosexuals because they carry a rare and dangerous type of AIDS (oh, and one of them infected his late brother), yet people feel sympathetic because the guy claims he was "preventing" further infections. No court in real life would say "He's got a point, let's let him go." So they say it's ok to kill people with rare diseases so they can't infect others? Well ok, then let's kill a pedophile and his entire family, clearly his vile genes might activate in his children and make them predators. While I'm not bugged much by the end (though you'd think 15 years seems a bit too light for killing two people), it's still ludicrous to think that any sane, logical human would be "Hmm, clearly killing these people will prevent further infections."

• • There are two things wrong with what you said:
    • The guy was going around having unprotected sex with a bunch of other men despite the fact that he was infected with a very deadly strain of AIDS. The fact that he had the disease wasn't the problem, but the things he was carelessly doing with it. The show made a point of the fact that people need to be responsible when it comes to sex with strangers. The thing is that worried the main cast was that the jury would ignore the fact that both parties are responsible for their actions and that anyone who got infected by that man was a moron for not taking proper precautions.
    • A pedophile isn't automatically a child predator since pedophilia is merely a sexual attraction and not all of them are exclusively attracted to prepubescents. Being biologically related to a pedophile does not most likely make you one.
• And you clearly didn't read the thing properly. I said it was ridiculous how they try to crucify the dead man like he was a monster. Yes, it was irresponsible to not tell his potential partners. But that hardly makes the murder justified. And the thing with the pedophile was a jab at the ignorant opion that "Oh, there is something wrong with this person, let's persecute and destroy them before they bring harm to us."

The reaction to O'Halloran's death in "Zebras" is awful

I'm not even going to go into the whole "SVU is getting creepier/trying to get creepier" What bugs me is that the lab tech is stabbed and NO ONE cares! It's not even mentioned again. He was their lab tech since Season 3 or something. They talked to him so much and knew him, and they're like "Oh, he's dead. Oh no! Stabler is in trouble!" It really gets me angry.

Don't they have metal detectors?

Is it just me, or is the Manhattan SVU precinct the most dangerous place to be in the city? It seems that every other week, some perp pulls a gun or a knife. I get that all the cops carry guns, but shouldn't they at least have civilians walk through metal detectors on the way in? My middle school shouldn't have tighter security than a police station.

• Chalk that one up to holding the Idiot/ConflictBall, I guess.

Entrapment

Is it just me, or do the detectives on the show straddle the line between sting operations and entrapment? Every other time they set up some poor schmuck I end up wondering whether what the police are doing is actually legal.

• Can you give an example?
  • I can give an example. In one episode, a convicted child molester is released from prison. After a young woman is raped, the cops assumed he did it. So Stabler decides to go undercover as just released convicted child molester as well to see if he did. Stabler decided it was a good idea to coax the guy back to the slammer. In the end, the guy fell off the wagon and kidnapped the girl. Stabler saves the girl and kills the molester. Of course, the molester DID in fact call out Stabler on his assuming nature for basically trapping him to rape again. Not only that, but the fact that the guy is now dead, we never learn if he did in fact rape the other girl.
    • IIRC, Stabler had just given up on testing the guy when he showed up in a van with a party in the back, so to speak. The whole thing is morally dubious, cause SVU.
  • Entrapment is a defense that works much more often in television than in real life. In answer to your question, use the following standard (which is the actual legal standard for entrapment: Law enforcement lures, baits, or provokes an ordinarily law-abiding person into committing a crime that he would not have committed but for the government intervention. This is how undercover sting operations, such as drug buys, work.

Harassment or Good Detective Work?

This may be a case of Truth in Television, but how much investigating can the police do if the victim does not want to report the crime? It's true that they just have the victim's best interests at heart, but it seems like in a lot of the episodes Benson and Stabler (usually Benson) really cross the line and are just flat-out harassing the victims. I can't even count how many episodes start out with a girl waking up in the hospital after being attacked, only to refuse to cooperate with or lend anything to the investigation. And every single time the detectives (again, usually Benson) browbeat her until she agrees, sometimes going as far as arresting them for some minor charge in order to get them to cooperate. And their favorite line to use is "if you don't help us he's just going to do this again to some other poor girl," which is an extremely manipulative way of essentially saying that the well-being of any potential victim is in the current victim's hands.

Warner is a horrible M.E. and not that good a person

• She seems to believe everything is sexual assault as calls SVU as the primary investigators instead of homicide despite the fact dead bodies are always supposed to go to them first. For instance in Intoxicated she decided that a murder was a sex crime just because there was an ejaculation on the bed she was found on despite the fact it belonged to a married couple. Even worse in wildlife when she did not seem to relies that several small sharp uneven object the leave a lot of saliva were teeth and decided it was a sex crime because apparently because of a little Wiki Walk saliva was found on the victim, saliva is produced by the body, semen is produced by the body, semen is left after sex, sometimes sex is not consensual, SVU is called on those cases. Thus the girl was raped and she called SVU. This is especially bad because of Unstablers habit of leaving dead bodies in his wake because of his reckless style for instance in wildlife if got an innocent man killed by forcing him to become an informant on a case he should not have been involved with in the first place.

"Confrontation"

Does anyone else agree that there are a few things wrong with this episode?

• The perp's whole MO seems bizarre and difficult to carry out. He rapes women repeatedly after getting a urine sample to determine ovulaton. How does he know these women aren't on some form of birth control? There are some non-hormonal contraceptives, like copper IUDs. In addition, I would assume that after being raped most women would take the morning after pill.
• The treatment of Dani by Casey bothered me. We saw when Dani caught the perp, she clearly announced "police!" and was holding her badge. Casey accused her of using excessive force, even though the perp had a knife to her. Dani's behavior seemed reasonable to me. Even "Unstabler" got on her case!
• There was one victim that actually did become pregnant, so the detectives wanted an amniotic fluid sample to determine paternity. Casey wasn't comfortable with the idea of forcing a rape victim to give a sample, but in other episodes she and the other AD As were more than willing to charge victims with various offenses to get them to cooperate. Usually it's the detectives that are uncomfortable. It just seemed like the behavior of most of the characters were acting really out of character.

Eh, let him die

• In the episode "Folly," the unit convinces a male escort to wear a wire while speaking to a woman who has been sending other escorts out to die. Okay, reasonable enough. However, the unit is simply waiting in the car, listening when she finds the wire. They hesitate, then eventually mobilize and then... wait outside her door until they hear the escort screaming. My description doesn't do it justice, but the length of time between them ascertaining that their plant was in trouble and actually doing anything is astonishing. Not to beat a dead horse here, but if it were a female victim they would have barged in the second their informant was even slightly in trouble.
  • The fact that she found the wire on him is another Headscratcher. They knew that the two were in a sexual relationship and that she's a very high-powered woman... given the inevitability of her feeling him, they should have hidden the wire better.

The Conclusion of RAW

Is it me, or did the whole "Oh, and it turns out the foster parents of the black kid were lying scumbags, too" just seem tacked on? I mean, they had a nice episode that revolved around how prejudice, while free to express, often leads to terrible misdeeds, then suddenly they make the sympathetic foster parents out to be bastards. Unless it was a reference to a real life event, it just felt out of place and added strictly for shock value.

{{[WMG| Is it just me or does Uncivilized just reek of Unfortunate Implications?}} Okay, so the episode is about how two male teens go on a sex-offender website & find that the odd guy living in the neighborhood was once convicted of raping a boy years ago when he took a lot of drugs. This leads to U.I. #1: The website apparently had nearly, if not, every facet about the crime laid out in perfect detail. Why would any website like that have such detail enough to where it would be easy enough to re-enact the crime? Ignoring the fact that this seems freally screwed up, it could (and in this episode, did) lead to someone deciding to replicate someone's M.O. and blame the crime on the offender.

Now after this, the two teens eventually wind up killing a kid & point at the ex-offender. As the investigation unfolds & evidence starts showing up that maybe he didn't do it, a D.A. tells Craigan that he wants to set up a court hearing to determine if the ex-offender could give in to any impulses he has to rape children, so they could lock him up indefinitely, regardless if he was innocent of the current crime. When it's revealed that the chain used to choke the victim to death nor the genetic material found on the body couldn't have come from the suspect and Craigan lets him go, everyone in the preceint does the "You got away with it, you bastard" staring at him as he's leaving. So now comes #2: Why? The guy didn't do it! Am I missing some sort of info that if a person is released due to exonerating evidence, they should be met with scorn?

Now this all leads to Stabler & Benson telling the victim's parents that while the offender didn't kill their son, that hearing is still happening. After court, the offender is walking down the steps with his attorney when the father of the victim walks up and empties an entire fucking clip of handgun ammo into the guy's chest. This leads to #3: Do the fucking writers of the show think that if somebody was an offender in the past, something bad has to happen to him? The whole shooting was entirely unnecessary! And let's not forget #4: It would be one thing if the offender did kill the kid and the dad shot him to death, but the offender was entirely innocent in this case. What possible path of logic could have lead to the dad kiling the guy? It's like, say Guy X have a cat and someone kills it & it initially looks like Guy Y did it because he tortured animals when he was a kid but then it's discovered that it was actually Guy Z. But then all of a sudden, Guy X stabs Guy Y in the stomach repeatedly. Why would that fucking happen?! A Shocking Swerve that didn't need to exist.

• Where have you been? SVU is almost nothing BUT Shocking Swerves that didn't need to exist.

This entire show is a Wallbanger

Like the time Un Stabler tracks down a girl who ran off to look for her father, finds a cop who was giving her shelter for sex, finds him handcuffed to the bed, then scrawls "kiddie lover" on his arm with a marker+threat of jail to scare him into confessing, then leaves him with a couple of unsympathetic cops who presumably would have beaten him up(and then claimed he was resisting arrest). Shit like that pisses me off to no end, and is the reason why I try to just tune it out whenever my mum switches the channel to the show. From a personal standpoint, I would rather exile paedophiles to their own island prison, where they can live out the rest of their days without temptation. Otherwise, anyone found exposing a convict's crime(and reason for being in jail) will be sentenced to hard time as well. Seriously, the prison system is fucked up enough without self-righteous bastards carrying out personal vendettas and exacting revenge via other convicts.

All of the times someone waltzes right into the police station with a gun and shoots somebody.

For god sakes, don't they search them before they let people into a police station!?

'Russian Brides.' Just... just 'Russian Brides.'

• 1) Didn't they already do an episode on European mail-order brides where one goes around scamming men out of thier money and having some relation to the Russian Mafia killing people? I may be confusing mail-order bride with hooker, since I'm thinking of 'Russian Love Poem,' but... they still have the same basic plot, with the few differences being the 'kidnapped' child, the lady actually having done the killing and a few other minor things e.e
• 2) The treatment of those nerds... just bugs me. So much. What the hell made Fin and Blonde!Olivia (Because let's face it, the new blonde lady and Amaro are just the writers trying to replace the Benson and Stabler dynamic) so pissy as to threaten them with Prison Rape when they offered to wait and let them get a warrant, dammit?! Sure, the guy with the lollipop sounded like an obnoxious teen, but... I mean, they've handled guys twice as obnoxious as him and at least had the courtesy to not rough him up like that until they got him in an interrogation room. I mean, you could say that the nerds were likely to try and erase all thier crap and leave by the time the cops got there with a warrant, but... still bugs me. It felt like them roughing up those guys was the writers poking fun at Hollywood Nerds or something e.e

'The entire second half of "stolen"'

OK, so they find the kid who was illegally adopted has a loving home with wonderful parents. Naturally the biological dad wants custody, and it's a long, tense trial. But in the end, they place the kid with the biological father, which really infuriated me. The kid had explicitly expressed his wish to stay with his adoptive family, who seemed stable and loving, if not perticularly rich, but rich enough to provide for him. Furthermore, the father was a single dad with two other kids, who had recently gone through a messy divorce with an absolute bitch, it semed. (Seriously, I don't advocate violence against women, but I just wanted to slug that haughty, sniveling little shrew the moment she said "I have contempt for this" (A DNA test to investigate a murder)) I know we aren't supposed to like her, but who would want someone like that in their life? L Aos, for all the posturing that the father was this "good person" all he put forth was "I was cheated..." "I never got the time..." waaa waaa waaa. me, me, me. Did it never occur to the man that he could be a part of his son's life without tearing the kid away from everything he ever knew? Maybe it's because I have loving parents and even though I'm not adopted, I, as an empathetic person, could imagine a situation like this and how it would feel that this episode bugged me so much, but no one seemed to take what the kid wanted, or even Dr. Huang's testimony into account at all, instead taking real-world-irrelivent paternity DNA into account as more important. So now the kid has to be torn from the only home he ever knew to go live with a complete stranger, a stranger, no less, who has never met the boy in question before. Nice job, courts. I can see the boy growing up resenting the asshole who tore him away from the parents he obviously wanted to stay with. Yeah, that's a recipe for a healthy relationship all right, and consequently, I can see him running away a lot and acting out, just like Huang said, or, given how he was scowling at Kragen at the end, marching right back into the courthouse and trying to file an appeal of some kind. This episode made absolutely no sense at all to me and left a really bad taste in my mouth. They missed an oppertunity for a really heartwarming conclusion with the whole 'best interests of the child' message going on. Instead, they seemed to do the exact oppasite, acting in the best interests of legal minutae and letter-not-intent nitpicking. I don't know what they were going for with this episode, but it just succeeded in pissing me off.

• • Horribly, this is Truth in Television, some states will even force a kid to move across the country in their senior year and screw up their schooling because of DNA... Luckily, its normally an affair issue of some sort and its notnearly as common as it used to be. But, under most circumstances what is best for the kid is nothing compared to DNA, lawsuits and kidnapping charges :(

When will there ever be a good representation of the LGBTQ community?

When I write this, I speak not about the victims, but rather the gay rights groups that come to back them up. All of them are wild and radical, and they only care about the fact that the victim is gay, not about any other feature. They are infuriatingly unrealistic and do not at all resemble how most of the LGBTQ community acts. Is there one episode that shows a mild-mannered gay rights activist?

• • Fin's son Ken seems to be their go-to character for having a positive gay role model. So positive, in fact, that we never see any boyfriends on screen or ever hear him mention dating men.
    • His fiancee appeared in a episode recently, although he was the Victim of the Week.

Olivia and her discriminatory treatment of mentally-ill people

• She was a total bitch to a mentally-unstable male witness, making sure he knew that she loathes people like him. But since his testimony was needed in the case, she also pressured him into not taking his meds and "be useful". She didn't listen to the guy's mother when she attempted to explain what went on and kept browbeating and trash-talking him into acting like she wanted. And then the dude lost it, hung himself as soon as he gave his testimony, and Olivia was shocked that the dude was Driven to Suicide? And she gets, like, few to none punishment aside of the dude's mom looking at her hatefully? Sorry, but Olivia Benson crossed the Moral Event Horizon for me, and whenever I see her touted as "a strong and badass woman who takes no shit" I fucking SEETHE. (But hey, a man killed himself, who cares.)
  • He was actually pressured to start taking medication, not get off his meds. He did not like being medicated but if he didn't not only could he not testify, but the perp was ready to say that he did the crime and since he assaulted the perp(to defend the victim) and had blood on his clothes it could help him get off.
    • Still not an excuse for Olivia bullying and being a total asshole to him. She plainly told him horrible things that no one ever should tell to mentally-ill persons, and helped to screw up an already unstable person even more than he was.

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1. ↑ She says "All rapists have a problem with women," as if to imply that all rapists are misogynists and/or Male. Never mind her ignoring it's possible for males to be raped.
2. ↑ (man, that episode gets all the complaints)