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Love and Sex

 SVU. First, let's see where we are.

A concerned citizen arrives at the station. Her neighbor, Rosa, is involved in weird business. Rosa won a palatial subsidized-housing spot through a lottery--a really tough lottery--but where is the record of her application? And why are strange men entering and exiting her home at all hours, throughout the week?

Olivia understands pretty quickly that she is looking at a sex-trafficking situation. The main question is: which powerful people are involved? Meaningful eye contact and gentle vocal tones ensure that Olivia wins Rosa's cooperation; Rosa wears a wire and brings down a charismatic "wolf," a corrupt broker who is a bit like Boss Tweed or like Ghislaine Maxwell. And several senators also fall, as a result.

Not the most gripping SVU. The title ("Wolves in Sheep's Clothing") pretty much tells us where we're going. But I liked the coda, which was like something from Shakespeare, or the end of "A Little Night Music." A Shakespearean comedy tends to end with couples newly-formed; people are paired off, sometimes in surprising ways. In SVU, we know which couples will tango at the climactic wedding, but we don't really know what the tango will look like. The writers engineer some graceful surprises: Fin is in fact not married to Phoebe, Carisi is now truly entangled with Rollins, Olivia and Elliot are now awkwardly semi-acknowledging their romantic tension. ("You always remember your first partner. A partnership is like a marriage.....")

Let September arrive very soon!
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