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SVU Tonight

 Tonight's 8 PM "SVU" is a rerun (9 PM is new) -- but the 8 PM is worth exploring.


8 PM has one of the creepiest SVU villains--the "post-graduate psychopath." It's a guy from the mid-years of SVU--re-visited. Famously, around eight years ago, Amaro et al. apprehended a kid who enjoyed brutalizing his sister, torturing pets, etc.

Tonight's chapter has the kid "graduating" from juvenile detention and re-entering the world.

Then it's one chilling scene after another.

The kid visits Rollins's child in a playground, gives her a stuffed animal, and makes a reference to her pet cat; all this is enough to alert Rollins that she is in danger.

Next, the kid finds Broadway's Andre De Shields (playing a homeless guy)--and Andre De Shields purchases the ropes, the thick duct tape, and the shovels that the kid will "need." (Best not to have the Home Depot receipt obviously connected with the kid. Now the killings begin.)

Former "classmates" of the psychopath are interviewed; a local carnival is inspected. The game of cat-and-mouse explodes in a "funhouse" sequence (a reference to "Lady from Shanghai"? "Strangers on a Train"?) It's then that the kid tells Rollins how much he admires the ocean--because the ocean "can kill without any hassle."

This is a recent episode, but it has an old-school SVU feel--startling shifts, memorable characters.

I'm ready.
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