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"Law and Order: SVU"

 "SVU" had a great deal of work to accomplish this past week, and mostly, the writers did their job well. (One writer was Julie Martin; I can't remember the other.)


A rookie might think that the Rollisi wedding would be the climax of the hour--but, wisely, Martin understood that this isn't *really* why people care about Amanda Rollins. People care because of the Amanda/Olivia bond. So we had the wedding right away--and we were left to wonder what the *actual* fireworks might be. (We wondered for a half hour.)

The craftiness makes me think of "Ozymandias," from "Breaking Bad." If you murder Uncle Hank in minute five, how do you manage the rest of the episode?

Another grace note I admired: Olivia is engulfed in ominous music during the "upstate Christmas-house segments," and the horror-film score clashes nicely with the reindeer and the Santas. But, mostly, the upstate Christmas-house parts are *not* terrifying: Noah's new friends are apparently *not* creepy, and the apple pie looks respectable. The music at least plants the seed that we'll get something like a new Brooke Shields situation within the next few episodes; or maybe the trauma is just that Noah is "peeling away." ("My brother is, like, my only real family." A stand-out line in this season!)

And a few words about Kelli Giddish. The Fordham idea has felt hurried and inorganic. (This kind of pacing issue is something that SVU just mishandles, and mishandles, on a regular basis.) Even so, I thought that Giddish really "sold" her final scenes, so that my spouse and I were sobbing on the couch. The hour had a focus on playacting: Olivia's feigned stoicism in Noah's company, the delightful Hitchcockian "undercover" operation that Olivia and Amanda cooked up. A main (additional) act was Amanda's coolness and calmness in the bar scene; this performance is disrupted when she finally reveals she is leaving her job, and she grows (regrettably) impatient with Olivia's mini-tantrum. The clumsiness and the sense of rupture are really well-judged. There isn't much doubt that Olivia will eventually pull herself together--so the stakes aren't especially high--but I still liked the awkwardness and confusion.

Honesty has a cost. This idea is reintroduced when Olivia says she wants revealing personal footage available to a prosecutor; "if I ask victims to disclose everything, why shouldn't I hold myself to that high standard?"

I haven't loved this season, but I thought several people were firing on all cylinders on December 8. And the title: "A Trauma in a Pear Tree." How can you beat that?
















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  1. Unkie JDecember 11, 2022 at 8:49 AM

    We agree.... The promise of Noah's new "brother's" lurking, dark genes is another hook, at least for me.

    ReplyDelete
  2. ReaderDecember 11, 2022 at 9:12 AM

    The writers seem to want us in this particular state. The brother gives Noah a violent-seeming video game, I think? Which could mean something, or could just be a case of PlayStation being generally violent. Olivia seems worried about Noah's screen use -- this seems to be an all-American issue for parents.

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