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My Mariska Diary

 We wrapped this season with an enjoyable and trashy four-part melodrama.


A young sociopath builds an online network called "Shadowerk," where you can recruit a kind of Taskrabbit guy to murder your enemy. (It's an interesting plot to choose, because Jeffrey Toobin has recently written about how the internet has made events like January 6 "easier to plan." Toobin asks, if Timothy McVeigh had had internet access, what might have happened beyond Oklahoma City? ....McVeigh is named in the final "SVU" episodes of this season.)

Olivia's victory over the sociopath is inevitable, but the process involves a fun, surprising interlude where Benson's team watches spy-cam footage of a dumpy little office in Ohio. The Ohio office workers complain about low toner, bad coffee, a requirement to stay after hours. These discussions recall some of the little dramas within Olivia's own office: This has been a year of tense conversations about SVU dress code, seating arrangements, and the effort to make meetings with Terry Serpico's character as short as possible. ("Knock if I'm not out within five minutes.") I like how David Graziano's personal obsession with office politics becomes a little grace note in the season finale.

The other delightful thing: Benson has been sitting on an unopened Christmas present from Noah's "extra family." The present has been gathering dust for five months. I love fictional treatments of gift-giving--this is basically all that happens within James Marshall's "George and Martha" stories--and so I enjoy the moment when Stabler accuses Benson of "normalitis." Stabler says, "If you weren't weirdly intimidated by that conservative couple in Westchester, you would just open their present." (And so a Christmas present becomes a statement with regard to Benson's reservations about her own love life! Interesting!)

The actual present is a shitty ornament from CVS: "Live Laugh Love." But one E has become detached, so the object says: "Liv Laugh Love." I believe that anyone who hands out this junk as a gift must be deeply, deeply angry--but maybe we'll investigate that question next year. I just like that Graziano is swinging for the fences.
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