Oh man. Man oh man. I only say this like three times a week but I really wish I were still drinking, because if any hour of television earned me a stiff vodka on the rocks or maybe a half liter of Cabernet it’s what I lovingly dubbed Before Stablerset.
But before I tear into this smorgasbord of shit, I ought to mention that my laptop’s hard drive got dead. As such, I have potentially lost all my writing in progress, which includes reviews of the last two most recent episodes of SVU. Even if not it’s an annoying setback, having to learn a whole new keyboard. Rest assured I will return to those in a decent interval. For now, though, “Return of the Prodigal Son” is in my crosshairs. For those not in the know, Christopher Meloni left the show at the end of Season 12 and his character hasn’t been seen since. In the interim Meloni appeared on True Blood and Happy!, indicating he wanted to perform in more down to earth, realistic television. The show established him deciding to quit the force because he didn’t want to deal with the paperwork of shooting a 16 year old girl. To say this is an anticipated episode would be an understatement. “When is Stabler coming back?” is the first question anyone even adjacent to the production is asked for the last decade. “This episode oughta hold those little SOBs” said showrunner Warren Leight reportedly. Those expecting a return to form for the show…I don’t know what the fuck you’re thinking. What return to form? Why would this get better? How could this get better? During the prime Stabler years, Special Victims Unit was a cartoon of reactionary fearmongering. The best this can do is go from being a worse show to a simply bad show and it can’t even manage to do that.
Who did it better?
Credit where credit’s due: they don’t pussyfoot around. They know the audience wants the money shot and they give it. Stabler and Benson are reunited before the opening credits. But how? How are longtime partners reunited after a decade of falling out of contact? Well, it wouldn’t be SVU were it not completely over the top and ridiculous. Stabler’s wife, Kathy, is caught in a car bomb. Yes. The couple were planning on attending Olivia’s awards ceremony (see last episode; she’s up for an award for Excellence in NYPD Condescending Whispering) and wouldn’t you know it, you can’t attend a simple black tie affair without some delinquent blowing up your rental car. In a ripped from the headlines touch, the suspicion first falls on a conspiracy theorist [ding] anti-mask protester [ding] Capitol insurrection participant [ding] who was in the area at the time. If he had a “MATT GAETZ INNOCENT” t-shirt on he’d be the perfect liberal bête noire. He winds up not having anything to do with the case, yet the show spends a lot of time with him anyway. At best SVU deserves points for taking a firm stance opposing “Trump supporters firebombing cop cars”, with Stabler going so far as to comparing them to terrorists, but that doesn’t shed the “copaganda” label for the show just yet.
“You have my blessing…” “Blessing?”
“To bang Olivia when I inevitably die…”
But really, the case of the week is secondary to the fabled reunion. Hell, Kathy’s health outcomes run secondary to the reunion. In one of her scenes she’s literally in a hospital bed talking about how great it is Stabler and Benson are together again. BITCH YOU GOT BLOWN UP LIKE THREE HOURS AGO! The production milks it for all its worth, with the most important scene coming in the hospital as Elliot tries to explain why he ghosted Olivia all those years ago. If that sounds like a soap opera, it’s because SVU is basically that at this point, with more or less rape (depending on which soap is point of comparison). The ghosting is a key point because for years it’s been a question of why Elliot quit the force without so much as a phone call to Olivia, to say nothing of never touching base afterwards. Why would he do that? Well, the real answer is the writers are vindictive pricks. There’s no reason a guy would not even bother to send a text message informing his ex-partner what’s up. But since they were miffed Meloni didn’t renew they decided his character would go radio silence, even during tumultuous events like Benson being kidnapped, acquiring a son, getting a cell phone, etc. The fake answer the episode provides is, no shit, “I was afraid… if I heard your voice, I wouldn’t have been able to leave.” You ever have that feeling where, despite it all, you just want to put a gun in your mouth and pull the trigger? That’s how I felt when I heard that line.
SVU may as well be retitled Cops with Feelings because it’s an hour of cops, who have feelings. They’re cops with feelings. The creep of soap opera elements ironically began right around when Stabler left and it has accelerated with the success of Dick Wolf’s secondary empire, the Chicagoverse. Those shows are all soaps thinly veiled with procedural elements and as they’ve done well in the ratings his old faithful SVU has been massaged to better resemble the Windy City image. It’s atrocious and I hate it. In the good old days of Law & Order, we didn’t know about their personal lives. The cops had no personal lives! The morsels of backstory they did parcel out would be nourishment to the starving. It’d take five years to find out Mike Logan was molested and you would fucking like it. The spartan construction of Law & Order was a feature, not a bug, and while SVU from its inception put more emphasis on personal lives, it never got to this obnoxious degree.
Trent Reznor!
I ought to cover the case, such as it is, though it really is shunted to the background relative to Benson and Stabler hashing it out. Let me remind you it’s yet another instance of SVU having the case for dubious reasons; this time it seems to come down to “the husband of the victim used to work out of this precinct a decade ago”. The Capitol rioter guy goes nowhere, but his scenes are instructive because they reintroduce the audience to interrogation room Stabler. Interrogation room Stabler is one of my favorite Stablers, up there with “incredulous Internal Affairs disagrees with his methods Stabler” and “curbing his children’s autonomy Stabler”. Because she’s an idiot who’s bad at her job, Benson allows the husband of a crime victim into a room with the alleged perpetrator of said crime. Now, SVU knows what you’re thinking. It knows you’re expecting Stabler to rough up the guy, and the suspect camps it up nearly to the point of shouting “I’m glad your wife died and you probably have a small penis too!” at him. Suspects love provoking beatdowns on this shit. Stabler even rolls up his sleeves, as if to create anticipation for the motherfucking ruckus. Yet SVU knows it’s in the era of people caring about police brutality, so Benson intercedes before her former partner can do any damage. I understand this, but I’m still disappointed. See, Stabler is basically The Incredible Hulk, and when people tuned in to The Incredible Hulk, they didn’t want to see David Banner putter around a small town for an hour, they want to see Bill Bixby switch places with Lou Ferrigno and push around cars for a minute. Where is Meloni pushing around cars?
He’s rolling his sleeves/he’s doing ‘em twice
He doesn’t care whether you’re naughty or nice Stabler Claus is coming to town
Instead it becomes some eye glazing over tale of Russian mobsters. They find the triggerman, but it’s obvious he’s just a patsy for the real perpetrator. There’s some humor with the guy’s lawyer initially having the wrong file at arraignment. The lawyer (named Cochran, because fuck subtlety) the family enlists calls that guy “Perry Mason”. I assume he’s referring to fat old Raymond Burr and not the sexy dude from The Americans. Carisi’s play is to get the triggerman to flip, because he admitted he didn’t know who the target was, but before they can get him to narc on his overseer he mysteriously overdoses in police custody. While I suppose it would be anticlimactic to wrap up the case within the confines of 41 minutes, the suggestion that this will be some sort of season arc for Law & Order: Organized Crime has me reaching for my orange juice. As much as I don’t care for the soap opera stuff, the procedural element is still more of a waste. What possible good answer to “who killed Kathy Stabler?” takes 8 episodes to establish. It would have actually been more interesting if the Proud Boy had blown up Elliot’s wife, because—let’s be clear, Elliot Stabler absolutely voted for Trump. If a Trumper attacked his wife for being part of the adrenochrome harvesting gang that turns our kids trans, well, that’d be some pathos. Elliot has to contend with the beliefs he upholds in his day to day life harming his family. Basically my pitch is he goes rogue as a Punisher but of Trump people. I think the culture is ready for it, and I think the culture wants it.
Literally half the show.
Incidentally, the show’s provided explanation for where Stabler was during the last decade is the epitome of cowardice. Like I said, he absolutely voted for Trump, and if there’s one thing he hates more than those uppity Black Lives Matter protesters it’s Antifa. He almost certainly posts on Facebook about those Antifa thugs impersonating peaceful patriots on the 6th. The writers sidestep Stabler’s relationship to the policing that led to multiple uprisings of protest over the last several years by stating he went on walkabout for a while (read: Paul Kersey daring ‘thugs’ to accost him so he can draw his weapon), did private security (read: covered up Qatari royalty’s many indiscretions) and finally wound up as NYPD’s “man in Rome”, which to me is somehow the most absurd thing in this goddamn episode. The fuck does NYPD need one of those for? Do they have 10,000 officers stationed in Korea too? Before you ask, no, I didn’t do any research, so this post could exist. But even if it does, it’s stupid. It’s a real flaw that “Return of the Prodigal Son” writes off Stabler as fighting the fucking Hammer Bros. or covering up Vatican child rape or whatever during this time of the police’s role in society being scrutinized, because let me remind you, there was literally an episode of this show in which Stabler’s career is salvaged when the medical examiner decides to rule his beating a suspect to death as an overdose because the guy had drugs in his system. That’s the exact same fucking thing shithead conservatives were arguing happened with George Floyd. The show mentions he’s shot six people in the line of duty but that can’t be right, it’s way too low.
The other half is characters giving a quizzical look when Olivia admits Stabler abandoned her.
While the idyllic life in Italy may be a copout (get it? “copout”? Hah, that’s almost as funny as the film Cop Out!), don’t worry, they do address Stabler’s reputation and his relationship with NYPD at length. It would almost be compelling material were it not so poorly written and limply depicted. Basically, the new characters (Rollins, Kat, Carisi, Barnes) treat him as some sort of Boogerman to fear and avoid while those who knew him way back when (Benson, Ice-T) defend him. It’s sorta like when an old friend from out of town meets your current friend group and you feel obliged to apologize for his non-PC remarks. “No, no, Stabler’s a great guy, you just need to get to know him.” That Ice-T is one of those people is ridiculous considering he hated Elliot enough to try to transfer out at the end of Season 9. There’s a whole scene of them catching up and talking about Olivia and it just seems wrong.If their relationship has defrosted in the decade and change, how about showing that. How about doing any of the characterization work required to make any of this shit fly, you lazy fucks.
“She got kidnapped about five times, almost raped twice, her SON got almost kidnapped nine times, Brooke Shields was involved…look, it’s all very, very stupid.”
It becomes comical to see Benson defending her ex-partner to her colleagues on the basis of, well, [coughs into hand]. Actual line of dialogue: “he got too rough back in the day, but it wasn’t just testosterone. It was because he cared so much.” Characters will profess he’s changed, but how would they know that, not being in contact with him for over a decade. I guess they just assume it? Maybe they’re trying to ex post facto justify their leniency about Stabler, who admits he had “run of the place” back when Cragen was in charge. It would be funny had it turned out Stabler’s entire problem rested with being assigned to Special Victims Unit and he became the chillest Robbery Homicide detective you ever met. I mean, that’s the character concept, right? Stabler was the SVU guy who really hated pedophiles. He hated them because he had children, the mortal enemy of pedophiles. That’s good writing, that’s complex, interesting writing.
Anyway, time for the shoe to drop. Kathy doesn’t survive her hospital stay. Her spleen ruptured, which is ironic because that’s where I get my black bile I use to write this column from. Wow-ee. I mean, what can you say about deploying the “women in refrigerators” trope in 2021? It’s not as though she was ever a character with dimensions; she nagged Elliot about his job and basically their unhappy marriage (magically reoriented to “happy” in their offscreen decade in Rome) existed to provide an obstacle to Benson and Stabler getting together. Her character may as well have been named “Bulwark”. No disrespect to Isabel Gillies, by the by. She did the best with the material she was given, which was not great. There’s absolutely no reason Kathy had to die for Elliot to rejoin the force in New York. All manner of reasons could justify the return. I’m sure you could even come up with a reason that also allows Meloni some crying for the Emmy consideration reel. It’s cheap drama that…well, I’m not going to say is beneath the show, but they still shouldn’t have done it.
It’s around this point that I looked across the Internet and found that people watched a vastly different show than I did. I know I have a divergent viewpoint vis-à-vis SVU in that a lot of fans like it and I believe it blows chunks. I know that. What I didn’t know was the pervasive “shipping” contingent to the fanbase, specifically people who want Benson and Stabler to hook up. To them, what is to me a “dumbass story for idiots” is a welcome opportunity to bring these characters together now that Stabler isn’t married to a battle ax harpy with a throng of mewling children around her waist. Sure, Hargitay and Meloni have chemistry, but I always thought it platonic. To have it happen after this long a time, potentially, seems questionable as well. I suppose I’m the outlier and the entire population of TV viewers tune in just to see if someone is fucking and if not why not. Fine! Whatever! I lose. I guess I’m wrong for wanting to see grizzled investigators trade gallows humor over crying rape victims. That’s what this show is supposed to be, right?
“Return of the Prodigal Son”, more like “Return of the Prodigal Fun”, right? No. This may be entertaining in a ghoulish sense but it’s definitely not fun. It’s no FOX’s Prodigal Fun, for instance. That has serial killers and Michael Sheen camping it up. This? What does this have? Christopher Meloni looking pained for 70% of the episode and everybody speaking about him in hushed tones while Olivia Benson moons over the Catholic rage addict who ghosted her like three presidential administrations ago. The thing is, I don’t know how this reunion could’ve gone any differently. You know those friendships you fall out of? Then you think about them one day and consider contacting them but so much time has passed it’d be too awkward? That’s Benson/Stabler writ large. If this show happened in Season 15, sure. But Season 22 it’s the equivalent of The Simpsons using a weird Season 1 designed character and trying to update it for HD. Olivia Benson doesn’t even have her original face anymore goddamnit! Sometimes you gotta cut bait and cutting bait on Stabler was the smarter move. So obviously Dick Wolf and company didn’t go that route. When watching SVU, always expect the dumbest outcome.
Why is Stabler’s son a longshoreman?
MASKWATCH: Oh, don’t think I forgot about this shit, you fucks. (“You fucks” is referring to the SVU people, not you lovely readers, of course.) While this may be a format breaker in terms of returning Meloni to the fold, SVU doesn’t veer outside of its territory as “dangerously inaccurate about proper pandemic protocol”. As I’ve said before, I’m not obtuse. I understand that you don’t reunite Benson and Stabler and have them wearing masks. They have to be within kissing distance the entire episode to appease the shippers, and you can’t kiss with masks. They mention the patriot swoop haired guy doesn’t believe in COVID yet in interrogation no one else wears protection either, so SVU is basically saying, yeah, it is a hoax, because we’re not pretending there’s any repercussions from its existence. It’s a fuck you to an audience that has had to deal with this shit for a year now. I don’t think I can recall any part of the episode where the main cast did wear masks.
“Sure, Olivia, intrude on my private family moment of grieving you voyeuristic creep.”
For such an anticipated episode, “Return of the Prodigal Son” was a real pile of shit. Christopher Meloni does a good job, but that’s to be expected because he’s a fine actor. He deserves better material than this sub-soap opera junk. This makes the Oz finale look like actual Shakespeare. Here’s hoping Organized Crime is better, but I’m not getting my hopes up, because what reason would I have to be optimistic. It just makes me wish for vanilla Law & Order to come back. They could solve a variety of cases, examine a number of issues, address the full spectrum of headlines rather than focus on the rape-y ones. Of all the spurious reboots, why we haven’t gotten that one will continue to puzzle me.
Law & Ordocki Season 5 #8 (#42): The Dark Nut Returns
Oh man. Man oh man. I only say this like three times a week but I really wish I were still drinking, because if any hour of television earned me a stiff vodka on the rocks or maybe a half liter of Cabernet it’s what I lovingly dubbed Before Stablerset.
But before I tear into this smorgasbord of shit, I ought to mention that my laptop’s hard drive got dead. As such, I have potentially lost all my writing in progress, which includes reviews of the last two most recent episodes of SVU. Even if not it’s an annoying setback, having to learn a whole new keyboard. Rest assured I will return to those in a decent interval. For now, though, “Return of the Prodigal Son” is in my crosshairs. For those not in the know, Christopher Meloni left the show at the end of Season 12 and his character hasn’t been seen since. In the interim Meloni appeared on True Blood and Happy!, indicating he wanted to perform in more down to earth, realistic television. The show established him deciding to quit the force because he didn’t want to deal with the paperwork of shooting a 16 year old girl. To say this is an anticipated episode would be an understatement. “When is Stabler coming back?” is the first question anyone even adjacent to the production is asked for the last decade. “This episode oughta hold those little SOBs” said showrunner Warren Leight reportedly. Those expecting a return to form for the show…I don’t know what the fuck you’re thinking. What return to form? Why would this get better? How could this get better? During the prime Stabler years, Special Victims Unit was a cartoon of reactionary fearmongering. The best this can do is go from being a worse show to a simply bad show and it can’t even manage to do that.
Who did it better?
Credit where credit’s due: they don’t pussyfoot around. They know the audience wants the money shot and they give it. Stabler and Benson are reunited before the opening credits. But how? How are longtime partners reunited after a decade of falling out of contact? Well, it wouldn’t be SVU were it not completely over the top and ridiculous. Stabler’s wife, Kathy, is caught in a car bomb. Yes. The couple were planning on attending Olivia’s awards ceremony (see last episode; she’s up for an award for Excellence in NYPD Condescending Whispering) and wouldn’t you know it, you can’t attend a simple black tie affair without some delinquent blowing up your rental car. In a ripped from the headlines touch, the suspicion first falls on a conspiracy theorist [ding] anti-mask protester [ding] Capitol insurrection participant [ding] who was in the area at the time. If he had a “MATT GAETZ INNOCENT” t-shirt on he’d be the perfect liberal bête noire. He winds up not having anything to do with the case, yet the show spends a lot of time with him anyway. At best SVU deserves points for taking a firm stance opposing “Trump supporters firebombing cop cars”, with Stabler going so far as to comparing them to terrorists, but that doesn’t shed the “copaganda” label for the show just yet.
“You have my blessing…”
“Blessing?”
“To bang Olivia when I inevitably die…”
But really, the case of the week is secondary to the fabled reunion. Hell, Kathy’s health outcomes run secondary to the reunion. In one of her scenes she’s literally in a hospital bed talking about how great it is Stabler and Benson are together again. BITCH YOU GOT BLOWN UP LIKE THREE HOURS AGO! The production milks it for all its worth, with the most important scene coming in the hospital as Elliot tries to explain why he ghosted Olivia all those years ago. If that sounds like a soap opera, it’s because SVU is basically that at this point, with more or less rape (depending on which soap is point of comparison). The ghosting is a key point because for years it’s been a question of why Elliot quit the force without so much as a phone call to Olivia, to say nothing of never touching base afterwards. Why would he do that? Well, the real answer is the writers are vindictive pricks. There’s no reason a guy would not even bother to send a text message informing his ex-partner what’s up. But since they were miffed Meloni didn’t renew they decided his character would go radio silence, even during tumultuous events like Benson being kidnapped, acquiring a son, getting a cell phone, etc. The fake answer the episode provides is, no shit, “I was afraid… if I heard your voice, I wouldn’t have been able to leave.” You ever have that feeling where, despite it all, you just want to put a gun in your mouth and pull the trigger? That’s how I felt when I heard that line.
SVU may as well be retitled Cops with Feelings because it’s an hour of cops, who have feelings. They’re cops with feelings. The creep of soap opera elements ironically began right around when Stabler left and it has accelerated with the success of Dick Wolf’s secondary empire, the Chicagoverse. Those shows are all soaps thinly veiled with procedural elements and as they’ve done well in the ratings his old faithful SVU has been massaged to better resemble the Windy City image. It’s atrocious and I hate it. In the good old days of Law & Order, we didn’t know about their personal lives. The cops had no personal lives! The morsels of backstory they did parcel out would be nourishment to the starving. It’d take five years to find out Mike Logan was molested and you would fucking like it. The spartan construction of Law & Order was a feature, not a bug, and while SVU from its inception put more emphasis on personal lives, it never got to this obnoxious degree.
Trent Reznor!
I ought to cover the case, such as it is, though it really is shunted to the background relative to Benson and Stabler hashing it out. Let me remind you it’s yet another instance of SVU having the case for dubious reasons; this time it seems to come down to “the husband of the victim used to work out of this precinct a decade ago”. The Capitol rioter guy goes nowhere, but his scenes are instructive because they reintroduce the audience to interrogation room Stabler. Interrogation room Stabler is one of my favorite Stablers, up there with “incredulous Internal Affairs disagrees with his methods Stabler” and “curbing his children’s autonomy Stabler”. Because she’s an idiot who’s bad at her job, Benson allows the husband of a crime victim into a room with the alleged perpetrator of said crime. Now, SVU knows what you’re thinking. It knows you’re expecting Stabler to rough up the guy, and the suspect camps it up nearly to the point of shouting “I’m glad your wife died and you probably have a small penis too!” at him. Suspects love provoking beatdowns on this shit. Stabler even rolls up his sleeves, as if to create anticipation for the motherfucking ruckus. Yet SVU knows it’s in the era of people caring about police brutality, so Benson intercedes before her former partner can do any damage. I understand this, but I’m still disappointed. See, Stabler is basically The Incredible Hulk, and when people tuned in to The Incredible Hulk, they didn’t want to see David Banner putter around a small town for an hour, they want to see Bill Bixby switch places with Lou Ferrigno and push around cars for a minute. Where is Meloni pushing around cars?
He’s rolling his sleeves/he’s doing ‘em twice
He doesn’t care whether you’re naughty or nice
Stabler Claus is coming to town
Instead it becomes some eye glazing over tale of Russian mobsters. They find the triggerman, but it’s obvious he’s just a patsy for the real perpetrator. There’s some humor with the guy’s lawyer initially having the wrong file at arraignment. The lawyer (named Cochran, because fuck subtlety) the family enlists calls that guy “Perry Mason”. I assume he’s referring to fat old Raymond Burr and not the sexy dude from The Americans. Carisi’s play is to get the triggerman to flip, because he admitted he didn’t know who the target was, but before they can get him to narc on his overseer he mysteriously overdoses in police custody. While I suppose it would be anticlimactic to wrap up the case within the confines of 41 minutes, the suggestion that this will be some sort of season arc for Law & Order: Organized Crime has me reaching for my orange juice. As much as I don’t care for the soap opera stuff, the procedural element is still more of a waste. What possible good answer to “who killed Kathy Stabler?” takes 8 episodes to establish. It would have actually been more interesting if the Proud Boy had blown up Elliot’s wife, because—let’s be clear, Elliot Stabler absolutely voted for Trump. If a Trumper attacked his wife for being part of the adrenochrome harvesting gang that turns our kids trans, well, that’d be some pathos. Elliot has to contend with the beliefs he upholds in his day to day life harming his family. Basically my pitch is he goes rogue as a Punisher but of Trump people. I think the culture is ready for it, and I think the culture wants it.
Literally half the show.
Incidentally, the show’s provided explanation for where Stabler was during the last decade is the epitome of cowardice. Like I said, he absolutely voted for Trump, and if there’s one thing he hates more than those uppity Black Lives Matter protesters it’s Antifa. He almost certainly posts on Facebook about those Antifa thugs impersonating peaceful patriots on the 6th. The writers sidestep Stabler’s relationship to the policing that led to multiple uprisings of protest over the last several years by stating he went on walkabout for a while (read: Paul Kersey daring ‘thugs’ to accost him so he can draw his weapon), did private security (read: covered up Qatari royalty’s many indiscretions) and finally wound up as NYPD’s “man in Rome”, which to me is somehow the most absurd thing in this goddamn episode. The fuck does NYPD need one of those for? Do they have 10,000 officers stationed in Korea too? Before you ask, no, I didn’t do any research, so this post could exist. But even if it does, it’s stupid. It’s a real flaw that “Return of the Prodigal Son” writes off Stabler as fighting the fucking Hammer Bros. or covering up Vatican child rape or whatever during this time of the police’s role in society being scrutinized, because let me remind you, there was literally an episode of this show in which Stabler’s career is salvaged when the medical examiner decides to rule his beating a suspect to death as an overdose because the guy had drugs in his system. That’s the exact same fucking thing shithead conservatives were arguing happened with George Floyd. The show mentions he’s shot six people in the line of duty but that can’t be right, it’s way too low.
The other half is characters giving a quizzical look when Olivia admits Stabler abandoned her.
While the idyllic life in Italy may be a copout (get it? “copout”? Hah, that’s almost as funny as the film Cop Out!), don’t worry, they do address Stabler’s reputation and his relationship with NYPD at length. It would almost be compelling material were it not so poorly written and limply depicted. Basically, the new characters (Rollins, Kat, Carisi, Barnes) treat him as some sort of Boogerman to fear and avoid while those who knew him way back when (Benson, Ice-T) defend him. It’s sorta like when an old friend from out of town meets your current friend group and you feel obliged to apologize for his non-PC remarks. “No, no, Stabler’s a great guy, you just need to get to know him.” That Ice-T is one of those people is ridiculous considering he hated Elliot enough to try to transfer out at the end of Season 9. There’s a whole scene of them catching up and talking about Olivia and it just seems wrong.If their relationship has defrosted in the decade and change, how about showing that. How about doing any of the characterization work required to make any of this shit fly, you lazy fucks.
“She got kidnapped about five times, almost raped twice, her SON got almost kidnapped nine times, Brooke Shields was involved…look, it’s all very, very stupid.”
It becomes comical to see Benson defending her ex-partner to her colleagues on the basis of, well, [coughs into hand]. Actual line of dialogue: “he got too rough back in the day, but it wasn’t just testosterone. It was because he cared so much.” Characters will profess he’s changed, but how would they know that, not being in contact with him for over a decade. I guess they just assume it? Maybe they’re trying to ex post facto justify their leniency about Stabler, who admits he had “run of the place” back when Cragen was in charge. It would be funny had it turned out Stabler’s entire problem rested with being assigned to Special Victims Unit and he became the chillest Robbery Homicide detective you ever met. I mean, that’s the character concept, right? Stabler was the SVU guy who really hated pedophiles. He hated them because he had children, the mortal enemy of pedophiles. That’s good writing, that’s complex, interesting writing.
Anyway, time for the shoe to drop. Kathy doesn’t survive her hospital stay. Her spleen ruptured, which is ironic because that’s where I get my black bile I use to write this column from. Wow-ee. I mean, what can you say about deploying the “women in refrigerators” trope in 2021? It’s not as though she was ever a character with dimensions; she nagged Elliot about his job and basically their unhappy marriage (magically reoriented to “happy” in their offscreen decade in Rome) existed to provide an obstacle to Benson and Stabler getting together. Her character may as well have been named “Bulwark”. No disrespect to Isabel Gillies, by the by. She did the best with the material she was given, which was not great. There’s absolutely no reason Kathy had to die for Elliot to rejoin the force in New York. All manner of reasons could justify the return. I’m sure you could even come up with a reason that also allows Meloni some crying for the Emmy consideration reel. It’s cheap drama that…well, I’m not going to say is beneath the show, but they still shouldn’t have done it.
\
Crying Emmy tears!
It’s around this point that I looked across the Internet and found that people watched a vastly different show than I did. I know I have a divergent viewpoint vis-à-vis SVU in that a lot of fans like it and I believe it blows chunks. I know that. What I didn’t know was the pervasive “shipping” contingent to the fanbase, specifically people who want Benson and Stabler to hook up. To them, what is to me a “dumbass story for idiots” is a welcome opportunity to bring these characters together now that Stabler isn’t married to a battle ax harpy with a throng of mewling children around her waist. Sure, Hargitay and Meloni have chemistry, but I always thought it platonic. To have it happen after this long a time, potentially, seems questionable as well. I suppose I’m the outlier and the entire population of TV viewers tune in just to see if someone is fucking and if not why not. Fine! Whatever! I lose. I guess I’m wrong for wanting to see grizzled investigators trade gallows humor over crying rape victims. That’s what this show is supposed to be, right?
“Return of the Prodigal Son”, more like “Return of the Prodigal Fun”, right? No. This may be entertaining in a ghoulish sense but it’s definitely not fun. It’s no FOX’s Prodigal Fun, for instance. That has serial killers and Michael Sheen camping it up. This? What does this have? Christopher Meloni looking pained for 70% of the episode and everybody speaking about him in hushed tones while Olivia Benson moons over the Catholic rage addict who ghosted her like three presidential administrations ago. The thing is, I don’t know how this reunion could’ve gone any differently. You know those friendships you fall out of? Then you think about them one day and consider contacting them but so much time has passed it’d be too awkward? That’s Benson/Stabler writ large. If this show happened in Season 15, sure. But Season 22 it’s the equivalent of The Simpsons using a weird Season 1 designed character and trying to update it for HD. Olivia Benson doesn’t even have her original face anymore goddamnit! Sometimes you gotta cut bait and cutting bait on Stabler was the smarter move. So obviously Dick Wolf and company didn’t go that route. When watching SVU, always expect the dumbest outcome.
Why is Stabler’s son a longshoreman?
MASKWATCH: Oh, don’t think I forgot about this shit, you fucks. (“You fucks” is referring to the SVU people, not you lovely readers, of course.) While this may be a format breaker in terms of returning Meloni to the fold, SVU doesn’t veer outside of its territory as “dangerously inaccurate about proper pandemic protocol”. As I’ve said before, I’m not obtuse. I understand that you don’t reunite Benson and Stabler and have them wearing masks. They have to be within kissing distance the entire episode to appease the shippers, and you can’t kiss with masks. They mention the patriot swoop haired guy doesn’t believe in COVID yet in interrogation no one else wears protection either, so SVU is basically saying, yeah, it is a hoax, because we’re not pretending there’s any repercussions from its existence. It’s a fuck you to an audience that has had to deal with this shit for a year now. I don’t think I can recall any part of the episode where the main cast did wear masks.
“Sure, Olivia, intrude on my private family moment of grieving you voyeuristic creep.”
For such an anticipated episode, “Return of the Prodigal Son” was a real pile of shit. Christopher Meloni does a good job, but that’s to be expected because he’s a fine actor. He deserves better material than this sub-soap opera junk. This makes the Oz finale look like actual Shakespeare. Here’s hoping Organized Crime is better, but I’m not getting my hopes up, because what reason would I have to be optimistic. It just makes me wish for vanilla Law & Order to come back. They could solve a variety of cases, examine a number of issues, address the full spectrum of headlines rather than focus on the rape-y ones. Of all the spurious reboots, why we haven’t gotten that one will continue to puzzle me.
Ronnie Gardocki
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