Note: I’m single, ladies.

Special Victims Unit often likes to take complex issues with no easy answer and turn them into garbage. Why not? There’s nothing saying the show has to be good; it just has to satisfy the war criminals at General Electric. As long as the ratings remain tolerable, which in the Frank’s Wild Years of NBC means “above negative viewers”, SVU can be stupid as fuck and not even have to pay lip service to whatever it purports to be about. It’s how an animal smuggling episode with Dann Florek fishing a monkey out of a basketball happened (and also Big Boi got eaten by a tiger). But, sadly, today I won’t be talking about that. That’s for another time, a better time. “Confession”, the Season 10 shitpile that is the focus of this article, is the first SVU episode I showed my then-girlfriend. She didn’t take to the inherent humor, I suppose, and that may be a contributing factor to the relationship dissolution. (Also contributing: she cheated on me and drove drunk on New Years.) “Confession” is perhaps the ur-garbage SVU episode in that it has everything: dumbass plot twists, salacious subject matter, Stabler beating someone to near-death and getting away with it and hilarious lines that become even funnier without context. All that and my least favorite SVU character in the history of the show will make for a doozy of a column. Face front, true believers!

We learn in the opening moments that the SVU precinct has a sort of “crunch time”; at the start of September, they’ve got to handle all the summer camp molestations and the fresh batch of college semester rapes. I want to know if there’s seasonal detectives who come in during crunch time and then are transferred to their original precincts when it reaches mid-November. (They also have to fill the gift bags and wear elf ears when taking witness statements.) The new ADA, aforementioned my least favorite character, wants to be all hands on, and we’re supposed to hate her for being a take charge hardass. I hate her for being a poorly written one-dimensional character played by a stone faced actress (Michaela McManus of One Tree Hill and Awake anti-fame) who delivers every line in the same haughty yet flat tone. If you can’t get somebody on par with Stephanie March or Diane Neal, just use a greenscreen that shows clips of Sam Waterston. It’s Dick Wolf’s intellectual property (Sam Waterston, that is; when contracts were being renegotiated, Wolf slipped in a clause stating that the actors at the time are property of Dick Wolf’s Penis Coyote Studios), so they can reuse that shit. Anyway, Kim Greylek (originally going to be named Polly Sturges) oversees an interrogation of a 17 year old boy who alludes to sex crimes occurring in his vicinity. It’s a nice bait and switch where you think an adult’s diddling him, but in actuality he wants to diddle his stepbrother who appears in the most hilarious photograph of anyone or anything ever.

He’s gonna grow up to be an asshole if he’s already doing finger guns.

See, he came to SVU as a preventative measure. Eric Byers wants help and insists he’s never done a little Zoo with the cowboy, but they investigate all the same. Let’s talk about Marshall Allman’s performance for a moment: as a teenaged pedophile, he goes one mode all the time, acting as though he’s seconds away from bursting into tears. Since the character has no dimension, it gets tiresome really quickly. Sniveling whininess grates especially from a character who’s not sympathetic. The only people in this country more hated than pedophiles (or “pedosexuals” as the non-violent sort call themselves) is those clowns in Congress. What a bunch of clowns. Benson checks up on the family; Teri Polo is insistent there’s no molesting going on while, while father Josh Charles (aka That Fucker From Sports Night) is absent but hates Eric. There’s little funnier than seeing Sports Night portray an average joe blue collar slob. “Confession” may as well carry the name “The Hits Just Keep On Comin’ for Eric Byers” because his situation never improves; it’s a downward spiral through and through. The cops decide to investigate this “website” Eric mentions that he uses as a support system for his urges. It’s named PediaPhax, which shows really that depictions of the Internet have not appreciably improved since Feardotcom. Think of all the people who wanted pediatricians and weren’t even close to spelling “facts” correctly.

Putting the final nail in nuance’s coffin, SVU casts noted creep Tom Noonan in the role of webmaster of PediaPhax. If you want ambiguity or complexity, you don’t fucking cast someone who played the goddamn Tooth Fairy in Manhunter! His philosophy is jerk off to children but don’t touch them. When the urge comes, flip over to the Disney Channel. A few Wizards of Waverly Place will sate you. If Tom Noonan’s casting wasn’t enough, he describes his love of “delicious little angels”, referring to little girls, and promises not to drool if Stabler gives him photographs of his children. Asking for a detective’s photos of his children for the purposes of masturbation is not something you fucking say if you want to come off as sympathetic. “Confession” raises the concept that pedophilia is hardwired sexual attraction that cannot be helped and then gives the pedophiles as creepy monsters out of Central Casting. Brian Cox in L.I.E. had more layers to him. Combined with exposition bots Ice-T and Munch saying that pedophilic urges are incurable, the message of the show seems to be “kill pedophiles, every last one of them”. Despite purporting to advocate for victims and counter the idea that any woman ever “deserves” or “asked for” rape, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit is as reactionary as it gets. Pretty shocking for a show where half the suspects have Stabler’s knuckleprints permanently tattooed on their face.

“Actually, I’ve been up to a lot since Sports Night!”

“Wow, really?”

“NO NOT REALLY!”

The key to making a wonderfully terrible SVU episode is coming up with four or five different plots and condensing them into one. “Confession” is no exception to this rule. When the little kid admits to being molested via a lovingly shot closeup of insertion of a crayon into a doll’s ass, the child psychologist concludes he was coached. Molestation accusations based on parents pressuring their kids? Throw it on the plot pile! Just as important an element is asinine plot twists barely justified by the narrative. Like Tom Noonan’s Jake Berlin adding an old photo of one of Stabler’s daughters! Who knows how he got the photo; perhaps he bought a copy of Who’s Who of the NYPD’s Loved Ones. Upon seeing one of his 13 kids as jerk material on a pedophile activism site, Stabler hurriedly leaves the precinct to beat Tom Noonan to death. It takes a full scene before Munch recognizes the photo as of the Stabler brood. The whole precinct (er, the precinct that MATTERS) hauls ass to Noonan’s apartment, coming across the sight of bloodied Noonan on the floor an Christopher Meloni trying to understand how a computer works. To its credit, SVU has consistently shown Stabler’s opinion of computers: antagonistic and frightful towards their awesome power. It makes sense he can’t delete the photo and needs outside help. I love how Tom Noonan threatens to press charges and everyone blows him off. Remember in Season 2 of The Shield how the Armadillo storyline was predicated on him threatening to reveal Mackey burned off half his face and that would be the end of his career and he’d likely go to prison? In SVU, the response to the grilled face would be “whatever, you’re bad, no one cares about your rights” and Michael Chiklis would be replaced by Sam the Eagle.

“Yeah, he, uh, fell on a bunch of fists that look like my fist”

Sure, he receives a dressing down from Captain Cragen, the first time in which the sleepy turtle/man hybrid asserts himself in episodes covered by this column. He tells him to go home and think about he did, noting that three cops put their jobs on the line to protect his. Just wait until the temperature drops, Elliot, and Cragen will be too sluggish to reprimand you. Happens to my tortoise all the time (have no idea how he’s still got his job as a claims adjuster). With Stabler benched for the duration of the episode, with no lasting consequences mind you, the plot’s allowed to continue. They found one of the little cowboy Cory’s shirts in the hamper, covered in semen, and the results indicate the cum culprit was Sports Night himself. He has a perfectly cromulent excuse, that he jerks off in the hamper cause he hasn’t been getting any lately. Sure! Whatever! Spray your genetic material all over the general vicinity of used clothing! Jerking off in your own bedroom with the right supplemental products or in your shower, both of which you can do because you’re an adult? Eh, fuck it. Eric’s in the wind and everybody think Teri Polo helped him out financially. She cops to it, but only after we find out Eric is a dead bloody sack of pedophile! DUN DUN DUN!

Will SVU websites ever look like actual websites?

Despite the dramatic act break confession of “I killed my son!”, Teri Polo didn’t do it. Sports Night didn’t do it either, but he did go to Eric’s hideout and shove a baseball bat up his ass. That did not kill him, though! A slobbish redneck whose job appears to be community service has standards, you know. Tamara Tunie sees that the other blood at the scene is from someone with diabetes, which means it’s Tom Noonan because in his first scene we see him shooting up some insulin. Really helpful for there to only be one diabetic in New York City. Noonan, who’s recovered quite nicely to prove Stabler’s police brutality was a series of love taps, admits to the murder and justifies it based on Eric admitting on Pedopedia that he fucked some boy on the playground. Eric wouldn’t give him the boy’s identity, because obviously pedophiles obtain contact information for all the children they defile, so Noonan killed him. I don’t care how raped by a baseball bat this kid, but he’s not losing in a struggle with Tom Noonan. The man’s a glass bird with a neanderthal forehead! But he did what Stabler’s been wanting to do all this time, so the other detectives’ outrage rings false. They stated outright that all treatments for pedophiles don’t work!

In this touching scene, Ice-T tells Benson that he sympathizes with Stabler, saying if the same situation happened to him he’d murder Tom Noonan. Homicidal impulses: classic stakeout conversation piece!

There’s two totally useless codas to the episode. In the first, the detectives interview a bunch of kids who met Eric but weren’t molested by him, leaving the identity of who Eric molested as controversial as what happened to Tony Soprano in the finale. The second calls back to a case Munch investigated for all of 7 seconds about a battered wife who refused to file a complaint against her husband. Now she does. It’s a naked attempt to create the perception of depth without actually having it. One thing permeating the episode is how Kim Greylek is terrible at her job. In her debut she notes in Washington DC she was called “The Crusader”, which is fucking awful, and her 14 episode tenure as the SVU ADA is a bunch of gaffes and bad puns. For this episode she tries to be as hands on with the case as possible, as though she only presents one case for trial at a time. By the way, there’s not one second set inside a courtroom. At other times she whines about SVU not letting her do whatever the fuck she wants even if it compromises their investigation. It makes for an uninteresting, unsympathetic character who goes from wanting to arrest someone over flimsy evidence to namedropping Casey Novak getting censured as a reason why not to justify police overreach. It’s terrible. She’s terrible. I like my ex-girlfriend more. She broke my heart and destroyed my faith in human nature, but at least she didn’t micromanage bullshit in a flat, stone-faced way.

It’s melodrama pitched at such a level that subtlety is Trotsky to its Stalin. It’s both hilarious and a terrible episode of television that does nothing for the characters, illuminates nothing on a hot button topic and furthers the totally correct perception that Law & Order: Special Victims Unit is written and produced by out of touch septuagenarians whose fears are everything outside the Hays Code. That is how the show ideally works; not as “quality”, not as “something people find intellectually or emotionally stimulating” but as a weekly discharge of the spleen. Quell your day-to-day outrage with self-righteous bullshit!