Did You Know?: Ice-T delivers all of his dialogue in French and therefore the voice actor Kevin Michael Richardson must come in every week to dub scenes into English.
Although it is neither Halloween nor All Saints Day (aka grandmadocki’s 100th birthday were she still alive), I wanted a seasonal installment of this franchise to excoriate. Unfortunately, there are not too many options, and the best one, which is about the two girls stabbing another girl to please Slenderman case with the serial numbers filed off, is not airing until this Wednesday. (I look forward to how this piece of shit show exploits a real life tragedy right in my neck of the woods. Please donate to the girl who suffered the attack if you can. If a dipshit like me did, you wonderful people certainly can as well. http://www.gofundme.com/HeartsForHealingWI.) The episode of SVU I do plan on covering this week does involve Halloween tangentially but also provides an opportunity to make my thoughts known regarding the characters created to replace Stabler. For those who wish for Halloween episodes that basically feature the boogeyman, watch Criminal Minds. Then demand to Beth that she greenlight an article series entitled “Liminal Stupid Bullshit” by Kip Reed and myself. Anyway. This begins with the pretense of Halloween and then evolves into something else, something stupid, a plot that’s appeared on the program approximately 17 times before. But hey, Diane Neal’s here! Performing in exposition scenes that do nothing to display her or her character’s personality. Forget it, Jake, it’s stupid fucking bullshit. You have no idea how much you’ll be wishing for Christopher Meloni to cave someone’s head in at the 20 minute mark. (It’s okay, he caves in heads because his shitty kids.)
The Shakes the Clown sequel nobody wanted to see!*
*I really liked that movie.
We open with the trick or treat day, in which the various characters interact with the holiday. Olivia, for example, is hanging out with her second foster child Calvin. The first one sorta died in a “EXECUTIVE PRODUCER DICK WOLF” moment and Calvin got thrown into the mix when Maria Bello went on the run after killing her rapist father, R. Lee Ermey. Olivia lost custody when the father killed Maria Bello’s girlfriend and she couldn’t raise the kid due to her druggin’ it, so the grandparents got the fucker despite Olivia and the kid’s protests. Wow, that explanation was way too long for what amounts to “awww, SVU tried to do a subplot? How cute!!”. (And don’t worry, that whole clusterfuck will be covered in depth in the coming weeks.) Amaro’s bitching about his daughter’s costume being too revealing. Here are the things you must know about Amaro: his marriage sucks and he’s overprotective of his daughter and that manifests itself when he investigates sex crimes involving children. Look, it’s perfectly okay that like the first 15 scripts with Danny Pino were just some “find and replace” of Elliot Stabler! Rewriting scripts is hard. Ice-T has a gay son who is gay, but you don’t wanna know what gay son’s trick or treating plans are, so Ice-T and Kelli Giddish’s Rollins spend their afternoon ringing the doorbells of registered sex offenders. They knock, say trick or treat, and if the perp’s got no candy, no costume, he won’t be arrested. Dress up like a clown with a bowl of Hershey Roofie Kisses you’re fucked. That is an incredibly specific element of one’s parole. Because the precinct has six people, they’re called off their festivities to investigate a missing child. Except for Munch, for in these later seasons Cragen and Munch are embroiled in a Timecop situation wherein both being in the same scene will cause both to become garbage. (RIP Ron Silver.) He gets the greatest Halloween treat of all, not having to be in this shite.
Olivia stops giving a shit about the kid the moment he becomes a gangly, pubescent freak with a tendency to mouth off. What a shocker.
The way for “Missing Pieces” to work is to emphasize the ticking clock on finding the missing child. There’s the occasional “30 hours” or whatever, but there’s not much in the way of tension presented in the episode. Maybe SVU once was able to generate and sustain tension, but those days are long since past. I don’t often talk about the shooting style of the show, but it bears mentioning now. There’s no sense of urgency depicted in what should be a race against time to find an infant. Oh well, whatever, might as well overstuff the episode with inert interrogation scenes that show the Manhattan SVU detectives fooled by two rednecks from Buffalo. Even if they’re not rednecks, they’re presented as such; the woman’s a debt collector call girl and the man named their kid after a Buffalo Sabres player. Flutie wouldn’t be a good name for a kid, I suppose. The show depicts those from northern New York state as simplistic rubes who are dazzled overtly by big city lights. The characters may as well be named Cletus and Brandine. That certainly would’ve made things better.
The couple don’t go much beyond the stereotypes, which isn’t surprising; Tim twisted Ali’s arm and she apologizes for his faults. The lady’s sister thinks he’s horrible and the guy looks like Rob Corddry if…he had the last few rough years that are Rob Corddry’s career. Sometimes I wonder how much a week’s work for an SVU writing room is; it sounds like the easiest fucking job in the world. Like half the episodes are ripped from the headlines that require just taking a current event, writing down a summary of it and adding one or two twists. For large portions of a script the writer can take pages from one that dealt with an identical issue and only have to tweak the dialogue minorly. Shit, might as well get Girl Talk on staff to break episodes at this point. Cragen has the amazing line of “let’s hope we get a lead before every village idiot in a Casey Anthony mask is too drunk to remember his own name”, which I’ve seen four times and read twenty times and still don’t understand. The investigation runs its course and the carjacking claim becomes less and less likely, especially when they find the car that was ransacked by a Vietnam veteran. He’s got a “Vietnam Veteran” cap and everything. Yes, it’s stupid, but it’s important to reveal that Tim and Ali are full of shit, baby Nate was dead the whole time. It’s a fine twist, but it makes the detectives look like morons for not seeing through their lies or their “performances” until the 25 minute mark. These dummies from Buffalo hoodwink the seasoned detectives every step of the way. Really, I wouldn’t be surprised if Benson is fucked over by the “Duck Season”/”Rabbit Season” dichotomy one of these days.
“If we don’t find this kid the next 24 hours, Master Splinter’s gonna make me do ninja exercises until my feet bleed.”
“…”
“I mean the Chief of D’s! Get to work!”
The kid died in the morning, then the couple drove to New York City with corpse in the cooler in tow in order to… what? To fool Lloyd Braun? This is where shit always stumbles for me; dumb as they may be, there’s no way going to NYC and concocting a carjacking baby murder will be better than honesty. They don’t even come close to plausibility, which becomes a contradiction considering how long it takes the detectives to figure out what was going on. The scene in which the cops excavate the beach, where Ali claims he’s been buried, is fucking hilarious. The music. The reaction shots. The little half baby face unearthed in the sand. (“Dead Baby On The Beach” is a mediocre cocktail.) The only thing that could make it better is a push-in on little baby sandals that will remain in an evidence locker, never to be on a baby again. Soap operas are more detached than this shit. Also, you know, if your show says a cooler was found with fecal matter and soy in it, the more times you bring it up the less effective it becomes. SVU says it enough that soy turds are a fucking punchline and not evidence.
“Getting stoned was my Vietnam, man…”
Now, it’d be easy to arrest one of these idiots for negligence, child abuse, whatever. Each of them confess to separate means of 86ing the kid – shaking, drowning, but the autopsy report by the once main cast member now guest star Tamara Tunie indicates that little shit SIDSed himself. They felt guilty so they buried him on the beach and put on a whole song and dance that wasted NYPD resources for multiple days. But, you know, they felt about it, so it’s okay. Benson actually asks if they should charge them with anything. Ice-T and Rollins express incredulousness, while Amaro somberly states “they’re gonna be paying for this the rest of their lives”. So I guess cops are the arbiter of if people should be charged with crimes? Casey Novak is absent from the final scene. Like, what the fuck? At the very least the pair filed a false police report. Are they really being let go because they learned their lesson or that dead baby earns them a first round bye? It’s stupid. I understand SVU is neither intended to reflect real life police work nor real life anything. That doesn’t mean this shit ain’t intelligence insulting idiocy.
The Baby Mummy Returns
“Missing Pieces” was early days for the repositioned Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. The difference between Season 13 and 12 and before is that the storytelling became more personal, intimate tales over retarded gumph that was indistinguishable from episodes of Scooby-Doo. Warren Leight took over with this year; he’d previously run Criminal Intent and done the personal focus there. This knowledge makes the changes come less out of nowhere. They’re still not good, because the new characters come from the desire to make the characters “complex” without making them “good”. Amaro is Stabler 2.0 while Rollins has a Southern accent and not much else. Later on we’ll learn she’s got an addiction that compromises her ability to do her job, some sexual abuse angst and some family angst, but five episodes into Season 13 she’s someone Dick Wolf picked up in the draft after Chase was canceled. Really, the four detectives, the captain and the ADA have roles in the episode that could’ve been fulfilled by one detective and an intertitle. If “Missing Pieces” was “the baby died of natural causes instead” on an intertitle right after the opening credits, followed by EXECUTIVE PRODUCER DICK WOLF…it would be in the top 50% of SVU episodes.
This is barely an episode of barely television. There’s nothing interesting going on, no good performances, no good writing, a total waste of time. The most we learned about the characters is Nick Amaro is a monster. He asks his daughter, dressed as Jasmine or some other midriff bearing symbol of female empowerishment, what she got for Halloween. “Candy corn.” “That’s my favorite”, he says. BULLSHIT. NO ONE LIKES CANDY CORN. I believe this to be wonderful foreshadowing for Amaro’s eventual Stablerism, because only someone with a disgusting violent streak would like candy corn. When his wife is away, that’s how he gets off.
Law & Ordocki #9: Law & Order: SVU and the Case of the Six Craigslist Gay Guys
Did You Know?: Ice-T delivers all of his dialogue in French and therefore the voice actor Kevin Michael Richardson must come in every week to dub scenes into English.
Although it is neither Halloween nor All Saints Day (aka grandmadocki’s 100th birthday were she still alive), I wanted a seasonal installment of this franchise to excoriate. Unfortunately, there are not too many options, and the best one, which is about the two girls stabbing another girl to please Slenderman case with the serial numbers filed off, is not airing until this Wednesday. (I look forward to how this piece of shit show exploits a real life tragedy right in my neck of the woods. Please donate to the girl who suffered the attack if you can. If a dipshit like me did, you wonderful people certainly can as well. http://www.gofundme.com/HeartsForHealingWI.) The episode of SVU I do plan on covering this week does involve Halloween tangentially but also provides an opportunity to make my thoughts known regarding the characters created to replace Stabler. For those who wish for Halloween episodes that basically feature the boogeyman, watch Criminal Minds. Then demand to Beth that she greenlight an article series entitled “Liminal Stupid Bullshit” by Kip Reed and myself. Anyway. This begins with the pretense of Halloween and then evolves into something else, something stupid, a plot that’s appeared on the program approximately 17 times before. But hey, Diane Neal’s here! Performing in exposition scenes that do nothing to display her or her character’s personality. Forget it, Jake, it’s stupid fucking bullshit. You have no idea how much you’ll be wishing for Christopher Meloni to cave someone’s head in at the 20 minute mark. (It’s okay, he caves in heads because his shitty kids.)
The Shakes the Clown sequel nobody wanted to see!*
*I really liked that movie.
We open with the trick or treat day, in which the various characters interact with the holiday. Olivia, for example, is hanging out with her second foster child Calvin. The first one sorta died in a “EXECUTIVE PRODUCER DICK WOLF” moment and Calvin got thrown into the mix when Maria Bello went on the run after killing her rapist father, R. Lee Ermey. Olivia lost custody when the father killed Maria Bello’s girlfriend and she couldn’t raise the kid due to her druggin’ it, so the grandparents got the fucker despite Olivia and the kid’s protests. Wow, that explanation was way too long for what amounts to “awww, SVU tried to do a subplot? How cute!!”. (And don’t worry, that whole clusterfuck will be covered in depth in the coming weeks.) Amaro’s bitching about his daughter’s costume being too revealing. Here are the things you must know about Amaro: his marriage sucks and he’s overprotective of his daughter and that manifests itself when he investigates sex crimes involving children. Look, it’s perfectly okay that like the first 15 scripts with Danny Pino were just some “find and replace” of Elliot Stabler! Rewriting scripts is hard. Ice-T has a gay son who is gay, but you don’t wanna know what gay son’s trick or treating plans are, so Ice-T and Kelli Giddish’s Rollins spend their afternoon ringing the doorbells of registered sex offenders. They knock, say trick or treat, and if the perp’s got no candy, no costume, he won’t be arrested. Dress up like a clown with a bowl of Hershey Roofie Kisses you’re fucked. That is an incredibly specific element of one’s parole. Because the precinct has six people, they’re called off their festivities to investigate a missing child. Except for Munch, for in these later seasons Cragen and Munch are embroiled in a Timecop situation wherein both being in the same scene will cause both to become garbage. (RIP Ron Silver.) He gets the greatest Halloween treat of all, not having to be in this shite.
Olivia stops giving a shit about the kid the moment he becomes a gangly, pubescent freak with a tendency to mouth off. What a shocker.
The way for “Missing Pieces” to work is to emphasize the ticking clock on finding the missing child. There’s the occasional “30 hours” or whatever, but there’s not much in the way of tension presented in the episode. Maybe SVU once was able to generate and sustain tension, but those days are long since past. I don’t often talk about the shooting style of the show, but it bears mentioning now. There’s no sense of urgency depicted in what should be a race against time to find an infant. Oh well, whatever, might as well overstuff the episode with inert interrogation scenes that show the Manhattan SVU detectives fooled by two rednecks from Buffalo. Even if they’re not rednecks, they’re presented as such; the woman’s a debt collector call girl and the man named their kid after a Buffalo Sabres player. Flutie wouldn’t be a good name for a kid, I suppose. The show depicts those from northern New York state as simplistic rubes who are dazzled overtly by big city lights. The characters may as well be named Cletus and Brandine. That certainly would’ve made things better.
The couple don’t go much beyond the stereotypes, which isn’t surprising; Tim twisted Ali’s arm and she apologizes for his faults. The lady’s sister thinks he’s horrible and the guy looks like Rob Corddry if…he had the last few rough years that are Rob Corddry’s career. Sometimes I wonder how much a week’s work for an SVU writing room is; it sounds like the easiest fucking job in the world. Like half the episodes are ripped from the headlines that require just taking a current event, writing down a summary of it and adding one or two twists. For large portions of a script the writer can take pages from one that dealt with an identical issue and only have to tweak the dialogue minorly. Shit, might as well get Girl Talk on staff to break episodes at this point. Cragen has the amazing line of “let’s hope we get a lead before every village idiot in a Casey Anthony mask is too drunk to remember his own name”, which I’ve seen four times and read twenty times and still don’t understand. The investigation runs its course and the carjacking claim becomes less and less likely, especially when they find the car that was ransacked by a Vietnam veteran. He’s got a “Vietnam Veteran” cap and everything. Yes, it’s stupid, but it’s important to reveal that Tim and Ali are full of shit, baby Nate was dead the whole time. It’s a fine twist, but it makes the detectives look like morons for not seeing through their lies or their “performances” until the 25 minute mark. These dummies from Buffalo hoodwink the seasoned detectives every step of the way. Really, I wouldn’t be surprised if Benson is fucked over by the “Duck Season”/”Rabbit Season” dichotomy one of these days.
“If we don’t find this kid the next 24 hours, Master Splinter’s gonna make me do ninja exercises until my feet bleed.”
“…”
“I mean the Chief of D’s! Get to work!”
The kid died in the morning, then the couple drove to New York City with corpse in the cooler in tow in order to… what? To fool Lloyd Braun? This is where shit always stumbles for me; dumb as they may be, there’s no way going to NYC and concocting a carjacking baby murder will be better than honesty. They don’t even come close to plausibility, which becomes a contradiction considering how long it takes the detectives to figure out what was going on. The scene in which the cops excavate the beach, where Ali claims he’s been buried, is fucking hilarious. The music. The reaction shots. The little half baby face unearthed in the sand. (“Dead Baby On The Beach” is a mediocre cocktail.) The only thing that could make it better is a push-in on little baby sandals that will remain in an evidence locker, never to be on a baby again. Soap operas are more detached than this shit. Also, you know, if your show says a cooler was found with fecal matter and soy in it, the more times you bring it up the less effective it becomes. SVU says it enough that soy turds are a fucking punchline and not evidence.
“Getting stoned was my Vietnam, man…”
Now, it’d be easy to arrest one of these idiots for negligence, child abuse, whatever. Each of them confess to separate means of 86ing the kid – shaking, drowning, but the autopsy report by the once main cast member now guest star Tamara Tunie indicates that little shit SIDSed himself. They felt guilty so they buried him on the beach and put on a whole song and dance that wasted NYPD resources for multiple days. But, you know, they felt about it, so it’s okay. Benson actually asks if they should charge them with anything. Ice-T and Rollins express incredulousness, while Amaro somberly states “they’re gonna be paying for this the rest of their lives”. So I guess cops are the arbiter of if people should be charged with crimes? Casey Novak is absent from the final scene. Like, what the fuck? At the very least the pair filed a false police report. Are they really being let go because they learned their lesson or that dead baby earns them a first round bye? It’s stupid. I understand SVU is neither intended to reflect real life police work nor real life anything. That doesn’t mean this shit ain’t intelligence insulting idiocy.
The Baby Mummy Returns
“Missing Pieces” was early days for the repositioned Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. The difference between Season 13 and 12 and before is that the storytelling became more personal, intimate tales over retarded gumph that was indistinguishable from episodes of Scooby-Doo. Warren Leight took over with this year; he’d previously run Criminal Intent and done the personal focus there. This knowledge makes the changes come less out of nowhere. They’re still not good, because the new characters come from the desire to make the characters “complex” without making them “good”. Amaro is Stabler 2.0 while Rollins has a Southern accent and not much else. Later on we’ll learn she’s got an addiction that compromises her ability to do her job, some sexual abuse angst and some family angst, but five episodes into Season 13 she’s someone Dick Wolf picked up in the draft after Chase was canceled. Really, the four detectives, the captain and the ADA have roles in the episode that could’ve been fulfilled by one detective and an intertitle. If “Missing Pieces” was “the baby died of natural causes instead” on an intertitle right after the opening credits, followed by EXECUTIVE PRODUCER DICK WOLF…it would be in the top 50% of SVU episodes.
This is barely an episode of barely television. There’s nothing interesting going on, no good performances, no good writing, a total waste of time. The most we learned about the characters is Nick Amaro is a monster. He asks his daughter, dressed as Jasmine or some other midriff bearing symbol of female empowerishment, what she got for Halloween. “Candy corn.” “That’s my favorite”, he says. BULLSHIT. NO ONE LIKES CANDY CORN. I believe this to be wonderful foreshadowing for Amaro’s eventual Stablerism, because only someone with a disgusting violent streak would like candy corn. When his wife is away, that’s how he gets off.
Ronnie Gardocki
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