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Law & Ordocki Season 5 #10 (#44): Jungle Fever

“WELCOME TO THE PEDO MOTEL”. Well, that’s certainly a title. Despite that, “Welcome to the Pedo Motel” is deliberately a low key affair, considering last week brought Elliot Stabler back into the mix and was the most consequential episode in years. I guess it’s to the show’s credit it remembers it has, you know, its own cast and is not an adjunct to the Elliot and Olivia saga. That said, what is SVU at this point? Well, it’s shit, for one thing. It’s genuinely bad television that exhausted all its angles of storytelling for its limited subject matter. The routes it can take are retreads of old stories or rejiggering real life events into events just like them but with a couple of twists. Although Season 22 made a feint towards approaching police overreach, police brutality, unconscious racial biases of supposedly conscious white cops, but that’s all that was: a feint. At best they make vague notions towards “the current climate” as to why they can’t, say, indict someone based on the evidence of “the cop saw him in the closet making babies and one of the babies looked at him” anymore. Otherwise it’s business as usual for a show that outlived its use a couple of presidential administrations ago. I’ll give them credit, however: “Welcome to the Pedo Motel” is a departure from standard SVU in that because of the subject matter when the question “do all sex offenders deserve to die” is raised, the answer is not an immediate “hell yeah!”. That’s progress, dammit.

Lonnie is your average African-American 20something who just so happens to live in a halfway house owing to his sex offender status. The “pedo motel” of the title isn’t well liked by the community; local bikers taunt the residents and living there really diminishes one’s game with the ladies, as Lonnie finds out. “Come on, I’m not like them” falls on deaf ears when your roommate prays to a saint before jerking off to The Bad News Bears. (See, it’s clever because Bad News Bears’ Jackie Earle Haley played a pedophile in Little Children. It’s all a circle.) Lonnie’s co-worker is attacked on her way home from work, and while it’s obvious Lonnie didn’t do it, it’s equally obvious he will be blamed for it. Black and sex offender? That’s what we in the biz call a “double whammy”.

01

So really it’s a blessing in disguise she died.

So Ceranda is missing and everything points to Lonnie, and by everything I mean he’s the right color and disposition for the crime. We never find out what videotapes he jerks off to, but I’m guess Bring It On Again. That’s right, the sick fuck doesn’t even pleasure himself to the original. In a scene befitting SVU’s efforts to do better vis-à-vis police overreach, Ice-T rebuffs Lonnie’s request to see a warrant with “your ass is still owned by the state. I can do whatever I want to”. “I can do whatever I want to” is up there on the Letterman Top 10 list of “last things police violence victims hear before they die”. Lonnie’s alibi doesn’t check out and the case intensifies when Ceranda is found dead in a van. There’s this whole thing about needing a Muslim cop on the case to be sensitive to the Muslim community but it never really comes to anything. Throw another useless subplot on the pile, it’s just getting larger and larger.

02

YOU’VE BEEN DOING THIS FOR 22 FUCKING YEARS

There’s a funny scene where, apropos of nothing, Carisi asks Benson what Stabler is up to. The show stops for a minute and a half just to discuss Organized Crime. This integrated advertising gets more and more savvy with each iteration, I’m telling you. When Carisi asks if it’s healthy for him to be investigating his own wife’s murder, Benson replies “you wanna tell him that?”. I love it. Even after being on walkabout in Europe for a decade, Stabler still frightens the NYPD so much they’ll acquiesce to his demand to be put on the case despite, you know, no one in their right mind letting a widower anywhere near the case that made him a widower. “We were gonna say no, honest, but he frightens us.” Then again, otherwise there’d be no show. I just hope these little catchups continue to occur, with the characters taking a breather to discuss the more compelling Organized Crime. Way to signal you don’t even give a shit about your own show, SVU.

06

Not so much Casual Friday as it is Who Gives A Shit Anymore Honestly Wednesday.

Now that everyone at the Pedo Motel are suspects, the neighborhood outcry has intensified with protests from local biker gang the Dyckman Knights. Their leader is named Elvis, which…why? You’re trying to write a drama, right? Why include all these laughable aspects? Might as well name him Count Chocula while you’re at it. If you’re wondering why a 3%er White Nationalist biker would care about the death of a Muslim teenager, yeah, well, shut up. It took three people to come up with the story of this shite. Just as soon as the detectives find video footage of someone in Lonnie’s jacket running in the vicinity of the murder scene, the Pedo Motel goes up in flames with Lonnie as the sole casualty. They set the fire to cover up the murder, apparently. Suspicion falls on Elvis and the Dyckman Knights, but they have the airtight alibi of “playing cards”. The actual arsonists are some Hispanic dudes who want to join the Knights because they saw Elvis’ YouTube videos. Look, I know Juice was allowed into the Sons, but it seems to me the Knights are even less cool racially than SAMCRO. I wouldn’t be surprised if the writing braintrust’s research into outlaw biker gangs consisted of a Sons of Anarchy episode on at a bar with the sound off and the subtitles switched to Spanish. “Elvis, cuts, no, I think I got this.”

03

“Look, go with it. I’m trying to create a tight five for Fallon…”

The DNA on Ceranda comes back and it’s someone outside the system, thereby clearing Lonnie of her murder. Ice-T takes this especially hard, because he prioritized “sex offender” over “black” and, whoops, SVU kinda sorta got an innocent dude murdered. This is the new SVU: they’ll still fuck up at the same rate as the previous iteration of the show, but there’ll be more apologies, pained faces and somber music. “We are so sorry” falls on deaf ears with Lonnie’s parents despite Mariska Hargitay pulling the best face plastic surgery can buy. The parents helpfully dump all the exposition necessary to close the case: Lonnie was in love with that 15 year old, the stepfather was a parole officer who used his connections to get Lonnie arrested the day he turned 18. Man, if the cops had done their due diligence and followed up on these “leads” as I believe they’re called maybe none of these horrible events would’ve happened!

07

Count yourself lucky: a screenshot of Ice-T caring about something is as rare as a 1st edition holofoil Charizard.

The parole officer, Roy Eastman, is a real piece of work. I know racists aren’t usually subtle, but within a minute he’s referring to Lonnie as a pimp. I think I understand this writing style that SVU employs, that everything is shouted at the audience, and while I don’t appreciate it I see why they do it. The viewership of this show was weaned not on premium dramas or peak TV, they grew up watching, well, SVU and like minded shows. They cannot recognize subtlety in the same way a colorblind person won’t recognize certain colors. Rather than reeducate their audience by adding nuance to the proceedings, SVU doubles down and makes everyone a ridiculous stereotype. Eastman can’t just be the racist parole officer, he has to be the racist parole officer, you know? They may as well have Alan Tudyk from 42 portray him. Anyway, they trace the DNA to a relative of one of Eastman’s parolees, who confirms he was coerced into impersonating Lonnie. Here’s where it gets funny, though: according to the perp (Sam), he was only meant to grope her, but she kept on screaming and he was high (“she started yelling, and I had gotten high to calm my nerves so I got mad”) so he uh had to kill her. There you have it, folks: MARIJUANA KILLS.

04

Bikers holding a peaceful protest to me is hilarious. Can you imagine some fucking Neo-Nazi with sharpie in mind, trying to make sure “PREDATORS” in “PREDATORS MUST GO” really pops.

The cops connect Eastman to Sam the high-as-a-kite-killer, finding texts and cash withdrawals, and everything is wrapped up in a neat little package, except for what the hell white nationalist bikers had to do with anything. Lonnie’s parents meet Ceranda’s parents at the memorial and opine both their children were killed for no reason. Ice-T “uh actually”s them by confirming tis hate killed the kids. Well, yes, in a roundabout way. It all stemmed from a guy’s problem with a white girl dating a black boy, but then there was motorcyclists and pedo motels and The Bad News Bears and it all got convoluted into a mush. Hey, remember when the Muslim cop was assigned to the case because 1PP wanted one for public relations purposes? Yeah, that went fucking nowhere. Sgt. Kaldun did nothing. In his earlier appearances he at least made Carisi jealous by taking Rollins out to dinner.

05

“For that, I’m going to name my pub ‘Free the Pedos’ in his honor.”

Speaking of which, those two are about to further the crawl that is their relationship when Carisi’s admission he’s seeing someone is interrupted by ROLLINS FAMILY DRAMA NEWS. Her father had a stroke, her stepmother (25 years old) bailed, and no one in Hotlanta is there to look after him. We have either that to look forward to or Kelli Giddish is taking some episodes off. I hope for the latter. She’s not worse than any of the other non-Ice-T characters by a significant margin, but the fewer characters this show has to wrangle the better. Most of the time it’s these idiots trading exposition instead of some sort of characterization anyway.

I like how this show is pretending it’s not treating sex offenders like they’re lower than dirt. Benson busts out the factoid that their recidivism rate is low, yet the opening scene had one guy beating off The Bad News Bears and another to women who look like his deceased aunt (“You just dissolve into them like a waterbed until the world disappears” he says as I’m not entirely convinced he’s not Buffalo Billing it up), so you can’t have your cake and eat it  too. “Hey look at these freaks, who ought to be afforded human dignity and respect!” Nope, I’m not buying it. SVU has a history of fearmongering about the diddler on the corner, the molester in the family home, the flasher on the subway. It does not get to turn around and say “actually, these guys served their time so let’s leave them alone to pick up the pieces of their lives”. There was a goddamn episode where Stabler went undercover to goad a recently released sex offender into committing more sex crimes! This isn’t a gradual and thought out evolution on SVU’s part; it’s an about face, and a cowardly one at that.

MASKWATCH: I almost forgot to include MASKWATCH this time out, and I think that speaks to how minimally SVU is feigning care about the pandemic anymore. I don’t want to go back to confirm the proclamation that there was no mask wearing whatsoever, but I don’t recall any. In fact, the closest acknowledgement to the pandemic in the episode is when Khaldun brings everyone’s coffee orders into the morgue and complains about the whole rule of six feet between spots in line at coffee shops. Am I right, folks? What is this stuff? We’re still not close to herd immunity, maybe we oughta try for that before busting out the uproarious coffee humor. Look, if they want to declare the pandemic over, fine. I don’t care anymore, if I ever did to begin with. All I ask is that Mariska Hargitay stand below a huge “PANDEMIC ACCOMPLISHED” banner.

08

Oh, I thought they were killed because of tensions exacerbated by the Teapot Dome scandal.

“Welcome to the Pedo Motel” felt like a bait and switch to me, an episode that looked to be about a halfway house for sex offenders but became a treatise on the dangers of opposing interracial relationships. Which, sure, we still need those in the 21st century because this country is deeply fucked up. But that doesn’t make it an interesting episode and it doesn’t make for interesting television. Think of the possibilities of a true Pedo Motel: an establishment by Pedos for Pedos. The Saville Suites, the Arbuckle Arms, the Pfister. Cast big stars in roles, like Kevin Spacey as a bellhop, Rob Lowe as the night manager, Woody Allen as the building super! You could probably get most of them to cameo for a reasonable rate. Spacey’s doing Italian movies for fuck’s sake, that’s a difference of kind and not degree from being on SVU. An episode that really drills down on accommodations for sex offenders would force the audience to sympathize with or at least try to understand those who made mistakes and are trying to rectify them. It would take better writing than the show is capable of, that’s for sure.

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