SVU’s Season Premiere!

Grade: A-

Verdict:  SVU’s premiere encapsulated every parent’s worst nightmare, and showcased some amazing real-life crime-fighting technologies, but got some serious details wrong when it came to questioning a child witness and her parents.  Overall, a great show!

What They Got Right: SVU started its 12th season with a powerful, harrowing episode. Joan Cusack shed her comic antics and was masterful in her role as the paranoid helicopter mother, constantly hovering over her kid. The episode showed some real technology that law enforcement uses to help solve crimes against children. Organizations like the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and some police agencies do have facial recognition technology which they use to match images of children on the Internet (especially child pornography) with known children. It’s still a developing technology, and at the moment, there are individual people who are reportedly just as good (if not better) at looking at thousands of pictures and matching the faces. But the technology is getting more incredible every day. Check out 3VR, a company that develops software like this. The idea of a girl being abducted and sexually abused for decades is also based on a real case. You may remember the heartwrenching story of 11-year-old Jaycee Dugard, who was kidnapped from her front yard in 1991. Her kidnapper, a serial child rapist, held her captive in a shed, repeatedly sexually assaulted her, and fathered two children by her before he was discovered and arrested.

What They Got Wrong: There were two glaring errors. First, when Benson was questioning MacKenzie, she violated the cardinal rule of child interviews.  Anyone who has worked on crimes against children knows that Rule #1 is to ask kids open-ended questions, because children are really suggestible and might just answer “yes” to whatever you suggest to them. So when Benson was asking, “Was it your case worker? Your stepfather? A mentor?” she tainted the child witness, and might have messed up the entire investigation! Second, there’s no way the cops could have gotten MacKenzie’s parents in to the police station to talk to them. Mom and Dad hated the police at that point, and the police didn’t have probable cause to believe that the parents had done anything wrong. These snooty Upper-West-Side parents would have lawyered up in a nanosecond, and there never would have been that heart-to-heart at the police station (and we would have missed that powerful scene where Joan Cusack breaks down, sobbing. She was great, right? Just great.).

Synopsis: Joan Cusack, taking a bath, freaks out when her 10-year-old daughter, MacKenzie, suddenly stops playing piano and disappears from the house. Joan thinks MacKenzie’s been abducted, and sobs to her husband that she can’t go through this again. Another daughter of theirs was abducted a few years ago. Benson and Stabler exchange knowing glances. (My first thought? Dad did it.)   But video surveillance shows MacKenzie walking out of the apartment building on her own. Turns out she’s been e-chatting with Eddie_D, who’s apparently been “grooming” her to meet him at Grand Central station. Benson and Stabler run to Grand Central and find MacKenzie sitting with a suave Brit named Erik. Dad clocks Erik and the cops arrest him. Erik swears he’s not a pedophile, but really a card-carrying member of COAP, Citizens Organized Against Pedophilia. Benson questions MacKenzie and eventually discovers that Eddie_D is actually MacKenzie’s 11-year-old friend. But, after her parents take her home, Benson finds a note MacKenzie left behind: “Help, my parents are hurting me and putting things in me.” Turns out Mom and Dad implanted a Lowjack-like microchip in MacKenzie’s arm, they’re so freaked out about losing another kid. It also turns out that MacKenzie is adopted and the parents are trying to make her into a spitting image of their vanished daughter, Ella, including dying MacKenzie’s hair and getting her a nose job. When questioned about it, Mom and Dad get pissed and throw the cops out of their house. Benson and Stabler somehow bring the parents in to the police station for questioning about the cold case. Mom swears she last saw her vanished daughter, Ella, with a red-haired girl while camping. Benson and Stabler investigate the cold case and, using facial recognition data, find the red-haired girl. Red, now all grown up, had a stint in underage porn and now does “full-service” massages. Red says she lured Ella away from her parents because her father told her to. Red’s dad wanted Ella to play his wife. The last Red saw of Ella, Dad was beating her up. Benson and Stabler go to a filthy, garbage-strewn farm and arrest Red’s father. There, they see a thin, pale woman in a prairie dress huddling behind a tree. It is Ella. She is reunited with her family. It is a bittersweet reunion, as MacKenzie, the adopted daughter, looks on, wondering what her place will be now that the “real” daughter has come home.

The views in this essay are mine alone and do not represent the views of the Department of Justice.

This was a 2-episode premiere — if I have the time tomorrow, I’m excited to talk about the second episode!

Got questions? Thoughts? Leave a comment! I’d love to chat.