Recap: A pretty young woman auditions for a spot in a singing reality TV show. The producer not only subjects her to the traditional casting couch, but spikes her drink with quaaludes before he rapes her and leaves her unconscious on a park bench, where a passing pervert sexually assaults her shearling coat. When SVU starts to investigate, the detectives walk in on the producer in the process of sexually assaulting yet another woozy woman. But the first woman doesn’t remember the assault, and the second woman doesn’t want to press charges – it might hurt her chances in the music industry. Nevertheless, our good SVU detectives gather enough evidence to arrest the sleazy producer and keep him at Rikers.

The producer’s redheaded son then freaks out and holds his own girlfriend and her daughter hostage. Red will only speak to Olivia. In the process, Red panics and shoots his girlfriend in the leg. But Olivia eventually talks him down, and he lets the hostages go. Olivia walks out of the building under the admiring gaze of DA Harry Connick Jr.

Verdict: B+

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Recap: The billionaire CEO of a private military security company (I didn’t catch its name – let’s call it SmackWater) is drugged, kidnapped, sodomized, and left alive but half-naked and bound in a park. The initial suspects are some scruffy Occupy Wall Street protestors, but our detectives soon track the crime to a clean-cut man whose military daughter was gang-raped by four SmackWater employees while she was working in Iraq. The daughter went to a party and was drugged and gang-raped so brutally she can no longer have children. After the rape, the company locked her in an interrogation room for 72 hours, before one kindly guard finally allowed her to call Dad. The U.S. government won’t do anything about the crime because “this company’s got a lot of juice in Washington.” Dad admits he sodomized the CEO with a baton in order to exact his own vigilante justice.

Cpt. Cragen tells the detectives not to go investigating a gang rape that took place outside their jurisdiction, but come on, Olivia’s not going to let that go! With the help of Harry Connick, Jr. (looking dapper as a DA), our detectives hone in on SmackWater. They talk to the army doctor who performed the sex kit on the woman in Iraq. At first, the doc says she witnessed the after-effects of a brutal rape. But when she’s called to the Grand Jury, she does a 180 and claims she doesn’t remember that particular case at all.

The SmackWater CEO is clearly behind this change of heart. He shows up at the police station in a tux and threatens Harry in front of three police officer. “Is this the battle you want?” the CEO snarls. “Because war is my business. And business is good.” (Hm. With all the legal advice this CEO was getting from his voluptuous lawyer, I’m surprised she didn’t tell him, “If you’re going to threaten a DA, do it outside the presence of the NYPD.”)

Immediately thereafter, Dad is shanked in prison, the kindly guard is killed with vodka, Olivia’s apartment is ransacked, and the daughter is brutally attacked in her workplace.

The war is on.

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Recap: Tonight’s episode was like an acid-trip combination of the movie “Eyes Wide Shut” and that episode of 30 Rock where Liz gets mad because her boyfriend is so good-looking that he gets better treatment than everyone else. Our SVU writers must’ve made a New Year’s resolution that in 2012 they’d tread as close as possible to the line of network-TV sexual-content tolerance without actually crossing into an “R” rating.   Even Ice-T’s wife, Coco, was surprised by what they had her wear in her sexy cameo.  (According to The Huffington Post, Coco said ‘Wait, hold up! NBC is OK with this?'”)  There were some seriously eye-popping scenes, and some nicely artistic renderings; no one can complain that the show wasn’t intriguing. But the plot was so far-fetched, the lacy lingerie so pervasive, the goat masks so perfectly burnished (goats again!), that this was more like a fraternity fantasy of what a sexual assault case looks like than an actual case.

We open in a kinky interactive theater that’s performing a show about Dante’s nine circles of hell. In dimly lit rooms, black-clad theater-goers are handed golden masks of animal faces and told “No one here knows you. No one will judge you.” The eerie masked audience stands solemnly before a raised dias. The way the stage is set up, you’re just waiting for the animal sacrifice or ritual sex to begin. And so it does. During a scene about infidelity, two masked members of the audience step forward, hold down the beautiful and barely-clad young actress, and violently rape her. The audience thinks it’s part of the show. But it’s real, and the young woman is devastated.

Here’s where the real craziness begins. Because it turns out that this young actress, Megan, has been targeted, stalked, assaulted, or set up by – count ‘em – four separate perverts in the last few weeks. There’s the horny director using professional leverage to pressure her to have sex with him. There’s the creepy cyber-geek stalker guy who’s wired her house with motion-detector cameras to videotape her while she’s in the shower. And there’s the judge who met her on SugarBabies.com, a sleazy matchmaking site where young women emulating Victoria’s Secret models find rich older men who want to trade cash for sex. The judge is the one who raped Megan on stage.

But this is SVU; we’re not done yet. The judge produces emails showing that Megan instructed him to rape her on stage — she wrote that it was her fantasy. The judge didn’t mean to rape anyone, he was just role playing. Is it possible there was actually no crime? Was this just a setup by Megan to get publicity? Through good detective work and the magic of Gilbert Gottfried’s hilarious police tech character, our detectives find that Megan didn’t send those emails. That was done by Megan’s dumpy, small-town, best-friend roommate who moved to the Big Apple with Megan a few months ago to seek fame and fortune on the stage along with her. (Was it just me, or did you know Plain Jane was the perp from the moment she thoughtfully handed Megan that frappucino?)

Plain Jane was pissed because Megan was getting all the good roles. Jane was the better actress. Hell, Jane even slept with the director and Megan didn’t, but Megan still scored the lead in “Nine Circles.” Jane was tired of watching how easy everything was for Megan, how generously everyone treated her because of her pretty face. So Jane joined SugarBabies.com, met the judge and learned his dirty little secrets, and somehow orchestrated the whole thing so that her best friend would be publicly raped while on stage. Oh, and this brilliant criminal mastermind also confessed the entire setup to the two detectives who casually mentioned that she must have been bummed that she didn’t get the role.

Verdict: C+

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If you’re as big a fan of SVU as I am, you can imagine my delight when I got a comment on last week’s blog — from the SVU writers room!

As you may recall, I took issue with the goats in the gypsy camp of the Lost Traveler episode. “In my 12 years as a prosecutor,” I said, “I never saw a goat.”  Then I challenged the writers to work a dolphin into a future episode.

A couple days later I found this email in my inbox:

Dear Allison,

On behalf of the SVU writers room, we think your blog is very good. Our showrunner brought it to our attention recently, and we’ve all been enjoying it very much.

We have one bone to pick, however. RE: the dolphin. The ’08 writers room already went there. See the below link.

Keep up the good work!

Scott McCarrey
Writers’ Assistant, Law & Order: SVU
Swingline Productions

After I finally stopped laughing and picked myself off the floor, I realized several things: First, there is nothing that SVU shies away from, and little that they haven’t covered. Second, dolphins are not sexy. (Actually, I already knew that one.) Third, and most importantly: don’t mess with the SVU writers room.