Recap: This episode took a harrowing real-life case and gave it a twist, a double-backflip, and a roller-coaster ride. Hang on tight SVU fans. Curves ahead. (Learning Curves. Ba dum bum.)
Tonight’s show started with a brutal crime landing right on Ice-T’s doorstep. His son, Ken, announces that he’s engaged to marry a hot young hunk name Alejandro. Before Ice-T even finishes his hilarious scowl of surprise, Alejandro is abducted by a bunch of thugs who stuff him into a van, take him to a dingy apartment, and beat and sodomize him with a baseball bat while yelling gay-bashing insults.
Ice-T is outraged, but the top brass take him off the case. (Good call, top brass). Of course, Ice-T goes rogue and keeps investigating. Amanda (who apparently has a considerable bad-girl streak of her own) goes with him to a suspect’s apartment. Although they don’t have a warrant, they barge into the house. The hugely pregnant resident demands that they leave – but Amanda blocks the woman into the kitchen while Ice-T goes to her bedroom and rifles through underwear drawers. Bad cops! No donut! Ice-T finds an unregistered gun, which Nick then uses to strong-arm the pregnant woman’s boyfriend into confessing that he and a bunch of his gang friends assaulted Alejandro. SVU arrests all of the gang members involved.
Case closed, right? Of course not. We’re not even at the second commercial break.
Another man is soon abducted, pulled into a van, assaulted and gay-bashed. Our second victim is played by Tony Hale, the actor known for his hilarious portrayal of Buster Bluth on Arrested Development. (Hale tweeted: “Going to be on Law & Order tonite. I’ve heard it’s my best comedic performance to date.”)
Our detectives scratch their collective heads. With all the gang-bangers locked up, who assaulted Buster? We soon learn it was the pugnacious grocer father of a student at the school where Buster taught. But why? Well, that gets complicated. The grocer’s teenage son, Luca, reported that Buster molested him. But Luca can’t keep his story straight. Soon, he’s saying a different, mousy brunette female teacher was the one who molested him. But it’s not her either. After a quick chat with Martha Stewart (convincing as a prim and proper headmistress), our detectives learn that Luca was having sex with his curvaceous blond biology teacher. He made up the other allegations to cover for their illicit relationship.
Luca doesn’t want to file charges against this blond teacher — he wants to run away with her. But the biology teacher doesn’t. So Luca goes to her classroom and slits her throat with the least-frightening weapon of the season, a tiny frog-dissecting scalpel. We close with Nick convincing the blood-soaked boy to drop the scalpel rather than commit suicide with it.
Verdict: B
What they got right:
I find it remarkable that SVU ran this episode about gay marriage and hate crimes on the same day that President Obama announced his support for same-sex marriage. This season, SVU has had a near-psychic ability to run episodes at exactly the right time — sometimes even scooping the real news. (Like the Joe Paterno/ Jerry Sandusky case, where the fictional SVU episode aired before the real-life case broke.) It’s a little spooky. SVU creators, what kind of dark magic are you working over there in the writers room?
There really was a case involving a man who was allegedly kidnapped, tortured, and sodomized by a gang of young men in Brooklyn. In real life, the 30-year-old man was apparently targeted by the “Latin King Goonies” because he was gay and had sex with some 17-year-olds who were known to the gang members. The man was invited to a “party,” but when he showed up, the thugs allegedly beat him, sodomized him with a toilet plunger, and made one of his lovers burn him with cigarettes on his genitals.
Hate crimes against members of the lesbian, gay, bi and transgender community are on the rise – and tend to spike in response to gay marriage initiatives. Hate crimes were up 13% in 2010 – and 50% of hate-crime victims don’t even make police reports. Minorities and transgender victims are the least likely to come forward. In response to the President’s announcement tonight, we will unfortunately probably see an uptick in violent crimes against the LGBT community.
What they got wrong:
My favorite line tonight was the pregnant girl who said, “I’ve seen TV – I know my rights!”’ Oh sister, you need to check out this blog. Any semi-competent lawyer would’ve gotten that gun suppressed, and there would have been no leverage to elicit her boyfriend’s confession. Ice-T and Amanda violated that woman’s Fourth Amendment rights, which guard against unreasonable searches and seizures, by barging into her home and searching without a warrant. And the boyfriend’s resulting confession was “fruit of the poisonous tree” – meaning, the cops never would have gotten the confession without the bad search in the first place. Everything would have been suppressed.
I like a good confession as much as the next prosecutor. But this wasn’t a good one. Ice-T’s actions could have torpedoed the entire case, and the guy could have walked … if he or his girlfriend actually did know their rights. That’s what happens when you get your legal advice from TV shows!
(Editor’s note: this blog is for fun and does not give legal advice.)
The gruesome ending, where the boy killed his seductive blond biology teacher, was just a thin excuse to close with the requisite SVU gore. There have been plenty teenagers who declared their love and eternal devotion for the teacher who committed statutory rape by having sex with them. Those students never end up killing the teacher.
One of the most notorious cases of teacher/student statutory rape was that of Mary Kay Letourneau, the 35-year-old teacher who had an affair with her 13-year-old student, Vili Fualaau. She was prosecuted and jailed, but every time she got out, she returned to Fualaau. She had two of his babies while in jail. After her sentence was served, she married him, took the name Mary Kay Fualaau, and now seems to spend a fair amount of time giving interviews to glossy magazines.
Unlike the kid in tonight's SVU, Fili Fualauu responded with an engagement ring and People magazine interviews rather than killing his teacher/sexual assailant
One final “wrong” – I hear Martha Stewart didn’t bring home-baked cookies for the cast and crew when she guest-starred. Boo!
What do you think, SVU fans? Is the world actually being run by a cabal of SVU writers who are orchestrating real-life events to coincide with their episodes? Should Ice-T be punished for going off the rails or commended for being such a caring dad? And when a lifestyle guru shows up for her TV cameo, shouldn’t she bring some tasty treats for the crew? Leave your comments!