Reviews

...actually I would have given this only one star, but then I just *had* to add another one for all the fun that Charles Shaughnessy was obviously having with his not-quite-as-urbane-as-he-wants-to-think-he-is villain role. He was the only watchable thing in the movie.

(P. S., edit added later: For all you Sarah Butler fans out there, I can't be absolutely sure but I'd put the odds at at least 95% that in her deliberately out-of-focus nude scene she's actually wearing a flesh-colored bodysuit.)

Practically every other review has already said this but by god it needs repeating anyway: this movie has what might be the very worst-edited action scenes ever in a medium-to-high budget production. Actions scenes are usually the centerpieces of Bond films, but here the ultra-rapid cutting from one viewpoint to another, with close to no rhyme or reason, renders them literally incomprehensible -- it's like watching a *parody* of the genre with the quick-cut editing of action sequences turned up to eleven as a joke. I've watched the aerial sequence three times now and I still have no clue as to how Bond induced the enemy plane to crash. It's just mind-boggling that somebody made the movie this bad *on purpose*.

(And on another point, we now know that radiant heat does not exist in the 007verse. You can be in the middle of an inferno and as long as the flames aren't actually *touching* you, you're fine. I understand that Bond films, even in the current "closer to real-world" Daniel Craig era, require a fair amount of suspension of disbelief, but the sequences in the burning down/blowing up hotel required flat-out *disintegration* of disbelief. In the real world, Bond, Camille, and Greene all would have been quickly broiled alive in there.)

Okay, to be fair the *rest* of the movie was fairly good, with a decent plot and good acting from Craig, Judi Dench, Olga Kurylenko, and the completely unknown to me Mathieu Amalric as the villain. But taking the product as a whole, I can't go higher than four stars out of ten, and maybe it should just be three.

Gotta love an episode in which our heroes casually conduct two, count 'em two, separate warrantless searches: undercover Benson going through closed desk drawers in the meatpacking company's offices, and Munch snooping around in the little old lady's home (good luck getting that typewriter you found into evidence, John). Add to that the idea that a videotape cassette (ask your grandparents, kids) could be destroyed by somebody stomping on it and breaking the plastic case, and this episode doesn't come off as being very flattering to the writers.

And... I'm getting *really* tired of the detectives' almost sociopathic devotion to assuming that anybody who might, maybe, possibly, could be the killer is by definition guilty as sin, and coming after them in the interrogation room like they're the KGB trying to get secrets out of a captured spy. It's a repetitive and extremely dumb meme that makes the characters that we're (I think) supposed to admire look like jackasses. (And do they ever, *ever* apologize to anyone for subjecting them to all that crap only to later have their alibi check out?)

And by the way, why does everybody willingly go "downtown" with them to experience the joy of being stuck in a small room with two aggressive mooks with Ph.D.'s in person-on-person psychological warfare? Why do we never seem to see the cops' "Okay, you're coming with us" met with "No, actually I'm not"?

Man, they must have had to rebuild all the sets from scratch after Ann-Margaret chewed up all that scenery. But hey, it was in a good cause so I can't hold it against her. (I'm not at all convinced that she deserved the Emmy she got for this though.)

Jaclyn Smith, on the other hand... well, she was a good enough actress for something like "Charlie's Angels," but Dick Wolf & Co. have practically made a fetish of hiring only top-notch actors, famous or never-heard-ofs, for their shows' guest roles, and Smith didn't havethe acting chops to match that. Just compare her to, say, Kelly Spitko as Francine, the junkie at the dingy rehab facility that Stabler and Benson visit, and Smith just can't play in that league.

I see that not only are the producers by this point not even bothering to try to explain how people get into the SVU squadroom and surrounding hallways, elevators, etc., with guns to commit dramatic murders there, but also that this time they've shown us that about a dozen random women can just walk right in unimpeded and hold a silent protest there. Does anybody in the production office even remember that this is supposed to be the inside a police station?

There aren't many SVU episodes that can accurately be described as "fun" -- in fact, this may be the first one I've seen (though the next episode, "P.C.," which I'm only about halfway through as I write this, shows a lot of potential with everyone's exasperated reactions to Kathy Griffin's super-intense lesbian-activist character whom even the most sincere and earnest of left-wingers (like me) could only describe as being from Looneytown) -- but that's what we've got here.

With Olivia Benson doing a brief but excellent dominatrix impression in some gorgeous Gucci boots (no, really), and a wonderfully over-the-top staged crime (you'll know what I'm talking about when you see it), this one's got a whole lot of fun mixed in with the serious crime (a double-murder) and the possibility of direct threats to the safety of some of the detectives and their families. See it.

Without getting into spoilers, this episode had one of the two least believable jury verdicts in all of the episodes of L&O-verse shows I've seen so far. No, nuh uh, no way, not gonna happen, and for me it completely sank what, frankly, hadn't been a very good story anyway. And for god's sake, will somebody please bribe John Larroquette to never do a Southern accent on television again.

(The other non-credible jury verdict I'm thinking of, by the way, was in SVU's "Authority," a/k/a "The One With Robin Williams," back in season 9, two years earlier.)

SVU has its share of episodes where the story starts out appearing to be about one thing but then morphs into having a completely different central theme, but I don't think it's ever been do so thoroughly as this. And it's a good thing too, as after about ten minutes of the story I was *really* not looking forward to spending the next forty minutes watching yet another generic "He's stalking and victimizing her, but is so smart that he might get away with it" story unfold.

Fortunately, the story turns on a dime when the stalker has a meltdown in court and the judge recognizes something from his own past in a certain turn of phrase in the defendant's rant, and the stalking-crimes story effectively goes by the wayside (though there's little doubt that the guy will be found guilty eventually) in favor of a completely different one about the kidnapping and disappearance of the judge's then three-year-old son thirty years ago.

The serial child kidnapper-rapist-murderer who took the boy had been eventually caught and imprisoned on twelve consecutive life sentences, one for each victim. Over the years he's been revealing the locations of the bodies, one at a time, in exchange for certain in-prison privileges or other slight improvements in his living conditions. Now the only child whose body is still unfound is the judge's, and the killer is dying of emphysema. After reviewing Stabler's file. rife with incidents where he's gone right up to and in many cases over the line in the interrogation room. the judge asks him as a favor to visit the killer and extract from him the location of his son's body. Meanwhile, the judge also egregiously violates the trial rules by meeting alone with the stalker-defendant in his jail cell to ask him some personal questions...

This is a different kind of story from the usual SVU fare, much more about *people* than the investigation of a crime, and frankly my only real complaint about it is that it reached the end leaving us not knowing how things were going to work out for the people whose lives had been incredibly changed both on a very bad day thirty years ago and today. Recommended.

This was a pretty good, if somewhat workman-like, episode, despite the fact that the writers are getting way too much in love with having super-unexpected twists at the ends of their stories. The story hangs together well, with the possible exception of how a certain character managed to throw a suitcase full of dead body out the window of a moving Amtrak train (do their windows even open?). Eric McCormack is excellent as a suspect who, for all of his other faults, is undeniably a truly loving father, and Christine Lahti is doing nicely on building her tougher-than-nails Assistant District Attorney character up as being wound just a tiny bit too tightly for the safety of herself or those around her; I'm expecting this side storyline to come to a head in two or three more episodes, preferably without her killing anybody.

But: I'm currently binge-watching L&O:SVU from the start, and after watching ten seasons in about three weeks I'm starting to get a subconscious feel, from the story or even just from the physical placement of the actors in a scene, for when they're about to pull something sudden and dramatic. In this episode I smelled the super-twist at the end about a minute before it happened; the only thing I got wrong was that I was expecting a letter-opener rather than a pair of scissors. Guys, you're starting to get predictable here.

"Hi, my name is Olivia Benson and the writers have apparently just dropped my IQ to about forty because I've just gotten a phone call that makes me suspect that my partner is in serious, perhaps even mortal, danger down in the Crime Lab, so I'm going to run right down there all by myself without telling anybody else! And then when I get there and see my partner gagged and tied to a chair I'm going to move straight towards him instead of getting my back to a wall and looking around for bad guys."

This was just too effing stupid for words, and I'd *liked* this episode a lot up till then.

First, the reason for my one-star rating: at one point, in the mandatory "We've got the wrong guy but we're 300% sure he's guilty" phase of the episode, Stabler and Tutuola, though mostly Stabler, literally physically assaulted and battered a suspect in the interrogation room, whole Cragen watched them through the two-way mirror, not lifting a finger to interfere. This was a serious crime -- if they'd seen a civilian doing the same thing they'd have arrested him -- but since they're cops then it's eh, who cares, the guy was a slimebag anyway. This was just terrible: we don't need criminal cops in real life, and we don't need them portrayed as the heroes of fictional cop shows either.

Aside from that element, the crime, investigation, and courtroom action part of the "pursuit of a serial killer" story worked pretty well, though as reviewer depaderico pointed out there were two big holes in it: the detectives' lack of interest in a possible suspect because he's a farmer in North Carolina (what, he can't travel?), and the complete freeing of the killer by the arraignment judge despite the fact that while the murders couldn't be stuck to him, a separate assault certainly could be.

But the character-driven story of Major Crimes detective Victor Moran (played by Delroy Lindo) mostly fell flat: he just wasn't nearly as interesting as the writers seemed to think he was and he was really difficult if not impossible to care about other than as an annoying jerk. And no explanation beyond "Because It's In The Script" was ever given for the new Chief of Detectives' rabid and almost literally sneering championing of him at the expense of the SVU squad.

In an episode about people of one gender who were unfortunately born into bodies of the opposite and, for them, wrong gender, the then-15-year-old actor Bridger Zadina anchors the episode with an excellent performance as a 13-year-old girl in a boy's body, and actress Daniela Sea is somehow utterly credible in a smaller role as a female-bodied 17-year-old boy, despite apparently having been 32 years old at the time. (In real life, Sea has come out as non-binary; I don't know whether that was before or after ths episode was made.)

The story itself works well too, as the whole crime is driven by a father's selfish refusal to accept that the son he loved is actually a daughter. (Frankly, there were times in the episode when I found myself wishing that his attempted murder had been successful.) More conservative audience members will probably hate this episode but what are you gonna do: in this case reality really *does* have a liberal bias.

(And also, as part of a red-herring sub-plot we meet an anthropologist who *really* goes the extra mile in her research.)

I loved watching Judith Light as prosecutor-turned-judge-turned-back-into-a-prosecutor-for-this-case-only Elizabeth Donnelly claiming that she wasn't letting her personal feelings govern her actions while her eyes glowed a demonic red and venom dripped from her fangs.

It was also good to see Mike Farrell again -- heven't seen much of him since M*A*S*H ended -- though it sucked to see that he'd gotten that old.

The real twist would have been if the incredibly obvious twist that the story was clearly leading to *hadn't* happened, but it did. Also, I know that James Brolin -- guest starring as an ex-Marine former astronaut friend of Stabler's, the man responsible for Stabler having become a Marine himself -- can turn in acting performances a lot better than this; I can only assume that the director kept telling him "No James, you've gotta give me more. Be *more* of a larger-than-life stereotype!"

Add in one of the clumsiest two-person fight scenes I've ever seen and gods, what a letdown this was after the incredible previous episode, "Swing."

Some reviews of the episodes in the early seasons have said how much better they were compared to those in the later seasons in which (in the opinions of the reviewers) the show became soap-opera-ish and centered too much on the characters' own lives and problems. That may be true (I'm watching the series from the start and haven't gotten to those later seasons yet), but this episode, which centers entirely on the travails of the Stabler family, is pretty close to perfect.

Ellen Burstyn as Elliot Stabler's mother simply owns every second of her three long scenes, and Allison Siko, whom I hadn't thought much of one way or the other until now because she had never been called on to be much more than a placeholder -- a competent-enough actress wearing a sign that says "Sulky Teenage Daughter," in effect -- is a revelation once she's given the opportunity to show us what she can do. I also enjoyed Fiona Dourif (daughter of actor Brad Dourif) in her brief appearance as Det. Nikki (not Mikki) Breslin; it's a pity that to date she hasn't appeared again on the show.

A quite good episode, but with some unintentionally silly or just plain dumb bits that dragged it down, starting with the visual silliness of the kid being attached to Stabler like a static-electricity-charged balloon early on in the episode. The bit where Stabler loudly -- I mean, *loudly* -- blabbed a big secret in a crowded hallway which included the person it was being kept from felt like something out of a bad sitcom, and all the drama of the aftermath of a major car crash was somewhat deadened by the script's ridiculous shoehorning of Olivia Benson into the middle of the action when she should have been sidelined while the rescue experts, the firemen and the EMTs, handled everything. (And P.S., Olivia: you *don't* move a crash victim's head unless a medical professional tells you to. Broken necks don't show on the outside.)

And yet, for all those flaws I'm still giving the episode a rating of eight out of ten stars -- it'd be eight and a half if that was allowed -- because all of it that wasn't badly done was done *very* well indeed. And special praise for Isabelle Gillies for nailing the childbirth scenes.

This could have been one of the better episodes but it was let down by the actual writing, which included what is hands down the most unintentionally hilarious death scene in the entire history of the Law &Order universe. Less entertainingly, everybody missed the blatantly obvious fact that one character was confessing to the initial murder just to protect someone else, and Casey Novak didn't even notice that that defendant's vague allocution while pleading guilty didn't line up with the crime scene evidence. And finally, I'm getting really tired of there being one last dramatic turn or event -- usually involving somebody dying -- popping up in the very last few minutes of an episode for no good reason except to be shocking. It's a cheap trick that turns up way too often in both the original L&O and SVU.

Pretty good episode, with a fine performance from Arye Gross as a good man victimized of his own criminal insanity. (Not as severely a as the three young girls that he'd serially kidnapped and raped, but still...) I loved his dialogue when, while handcuffed and being escorted to the back seat of a police car by Stabler, he believed that he'd received a message commanding him to escape: "Well okay, but do I have to do it right now? 'Cause it's gonna be real *hard*..."

Also noteworthy: Casey Novak deliberately pulls a courtroom stunt that, in the name of justice, helps the defense, and newly appointed acting District Attorney Jack McCoy is furious at her... but if she'd done some research she could have come back at him with at least two or three cases of McCoy, in his Assistant District Attorney career, having done exactly the same thing. (I recall a quietly furious D.A. Adam Schiff growling at McCoy and his assistant Claire Kincaid after one such incident "You two take a lot of liberties.")

Another reviewer has labeled this episode the "Spock's Brain" of L&O:SVU, and yes, it really is that embarrassingly bad. The red-herring sleepwalking sex bit, somewhat derided in at least one other review here, actually did make sense, but nothing that came after it did. The story felt like it was written by a bunch of adults who are trying to be "hip" about stuff that today's youth are doing but actually have no idea what they're talking about. And the final scene, in which poor Kevin Tighe was called upon to make a laughably insane premise seem plausible... oy.

(P.S.: For those who don't get the reference, Spock's Brain (1968), the first episode of the third and final season of Star Trek (1966) (1966-69), is widely considered, to the point of having become something of a cliche, to be the rock-bottom worst episode of the entire series.)