No doubt the show's writers struggled to create an especially loathsome predator for this milestone episode....NBC loudly trumpeted 'viewer discretion advised' at the beginning, which mostly cues 'SVU' fans to smack their lips and rub their hands in delirious glee. (Not that we'd ever stoop to such base behavior....we only screamed out one quick 'whoop!')
Did they succeed? Hmm....not bad, but in all the years of watching this show, we recall much scummier perps in 'SVU's long, long line of rapists, pedophiles, human traffickers, and assorted serial killers. No. 400 featured an uptown entitled shrink (Sara Wynter) a deeply conniving serial rapist of teen boys. Her traumatized 15 year old son inadvertently shoots and kills his best bud when he stumbles on Best Bud getting it on with Mom. (Mom, ever quick on the uptake, shouts 'he's raping me! to junior.....egging on the poor quaking kid to blast away)
But this psycho-babble harpy quack isn't fooling our indomitable SVU Commander (Mariska Hargitay) for one New York minute. Hargitay, now a producer of SVU , has rapidly transformed the show into an almost one-woman vehicle for herself......the camera lingers on endless, loving close-ups of her as she deploys withering, disgusted stares at her quarry. Unlike her previous Commander, (Dann Florek), she spends little or no time in the office barking orders, much preferring the fun of barging into our prime suspect's apartment, mainly for the purpose of giving out those 'you-make-me-sick, you vile pervert' gazes.
As in many SVU episodes, we reach the plot's juicy wham-bams at the halfway point, when the weekly Slimeball is dragged into court, there to be prosecuted by lightning-on-his-feet motormouth DA Barba (Raul Esparza). But this episode's gargoyle, Dr. Boy-Rapin' Mom, ain't no fool, hiring that wily defender of all Depraved Douchebags, John Buchanan (Delaney Williams, always superb at painting his monstrous clients as persecuted pillars of the community...)
If you're watching SVU live, starting at 9:00 Eastern Time, you know by now that at 10:50, just before the last chunk of commercials, the writers will unleash their final twist or plot reversal, guaranteed to make you and the entire cast drop their jaws in unison. (You can tell the writers are really desperate if they resort to a courtroom shootout, ending their plot by gunfire-ex-machina...) Episode #400 definitely trots out one of the better twists, further cementing Dr. Mom's utter malevolence.
At last we reach the signature fadeout of all Dick Wolf-produced shows, but especially potent in SVU.....designed to leave you queasy and unsettled. Yes, there's some amount of closure but usually at a horrible cost, strewn with untimely cruel death, destroyed lives, broken families, and eternal emotional damage to both victims and the SVU cops who championed them. By the time Dick Wolf's credit pops up at the end, you realize you've been on a mini- Heart Of Darkness cruise and you're ready to start muttering "the horror....the horror..."
Does that mean we won't come back for next week's episode? In the immortal words of Will Smith...."Oh Hell no!" To this episode and the show itself, we hand out 4 indictments....(****) Cue the Dick Wolf celebrated scene-punctuation sound.....'Gong-Gong.'
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