Law and Order SVU, like a fine wine, only gets better with age. Season one was good but they were still finding their footing. Season two feels a lot more like what this show would come to be. They hadn't come up with Hudson or Tompkins Square yet, so Hanford University is the setting for two of the cases. But Finn is now a proper member of the squad (had had barely just arrived at the end of season one) and Alex Cabot becomes SVU's first permanent ADA. Melinda Warner and George Huang also make their appearances in this season for the first time..
1. Legacy
The case starts with a seven-year-old girl, Emily, who's been brought to the E.R with a head injury that resulted in a comma. X-rays reveal clear signs of physical abuse and the doctors suspect she's been molested as well. When SVU starts to investigate, several suspects pop up: the father, Denny, with whom the mother doesn't want to have any contact anymore; the step-father, Randall McKenna, whom Denny claims he knows is violent with his daughter; the step-brother, Justin, an angry teenager who resents the presence of his father's new wife and her daughter in his home; and even Henry Abidin a wealthy minister who's taken a special interest in the little girl.
This episode is phenomenal. Most of the time, SVU detectives have access to the victim, but this time, because she's in a coma, it is specially difficult to put the pieces of the puzzle together. The mystery is intriguing, and each time a new suspect pops up there's compelling reasons to believe that we finally found the guy. But the thing that truly makes this episode number one is Detective John Munch.
You know, I used to watch SVU with my family all the time when I was a little kid. It was a running joke in our house that I was a John Munch fan girl, because he was definitely my favorite character. In recent years, however, since I started watching SVU on my own, and especially re-watching the post-Stabler seasons, I have to say, I didn't really understand why I used to like Munch so much. Barba became my undisputed favourite, and Munch... well, he was cool, sure, but totally underutilized, and even the way he left the show was a bit disappointing. But now that I am having a look at the earlier seasons again... Wow...
Munch doesn't get the center of many episodes. SVU isn't quite like The Next Generation, where the writers made it a point to dedicate some episodes to each of the main characters, and especially in the Stabler era, there's a disproportionate focus on Eliott and Olivia as opposed to everyone else. But whenever Munch gets an episode of his own, it's a banger of an episode and he totally steals the show.
Here, the abuse of this little girl rings a little too close to home, and reminds him of a kid that was abused in his neighborhood, when he was a teenager, before he even thought of becoming a cop. It is Munch who finally discovers the who's guilty of abusing Emily, and it is he who extracts the confession from the perp. It takes everything he has to pretend to have empathy for the abuser, and by the time the confession is done, you can see he is hanging by a thread by the way he quietly leaves the room. Later, in the rooftop, he tells Olivia the whole story. About how he used to see this girl on her porch every time he walked back from school. How she would sometimes have a black eye, or a bloody lip. How one day he came home and found out she had been killed. How guilty and heartbroken he feels that he let that little girl down. And he breaks down crying because it almost happened again. It's the best scene of the season.
And that moment in the very end, when he goes into Emily's hospital room to read to her... Sweetest moment since the start of SVU...
"I looked at that four-year-old... flashed on a little girl that used to live across the street from us in our old neighborhood on the Lower East Side. She had that same look in her eyes. Sad, lost. She used to stand on her porch every afternoon when I came home from school. Like she was waiting for me. Sometimes, she'd have a black eye or a bloody lip. Never said anything to me.J ust looked at me like she was trying to tell me something. But I was too full of my own teenage crap to pay any attention. One day, I came home... she wasn't there. Found out her mother threw her through a plate glass window. Went to the funeral. Saw her dad. It's the first time I saw a grown man cry. They sent her (mother) to a sanitarium. She told my mother... she didn't understand what all the fuss was about. She was the one that had to get a new window. Months later, I'd come home... and I'd look up at the porch. I swear, I saw that little girl standing there, looking at me with that look.I almost let her down again." - John Munch
2. Manhunt
The crime is kidnapping: a man pushes a woman into a green 4x4 before speeding off. But in his haste, the suspect dropped a chloroform-soaked cloth, the mark of the Bowery Stalker. This was Munch's case the previous summer, a perp who raped, tortured and killed his victims, but they never caught the guy, and Munch is taking this personally.
They have more leads this time though and the investigation is thrilling. Munch and Finn chase this guy across state lines, sharing a cheap motel room, in true X-Files fashion. That scene by the way is probably the beginning of Finn and Munch's friendship, when Finn tells munch about the reason why he left vice (a story that would come back to haunt him several years later). They discover the suspect is packing a ton of firearms, that he has a fortified bunker, that he has a partner.... The suspect turns out to be former US military, dishonorably discharged from the army because, in his superior's words, he "suffered under the delusion that we (the army) enjoy killing things".
The manhunt eventually leads them to Canada, where the guy has one final card up his sleeve: even if he's caught, Canada doesn't have the death penalty and Canadian law doesn't allow for extradiction of prisoners who will be subjected to execution.
Which brings us to the star of this episode: crusader for Justice, Alexandra Cabot. Alex has been full of surprises since her very first appearance, demonstrating that she is bold, intelligent and well-connected. And this time she uses a classy lawyery sleight of hand to circumvent their diplomatic crisis. In her words:
"John, you did your work. Now let me do mine."- Alex Cabot
3. Countdown
A ticking clock is a great way to create tension in a story, and it's exactly the device used in episode 15 of season 2. At 8PM, after a long day trying to interview a little girl who escaped her abductor, despite enormous interference from the mother, the team is fresh out of leads and ready to call it a night. Before the door of the elevator closes though, Captain Cragen stops them with: "Everybody stays.". Turns out the abductor has taken another girl. And now the team has 72 hours to catch him, if they hope to find the girl alive.
Eliot misses the twins' birthdays, Olivia forgets to cancel her date with, and all of them worked for hours on end, with barely little sleep, encountering nothing but closed doors and people who don't seem to appreciate the gravity of the situation. Everybody's feeling on edge, Olivia punches a plate of salad interrupting the lunch of two uncooperative vice cops, and Alex has to get a court order to compel the mother of the first victim to authorize a second interview with the girl.
Honourable mentions:
2x06 Non Compliance: The main suspect on the stabbing of a doctoral student is a schizophrenic man who refuses to take his medication. This episode does a wonderful job of subverting expectations and showing how not all is as it seems at first. It challenges preconceptions about patients with mental illness and the ending is just a punch to the stomach, exploring the idea that even something that seems good and well intended can have devastating consequences
2x08: Taken: A seventeen-year-old girl is raped during the opening event of a luxury hotel in Manhattan. The family who owns the hotel is trying to keep things quiet, a registered sex-offender is the main suspect, but eventually everything gets turned upside down.Victims become perps, perps become victims, and it's only due to the wit of crusader Cabot that the mastermind gets what they deserve.
2x17 Folly: A young man is beaten . He turns out to be a male escort. Something that lots of guys do in college, he says. It's good money. And sometimes there's an extra on the side. The crime is unusual, the investigation uncovers a cool twist, and it was fun seeing Rachel's boyfriend, Tag (from Friends) with a completely different (and much less innocent) voice work.
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