Law & Order: SVU had one of its most powerful cases in recent memory… if you skipped the first half of the episode.
It didn’t make sense that the team was investigating a murder until the big reveal that he was a sexual assault survivor.
This story ended up being as tragic as it was powerful, but the missing reason for giving this case to SVU in the first place was an unnecessary distraction.
Law & Order: SVU Season 27 Episode 18 Gave Desperately Needed Attention To Male Survivors… Eventually
During the first half of the episode, I kept feeling like I’d missed something because it was so unclear why SVU was investigating this murder.
Law & Order: SVU Season 27 Episode 18 opened like an old-school episode of its parent series, with a hotel housekeeper finding a dead body in the bathtub of one of her units.
I always loved those cold opens, and this one was a marked improvement over the 10 minutes or more that some Law & Order: SVU Season 27 episodes have offered.
However, SVU is not a homicide unit. Its mission is supposed to be to get justice for victims of sexual assault, find missing children, and bring those who abuse children to justice.
Maybe I missed something, but despite the victim being young, it seemed like this case should have belonged to Brady’s unit, not Benson’s.
In fact, Law & Order: SVU Season 27 Episode 18 had great material for a crossover event in which the Law & Order episode dealt with the homicide, and Benson was called in when it was discovered the victim was also the victim of a serial sexual predator.
Unfortunately, the plot belonged solely to SVU, and the question of why they were investigating this case was a distraction during the first half of the episode.
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That isn’t to say there weren’t some great investigative moments — it’s just that it didn’t make sense that SVU was involved at all.
We did get some badly-needed lighthearted moments, like that woman flirting with Benson, trying to convince her to sell her body, and refusing to share any information without getting paid first, but this investigation still broke the series’ internal logic until after Razor’s arrest.
It Was Obvious That Razor Was a Survivor From The Moment The Cops Met Him
It wasn’t just that he had nothing to say about Ian’s death — reluctant witnesses who seem perfectly suited to have committed the crime, yet don’t even know the victim is dead, are par for the course in the Law & Order franchise.
His defensiveness, his inability to tolerate people in his space, and his repeated demand not to touch him screamed trauma responses, even if he did deserve to get hauled in for physically assaulting Griffin.
That was the moment that Law & Order: SVU Season 27 Episode 18 began making sense as an SVU episode.
One of the reasons I wish it had come earlier is that male sexual assault survivors aren’t always taken seriously, to say the least, and SVU was uniquely positioned to tell a story about teenage boys being abused by a quasi-celebrity they admired.
The second half of the episode didn’t focus entirely on male survivors’ struggle to come forward, but Razor’s belief that he would never be taken seriously and that continuing to work for Clint was his only way to survive implied the challenges this demographic faces.
The Courtroom Aspect Was Both Powerful and Ridiculous (And Used An Overdone Trope)
The SVU team should have prepared better for this case. It didn’t make sense to me that after Clint was acquitted, Benson first decided to seek out other victims — something that will never happen now since Clint was killed.
Did it make sense to you why SVU was investigating this case in the first place?
Let us know in the comments! Don’t forget to share this article with your friends.
Usually, SVU would do that first rather than rely on a single witness who had already demonstrated extreme reluctance to testify, and if they didn’t do it on their own, Carisi would insist on it so that what happened in court didn’t happen.
It’s also annoying that Razor changed his story on the stand, not because it wasn’t true to his character, but because it’s a trope the franchise loves that defies the rules of competent lawyering.
While I’m not a lawyer, I’ve studied enough to know that you’re not supposed to ask witnesses questions that you don’t know how they will answer. So, in real life, I doubt there are many lawyers putting shaky witnesses on the stand who sneakily change their testimony as soon as they’re under oath.
Yet the Law & Order universe is full of witnesses who do just that. The majority of cases that fall apart or are in jeopardy of being lost on these shows achieve that status when the star witness suddenly decides to deny everything on the stand.
Additionally, Carisi accomplished nothing but arguing with Clint during cross-examination.
Usually, when fictional lawyers try to provoke someone, it’s in order to get them to contradict their claims of being reasonable, cool-headed people, or otherwise let something slip that proves the case.
This time, though, Clint merely yelled at Carisi to back off, something which the defense attorney and judge wholeheartedly agreed with. I wouldn’t be surprised if part of the reason Carisi lost the case is that he appeared to be bullying the defendant into a false confession.
Of course, that led to the tragic ending of Shawn killing Clint, but the tragedy of the verdict wasn’t earned because the case was handled so badly.
Or, at least, that’s how I saw it. What about you?
Hit the comments with your thoughts about how this case went, and don’t forget to share this article with your friends so they can join the conversation.
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Law & Order: SVU Season 27 airs on NBC on Thursdays at 9/8c and streams on Peacock on Fridays.
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