Law & Order: This one time, the show jumped the hyena

Posted by sara November 20th, 2008 at 10:00am In General Has Everyone Gone Mad? Law & Order

So Law & Order: SVU is kind of batshit crazy lately. They were four different kinds of ripped-from-the-headlines last week, and this week…oh my GOD. Let’s discuss.

Last week, Benson and Stabler took on a Gloucester, MA–style pregnancy pact, only because it’s SVU, they had to start off with a homeless man who’d been castrated and set on fire. Fantastic! Turns out he was castrated and set on fire because he knocked up a high school girl, and her older brother thought that the crispy critter raped his sister. But not so! She wanted a baby! Because her friend got pregnant and being pregnant is, like, awesome. Just ask my friend Suzy, it’s all vomiting and people thinking you’re fat and surreptitiously growing a penis inside of you.

From the friends-who-tell-friends-to-get-pregnant, the detectives embarked on another of their Awesome Adventures in Hip-Hop. Which are ALWAYS BAD IDEAS. Look, I know the people behind SVU think they can get away with storylines involving rappers and that subculture because they cast Ice-T, who once upon a time was a real rapper, but, um, they cannot. In last week’s episode, this adventure in alternate job choices included casting one of the kids from Sleepers as a wannabe rapper whose mission in life is, and I quote, “Wreckin’ decks and gettin’ sex.” …Yes. That part was lame.

And then one of the pregnant girls killed herself no wait her boyfriend killed her omg, and Debi Mazar was the original killer-by-fire and pregnant-girl’s mother, and the new ADA still sucks, the end.

This week, it got WEIRDER. And oddly, sadder. The show opened with Stabler getting shot in the chest, which of course didn’t bother him, because have you seen Meloni without a shirt? (That is not, by the way, a full-frontal shot from Oz. You’re welcome. Or I apologize, whichever is appropriate.) You could drive nails into his pecs and it kind of wouldn’t bother him. I bet he’d like it. So he got shot, and Benson made her crumply sad face. And then we flashed back a week, to the case of A Dead Girl in an Alley Who Had Been Mauled By a Tiger and Had a Rare Parrot in Her Purse. Yes, another one of those.

Stabler and Benson followed the trail to the Dead Girl’s boyfriend, who turned out to be Big Boi from Outkast, who also has a pet tiger. ZOMG. But! There’s another tiger in New York. Turns out Dead Girl was working as a smuggler to support herself while trying to launch a modeling career, and she was smuggling rare animals, not drugs, into the country. Rare animals like, you know, pet tigers. And rare parrots. And nearly-extinct monkeys that horrible rich people want to butcher so they can use their sternums as super-exclusive chopsticks. So Stabler went undercover into the smuggling ring, and met some Very Scary People. Who own tigers. And like to feed smugglers who get too big for their britches to said tigers. Ewww.

Stabler accidentally blew Big Boi’s cover, which led to one of the fucking freakiest moments I’ve ever seen on SVU, and I have watched a lot of this shit. The detectives get called to Big Boi’s place because the neighbors heard dogs fighting, and I thought this was going to go down your typical Michael Vick road, but NO. We found out that Evil Smuggler #1 FED BIG BOI TO SOME HYENAS OH HOLY GOD because they have jaws that can crush, like, STEEL. And then the hyenas puked up his bling.

I think that was the part of the episode that bothered me the most, that and the part where Evil Smuggler #1 smiled, with blood on his teeth (and that’s my dealbreaker, blood on the teeth, the thing that really freaks me out about about TV and movie violence), and told Elliot that the burgers they were eating were made of the aforementioned smuggler-eating tiger. After all the instances of horrible, disgusting, depraved sexual violence against women, men, children and whoever else on this show, this is what bothers me? I think that says something unpleasant about my humanity. But I’m not sure where else SVU can go. I think it’s becoming the procedural version of Las Vegas, which had a bomb, a kidnapping, a pregnancy, or someone being deployed to the Eye-rack about every other episode (and sometimes all at once). But I will keep watching, and not just when I need something on in the background while I copyedit a Christian romance novel (true story).