‘Law & Order: SVU’: Benson Questions Herself in Season 25 Premiere (RECAP)
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[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for the Law & Order: SVU Season 25 premiere “Tunnel Blind.”]
Law & Order: SVU, to start its 25th season, flashes all the way back for Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), with a look at her over the years, to lead into the baptism of ADA Sonny Carisi (Peter Scanavino) and (detective-turned-professor) Amanda Rollins’ (Kelli Giddish) baby.
“It’s moments like these that remind me of the oath that I took, to protect the innocent,” Benson’s voiceover plays over the opening montage of Benson over the years. “This is not a solitary act, but more of a lifelong commitment.” That leads into the baptism, then after, Carisi’s cousin’s interest in Benson. “Don’t look at me. You might as well toss your heart into a woodchipper,” she advises him. Steve (Hamish Allan-Headley) later sees her touching the compass around her neck (the gift from Stabler) and asks about the letters. “The J is for joy, and the C is for compassion. … The L is for love.” It hasn’t “yet” pointed her in the right direction, she says, looking at Carisi and Rollins taking advantage of actually having alone time with everyone eager to watch their baby.
Peter Kramer/NBC
While driving home with Noah (Ryan Buggle), Benson catches sight of a young girl in a van at a stoplight. When she and the squad are called to the scene of a missing girl, she discovers the two girls are one and the same (the mom has a photo of her and she’s wearing the same bracelet). Chief Tommy McGrath (Terry Serpico) is the first to question if she’s sure she saw what she did; she is, but as Benson tells Sergeant Odafin “Fin” Tutuola (Ice-T), she should’ve known something was wrong. That’s not the last time she’ll say that.
The squad digs into Maddie, but she looks like just an innocent 15-year-old, with no signs anywhere she was being groomed (and her social media accounts are all under parental controls). When it’s been over four hours, Fin suggests she take a few hours while they hold down the fort. “If you say that again, we’re going to have a problem,” Benson tells him. He reminds her she’s had a long day. “I let him take her,” she says. But why would someone use a bright green energy drink van for an abduction? Benson insists she’s not imagining it … and that’s when the van is found, abandoned, in Pennsylvania. Benson finds the bracelet stuffed in the front passenger seat, but they get nothing on the driver after searching the vehicle. Carisi’s the next to try to talk to Benson, telling her to stop beating herself up.
Maddie’s father alerts them to an older man who watched the girls’ soccer practice last year. A local cop talked to him, and he claimed to be a soccer fan. Fin, Detective Joe Velasco (Octavio Pisano), and Detective Terry Bruno (Kevin Kane) go to talk to him and find a photo of Maddie in his shed, but he insists he doesn’t know where he is. A thorough search of the property comes up with nothing. He also doesn’t have a valid driver’s license.
Then there’s a commotion at the precinct: A man comes in carrying a trash bag containing what looks like a body. He says he found the missing girl. Inside is a sex doll that looks exactly like Maddie (and has a replica of her bracelet). Whoever manufactured it did so before she was kidnapped, and as her parents reveal, the doll is wearing the same outfit Maddie did on her birthday. But they insist they keep her photos off social media and her mother’s account is private. Upon tracking down the seller, they find another Maddie doll. The dolls supposedly come from Taiwan.
Benson goes to see Rollins just as she happens to be teaching a class about humans’ basic needs and those becoming corrupted around the time of Jack the Ripper, the dawn of sex crimes investigation. They chat about the case (Carisi has kept his wife updated), and Rollins is the one to point out the squad needs to look at the buyers on the list who may have escalated. “Our perp,” she notably says — how long can Rollins continue to teach when she so clearly misses SVU? — which Benson calls her out on. Rollins is glad she can help. “Don’t make me miss you more than I do,” Benson tells her.
One of those buyers threw his doll that looks like Maddie in a dumpster because she’s the reason all this happened. He doesn’t know where Maddie is, but he does know who took her: a guy he paid $8,000 to do just that. He tried to cancel, but it was too late. Tracking the kidnapper’s phone leads them to a motel, where they find a body bag in a bathtub in the motel room in which Maddie was. But inside the bag isn’t Maddie; rather, it’s another missing girl, who is alive and whom another SVU detective, Detective Sloane Parrish (Amber Skye Noyes), has been looking for for a year.
As we figured she would, Benson has Parrish join her back in the city to talk to the girl, Tanya. She met George from Canada on Amtrak, which he apparently rides for days sometimes. A few days ago, he said he was going to make $8,000 and went out, then came back with the money and Maddie. However, he said he couldn’t take them both. There was a fight, then he got her high to calm her nerves … and she ended up in that body bag.
McGrath, of course, wants to celebrate what he sees as a victory — Tanya being found — despite Maddie still being missing. And so he holds a press conference — over on Organized Crime, Christopher Meloni‘s Detective Elliot Stabler also sees the chief remarking about the case on the news — during which Maddie’s parents show up, wanting to know about their daughter. Benson, still wearing a replica Maddie bracelet (she won’t take it off until the teen is found, Rollins knows), assures them she’s still working the case.
And with that, SVU begins a season of Benson reflecting on her career and future with a case she doesn’t solve. What did you think of the premiere?
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