stunt_muppet

a.k.a. Ah, Catholics. What would law enforcement do without ya.

 

First off, let’s get one thing out of the way:

 

(Insert obligatory rant about the five-minute presence of Munch and Fin here. I effing want them BACK, NBC.)

 

Okay. I feel slightly better now. But only slightly.

 

For the record, I’m a little bit sick of the “Bible-beating evangelical whackjob involved with a gay prostitute” story by now. It feels overdone. Granted, it ended in a more interesting way than before, and the preacher in this episode wasn’t played as a total monster, but still. When I turn on SVU, I don’t want to roll my eyes and ask “why are we doing this again?”. There are some plotlines that never get old, that you can have almost endless variations on. This really isn’t one of them. It doesn’t help that this episode is eerily similar to “Church” in TOS a couple of weeks ago. Let’s see, the aforementioned preacher with connections to a prostitute, check. Wife who’s even further off the deep end than preacher is, check. Multi-squillion dollar evangelical empire, check. Preacher and his family dragged through the mud in public, check. Religious leanings of main character brought up, check.

 

Also, from the moment I saw the title on Wikipedia I knew that Stabler was going to put his Guilty Catholic Powahs to work, and I almost groaned when Huang suggested playing on the preacher’s faith, because I knew precisely what was coming. I mean, I kind of liked it, because I’m a sucker for the Guilty Catholic Powahs, but it felt a little heavy-handed (there’s that word again). It also made Stabler look sanctimonious, which isn’t a good quality in anyone. And was I the only one who knew that the preacher’s confession was going to get dismissed because he didn’t make it in a police station? I completely knew it. Dragging him out into that church was a glaring and obvious mistake and someone (like Casey, maybe?) should have said something about it. Would’ve been much more productive than having Elliot and Casey try to talk over each other with the justifications.

 

Also, apparently, that Act of Contrition that Stabler recites is the Designated Act of Contrition To Be Used in Cop Dramas, since it’s the exact same one used in Miami in “From the Grave”. I only note this because I have, in all my churchgoing days, never once heard that prayer using those words. Ever. (No, I haven’t memorized every single Miami episode ever. That one was just on rerun a few days ago. I promise I’m not that much of a dork.)

 

Now, all the whining aside, there were things that I liked about this episode. For starters, the pastor in this episode was actually a human being. He took responsibility for a crime he hadn’t committed, he came to accept his son, and he forgave his wife. Frankly, I found him far less reprehensible than his wife. (again, this exact same thing came up in “Church”, but I’m done complaining about that.) His homophobia was appalling, but at the end of the episode I think we were left with the hope that he might change his way of thinking, that he might truly accept people who were different from him. I had no such hope for the wife and the psycho secretary (who I should have suspected but didn’t). Not only did the wife shoot at her own husband because she thought he might be gay, she used the word “sodomite” in cold blood. She clearly deserves whatever the law metes out.

 

Also, I liked the misdirection at the end, where we weren’t sure for a minute who had actually killed Victim Of The Week. I hadn’t pegged the secretary as being privy to family events, so it did come as a bit of a surprise to me.

 

In conclusion, another not-bad episode – not terrible, but not my favorite. Would have been ranked higher if the Preacher Plotline hadn’t already been done everywhere else, but hey. At least now they’ve got it out of their system and can move on to something else.