Law & Order: SVU Season 27 Episode 20 Squanders Benson’s Suspension Before Offering One Of Its Strongest Cases

What exactly was the point of Benson’s suspension?

Law & Order: SVU Season 27 Episode 20 started out strong, with Benson questioning what her next move was now that she’d been suspended and Fin and Curry forced into leadership positions they didn’t really want.

But before the first commercial break, Benson was already temporarily reinstated pending a hearing, allowing her to be the one who caught the rapist by the end of the hour, as if her suspension never existed.

Law & Order: SVU Season 27 Episode 20 Could Have Tested All The Characters

Benson started off the hour depressed, while Fin and Curry were in charge and nobody seemed particularly happy about it.

Fin has never wanted to be in charge of the unit, and having to do it because his close friend and captain is being railroaded would have been a meaty storyline.

Technically, he still had that storyline… for a few minutes.

Benson walked through the door almost as soon as Fin got through saying that he didn’t want to be the SVU supervisor but was forced into it.

She said that although she was back on duty, she’d let Fin be in charge, but that didn’t seem to amount to much, since she did her usual thing and Fin was barely on-screen.

How disappointing!

Fin has gotten the short end of the stick for most of Law & Order: SVU Season 27 for budgetary reasons, so now that he’s back, he deserves a real story.

Plus, Benson’s angst over what to do next seemed to be solved almost immediately, although technically her fate is still up in the air.

She was reinstated pending a hearing in 30 days, which her union representative expects to prevail at. That certainly sounds like getting rid of the story just as quickly as it started.

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Maybe I’m wrong, and it’s a false ending, but for now, it seems like the suspension at the end of Law & Order: SVU Season 27 Episode 19 was manufactured drama that nobody intended to do anything real with.

Benson’s doubt about whether she wanted to return to SVU and Velasco having to be the one to convince her to keep fighting were interesting, considering that Benson rarely gives up that easily — but what was the point if the story was just going to evaporate into thin air?

Law & Order: SVU Offered an Interesting Case Involving a Bunch of Jerks

Nora didn’t know which one of her four male friends had raped her, and they all kept accusing each other.

Every single one of those men was an entitled, insufferable jerk. I wouldn’t have been surprised if it had turned out that they’d all taken turns or had otherwise been involved together in the assault.

The crime scene was a disaster full of bad decisions fueled by cocaine use, and everyone had secrets and fear of looking guilty.

As a whodunit, it was perfect, but it fell flat as an SVU episode because it lost sight of the fact that there was a victim here.

Other than Nora’s shame when she admitted she and Adam had cheated on their spouses while Sophie — Nora’s so-called best friend — slept in the other room, she didn’t have much of a reaction throughout the hour.

She admitted to fighting with Josh and sleeping with Adam, but Ryan turned out to be the most entitled of all — a rapist who took what he wanted while Nora was unconscious and bleeding.

The ending of the episode seemed convoluted, and left me with some unanswered questions.

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It was never made clear why Ryan’s bloody shirt was in Josh’s things, nor why Josh was stupid enough to try to insist that he had nothing incriminating in the bag where the cops found evidence against him.

Josh claimed he was set up, so I guess we are supposed to believe that, but some explicit explanation would have been helpful here.

The entire interrogation scene at the end was weird, which could explain why I was confused about what happened.

Benson talking about how she needed to get up to speed was obviously subterfuge to get Ryan talking, but I wasn’t clear on why Benson complained about her eyesight — was that another trick, or was she legitimately not able to see?

That was a minor point. The thing that really got to me was the way that Ryan opened up and admitted almost everything 30 seconds after claiming he was onto what Benson was trying to do.

Throughout most of the interrogation, Benson did a great job of using active listening. I hate when cops do that because it turns a therapeutic technique meant to make people feel heard into a weapon against them.

Anyway, Ryan claimed he was onto that technique, so Benson offered to start again and kept using it… and he confessed.

Maybe he was being arrogant when he claimed to know what Benson was up to, but that transition seemed awfully abrupt to me.