Is Olivia Benson Still Captain After the Law & Order: SVU Season 27 Finale? Inside the Twist Ending

Another dramatic season of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit has come to an end.

Season 27 of the police procedural once again starred Mariska Hargitay as Captain Olivia Benson, solving New York City’s most sensitive sexual abuse and domestic violence cases.

Throughout the season, Benson was facing a power struggle with Chief of Detectives Kathryn Tynan (Noma Dumezweni), who threatened to take her job away on more than one occasion. At the same time, Tynan recruited her late police partner’s son, Detective Jake Griffin (Corey Cott) to the 16th Precinct.

However, just when Tynan thinks that she has the SVU in the palm of her hands, everything she thinks she knows comes to a crashing halt. Meanwhile, the rest of the team is trying to catch an evil serial killer — for a second time.

Prior to the season coming out, showrunner Michele Fazekas explained to PEOPLE that she had a clear mindset that season 27 would be the beginning of the end.

“How I came up with the theme for the season was like, OK, Mariska’s been on the show for 27 years. You’ve got to be thinking, ‘This is going to end at some point,’ and so let’s not ignore that,” she said. “Let’s go towards that. … There’s a line in the first episode of the season that Benson said to Fin: ‘Listen, I know we’re closer to the end than the beginning.’ “

Here’s everything to know about the Law & Order: SVU season 27 ending.

Did the team arrest the ‘Monster?’

The season 27 finale begins with Captain Benson and her SVU squad learning the devastating truth that one of their most dangerous criminals — a serial child kidnapper and killer Richard Caine — was released from custody as a result of a procedural mistake.

Benson and the rest of her team subsequently put all of their efforts into getting more evidence against him so they can arrest him again. In the midst of their investigation, retired NYPD Detective Donald Torres (Michael Harney) comes to the 16th Precinct and points out a few similarities between Caine’s victims and those of an unknown serial killer, whom he called “Parker,” that he’d been investigating for years in Florida.

Torres provides crucial evidence and new angles for the NYPD, so Benson and her colleagues can finally hunt Caine down and arrest him.

Just when the team finally locates Caine, he puts up a dramatic fight. Caine shoots at the NYPD officers and strikes Detective Griffin. Thankfully, Griffin is able to continue pursuing Caine and corners him in a moment where he can either shoot him or arrest him. At that moment, Griffin looks up at Benson, lowers his weapon and arrests Caine.

“I think she was giving me permission not necessarily to kill him, but to do what I think is the right thing to do,” Cott told TV Insider of his character’s decision to not kill Caine. “I’m put in that position immediately and I have to make that decision. And ultimately, I think Griff, whether it’s right or wrong, instinctually in that moment, made the decision not to do it as a way of — in the moment he felt like killing him would not be the right thing to do.”

What did Tynan do and how was she caught?

While the whole SVU team is focused on capturing Caine once and for all, Griffin is struggling with a personal conundrum.

He joined the SVU crew on behalf of Chief Tynan, who was his dad’s former police partner. The two developed a close relationship, but Griffin always had a strange feeling that his dad wasn’t totally innocent during his years as a cop.

Earlier on in the episode, Griffin finds a gun in his late dad’s storage unit and traces it to match a gun that killed someone in an off-duty shooting. Griffin comes to the conclusion that Tynan must have helped his dad cover up a murder and plans on confronting her.

Griffin meets with Tynan and secretly records their conversation during which he says that he knows what they did. Tynan confesses to covering up the crime and explains that his dad was taking dirty money from mobster Dennis Reeves to “look the other way.” Griffin’s dad eventually shot Reeves to prevent him from talking, so Tynan helped cover up the murder by planting the gun on the victim.

“I had two ways it could’ve gone in that situation,” Tynan tells Griffin. “Turn my partner in, he goes to prison, and I get labeled a rat and my career is over. Or, plant a gun on a lowlife who deserved it and the world’s a better place.”

How does Law & Order: SVU season 27 end?

In the final moments of the season 27 finale, the SVU team joins Griffin in the hospital to make sure that he’s recovering from the gunshot wound he sustained in the Caine chase.

After greeting him, Tynan confronts Benson and tells her that she’s going to force her to resign because she allowed Griffin to be shot on duty. Tynan tells Benson that her “career is over,” but the captain doesn’t seem too worried.

Benson pulls out the secret recording that Griffin gave her moments before and shows Tynan her own confession.

“I’m not interested in ruining your career, Chief, I’m really not,” Benson assures her. “But I’m not gonna let you ruin mine.”

The episode ends with Tynan and Benson’s season-long power struggle finally coming to an end with Benson leveraging the recording over Tynan so she can remain Captain.

Fazekas told PEOPLE that she purposely wanted the season to conclude with a sense of resolution — which includes the final scene shown sitting around Griffin’s hospital bedside.

“I really wanted it to come back to that. They got the guy, all of the stuff with [Chief] Tynan has been sort of handled, and at the end of the day the most important part is this core group,” Fazekas explained. “I had another scene in the outline after that [one], and I don’t remember what it even was, but as I was writing the script, I was like, ‘Oh no, this is the last scene.’ And I don’t need any dialogue in it. I just want to see them together.”

How does Benson’s power struggle affect her mindset?

Although Benson may not be the SVU Captain forever, she becomes even more determined after gaining her place back as the head of her squad and “recommits” herself to the team.

“It became the theme whereby the end of the season, Benson has answered the question of ‘Why are you still doing this?’ It’s like, ‘I’m doing this because I can’t do anything else,’ ” Fazekas explained to PEOPLE. “And so she somewhat recommits herself.”