Law and Order: SVU“Hell”
Original Air Date: March 31, 2009
Kara – Senior Staff Writer
kara@thetwocentscorp.com
This week, a young girl, Miriam, is found by a homeless man with her throat slit. The detectives find out through a doctor’s exam that she’s had a history of sexual violence. She can’t speak but when they ask her to draw a picture of who did it to her, she draws a picture of the devil. The case leads the detectives into the world of children who are forced to be soldiers in Uganda.
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[photo: NBC]
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Law and Order: SVU
ReplyDelete“Hell”
Original Air Date: March 31, 2009
Kara – Senior Staff Writer
kara@thetwocentscorp.com
This week, a young girl, Miriam, is found by a homeless man with her throat slit. The detectives find out through a doctor’s exam that she’s had a history of sexual violence. She can’t speak but when they ask her to draw a picture of who did it to her, she draws a picture of the devil. The case leads the detectives into the world of children who are forced to be soldiers in Uganda.
Five Things About This Week’s Episode:
1. Gbenga Akinnagbe and Julyzah Commodore were fantastic as Elijah and Miriam. Both brought a great deal of intensity to their already intense roles. When Elijah was upset about how hard he tried to make a life for himself here in the states and had been studying to better himself, all to be deported, it was heartbreaking. The best moment for me was when Miriam wanted to confront her abuser. I didn’t think it was a good idea at all for them to let her get near him because I thought it would deeply upset her. However, when she went into the room, she walked up to him and spit in his face. It’s something I’m not ever keen on seeing but in this case, not only was it fitting but it was so incredibly brave.
2. Miriam’s picture of her abuser being the devil prompted one of the strangest investigation techniques I’ve ever seen. Munch uses all of those flat screen monitors they’ve got hanging on the wall to display different names and pictures of the devil. Now, I never quite got why they needed the screens in the first place. I always liked the simplicity of the dry erase board myself, since it displays information and cuts down on the amount of time it must take to prepare the images and text for the screens. How long do you think it took Munch to set up that presentation? It was so ridiculous that The Soup even highlighted it.
3. Was it just me or was Stabler kind of useless in most of this episode? In the beginning, he lets the suspect go and doesn’t even attempt to chase him down the stairs. Sure, the suspect was mostly gone but a little bit of effort would have been nice to see. Then, after the Molotov cocktail was thrown, he chases after the car with his gun out for a few seconds and that was it. The worst was when Stabler went alone to bring in Joseph Serumaga, you know, the really scary mass murder and rapist. Why would Stabler do that? It was just ridiculous. He did handle Elijah’s hostage crisis well, I’ll give him that but he really screwed up a lot in this episode.
4. The twist at the end, with Elijah seeing the press and running towards the police was incredible. It was predictable, sure but the fact that he did it to bring exposure to his case and the child soldiers was pretty selfless.
5. In recent years, a lot of television shows have written episodes discussing the tragic epidemic of child soldiers. I might have missed it but I didn’t see the episode link to Invisible Children, the group casting light onto this crisis and doing a lot of work to try to help. So, in case you wanted to know more, please visit: www.invisiblechildren.com.
So, what did you think about this episode? Share your TwoCents with me in the comments!