I don't usually review "Law and Order: Special Victims Unit" but, since I've watched a million hours of it, I wanted to recap the first episode of the new season. The season 15 premiere was a 2 hour special. The two hours didn't seem like the same episode though. The first focused entirely on Liv who was kidnapped by a perv (at the end of last season's cliffhanger). The second was the standard SVU procedural. Olivia has been kidnapped by a serial rapist/murderer named Billy and he is bad news. He kills his lawyer's father and rapes and almost kills her mother (while forcing Liv to watch). And what lawyer is stupid enough to bring her rapist client home to dinner? Well his I guess.
Olivia tries everything in the book to get him to release her and no luck. When the cleaning woman shows up, he drags her and her daughter into the house, Liv must do something. She is able to break part of the frame off the bed. She first considers shooting him but can't bring herself to (even though he taunts her). She mentions Elliott and says he would know what to do.
After facilitating for some time, she finally beats the crap out of him. Billy unfortunately survives. IMHO she should have shot him and saved us taxpayers some money. Olivia then struggles for the rest of the episode with how to come to terms with it all. When her therapist infers she was raped, she instead says she was assaulted. Not sure if she's saying that to protect herself or he never got around to raping her.
Is Stabler coming back since Liv mentioned him? We can only hope.
Marisa Hargitay definitely deserves an Emmy for this one (to add to her previous win). It was at times painful to watch. How do you keep up that level of intensity for an entire episode? And for those who didn't notice, Billy/Lewis was portrayed by Pablo Schreiber (Pornstache on "Orange Is The New Black"). I didn't recognize him without his stache.
Grade: 4 1/2 Monsters (out of 5). The first episode was excellent. If that has been a stand alone episode I would have given it a 5.
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