Law & Order: SVU Season 15 Premiere

Law & Order: SVU‘s 15th season returned last Wednesday with two back-to-back episodes that we finally caught up with in the insomniac hours.

The first hour (“Surrender Benson”) picked up where Season 14 left off. Olivia Benson is at the mercy of serial rapist Billy in her own apartment. Billy, you may recall, is quite the sadist and he has beaten Detective Benson, burned her with cigarettes, forced her to drink alcohol and generally messed her up so much that when she offers to keep mum if he will only leave, Billy ain’t hearing it. He points out that her perky blonde colleage (Detective Amanda Rollins) will notice her sorry condition so that won’t work.

Liv’s boyfriend Brian Cassidy calls and she tells Billy that he’s NYPD, on his way over and has a key. But Brian leaves a message that he caught a double shift and can’t make it which Billy listens to. Back at the precinct, everybody wonders how Olivia is doing when Brian shows up and says he hasn’t heard from her himself. Cragen sends Finn and Rollins to check on her. The place is empty and trashed and they know Billy is behind it. They get a hold of his lawyer who thinks her client is right — the police have it in for Billy. But they learn that she took him to dinner at her parent’s home. Well, Billy had Olivia in the trunk the whole time and after the lawyer left, he killed her father and raped her mother, making Liv watch. The mother was left hanging in the closet but survived.

At this point, you may well be wondering, why didn’t he rape Olivia or the lawyer? Why the lawyer’s mom? Well explanations are provided later, which you may or may not find credible. Is it a spoiler to say Olivia frees herself, overpowers Billy, is traumatized and ordered to stay home by Cragen? No — that happens all the time.

The second hour had a still traumatized but unwilling to admit it Olivia return to work and get involved in a ripped-from-the headlines version of the Ariel Castro kidnapping crime. Well, we thought that was a little too recent and too raw for the victims of the real case for them to do, but never you mind — next up on SVU is a combined fictionalized version of the Paula Deen racial scandal and the Trayvon Martin case rolled into one!

You can watch some episodes of Law & Order: SVU on NBC’s site or Amazon, or check online to see if your cable provider has it. Ours did.

We have Comcast Xfinity because the idea of missing a minute of Boardwalk Empire is too overwhelming to contemplate.