Law & Order SVU: Infiltrated

(S08E06) First of all, let me just say that the "eco-terrorists" have surprisingly good fashion sense. And access to showers. As someone who lives in Oregon, where we have real eco-terrorists, I kept having to chuckle at their portrayal on this episode of SVU. But enough of the nit-picky stuff... Mariska Hargitay is back!

After her maternity leave, Mariska looks amazing. I thought the writers came up with a great storyline to get Det. Olivia Benson out of her undercover gig. She got bored with the squeaky clean environmentalists she had infiltrated so she started investigating the murder of the head of a pharmaceuticals company when her friends are suspected of his death.

Olivia knows by the crime scene photo that the murder is a sex crime. She enters the murder victim's house in the middle of the night, only to find the man's ex-wife ("Kitty" from That '70s Show) confiscating child porn. Through witness interrogations, she ends up finding a hidden room under the garage where the murder victim apparently kept a girl as his sex slave for eight years. The girl suffered from Stockholm syndrome- she ended up loving her captor, but killed him when he sent her out to find a younger girl for him. It was kinda/sorta ripped from the headlines. Over the summer, a girl in Austria escaped her captor of 8 years and said she wasn't mad at him for all he did to her.

The secondary storyline was about ADA Casey Novak's efforts to bring Olivia back to NYC to testify on behalf of a rape victim. Olivia arrives at the very last minute, which was really not a surprise. No gratification for us SVU fans though-- we didn't get to see a reunion with Olivia and Elliot (yet). She obviously missed him, because she was saying his name while unconscious at the hospital. And she described him as her 'best friend' to her FBI case agent with the super-amazing cheekbones. I miss seeing Olivia and Elliot together, too, but things are going to get weird between them because...

...Next week: It happens! Elliot and Dani hook up! Holy crap! I can't stop using exclamation marks!

Hilarious line from Munch about Olivia's disappearance: "Word in the conspiracy mill is she's out having my love child."