Is it just me or is LAW & ORDER: SPECIAL VICTIMS UNIT going down the crapper? I hate to sound like the Comic Book Guy on THE SIMPSONS, but tonight's episode with guest star Kevin Tighe was indeed, the WORST...EPISODE...EVER!, a completely implausible, addle-brained hour involving avatars, virtual reality, and a foolhardy attempt by a kidnapper to relive a love from 25 years ago. THE LAWNMOWER MAN was more believable than this episode. I was actually expecting Stabler and Benson to create avatars and arrest the perp in cyberspace.

And am I just out of the loop, or is "virtual reality" a term that's still widely used? Seems pretty 1995 to me. It was being bandied about like it was some cutting-edge verbiage.

The detectives of the SVU don't even investigate anymore. They just stand around making declarations while clues fall in their laps. And it's now two episodes in a row where the final twist came with one of the characters (Novak last week, Benson this week) noticed some tiny, obscure clue buried deep in an image (a photograph last week, a computer image this week). It's beyond formulaic. I realize character development has never been Dick Wolf's strong suit, but in these first two episodes, it didn't matter who was doing what: Stabler, Benson, Tutuola, Munch (oh wait, Belzer was completely MIA tonight) all just stand around as the obviously bored actors (boy, does Meloni look like he wants to be somewhere else!) totally phone it in. These first two episodes have just been REALLY bad, but tonight's was the worst episode in the L&O franchise since last season's CRIMINAL INTENT with Michelle Trachtenberg and the blog.

Speaking of L&O: CI, I'm hoping for good things when its new season starts Thursday on USA. I'm glad Vincent D'Onofrio is still around. SVU, on the other hand? I'm getting close to bailing.

Thoughts? Am I just in a foul mood or is this show becoming completely awful?

Boy, I'm not. Not that I watch the show anymore, but Goren has to be one of the most aggravating TV detectives... EVER! And how fat is Vincent D'Onofrio going to get before there's an departmental intervention or something?

I actually really like the Goren character. I know a lot of people don't, and I can certainly see where they're coming from, but the character and D'Onofrio's way of playing it have always worked for me over the course of the show.

As far as VDO's weight issues go, speaking as someone whose own weight has yo-yo'ed up and down for most of my adult life, I can certainly say he's looked healthier. He really didn't look good last year and from the pics I've seen this year, he probably looks worse. He's had an on-and-off weight problem since FULL METAL JACKET. It's easier to lose when you're younger (at least, it was much easier for me to drop some weight at 22 than it is now at 34). He's pushing 50, so that weight's not gonna come off easily. I hope he manages it the best he can in the meantime.

It's funny that you bring up this SVU ep, Mark, because I emailed RHS earlier and begged him to watch it so he could see one of the most unintentionally campy hours of TV I've seen in a long time. Yeah, this episode was terrible, and spoilers follow, so if anyone cares, be warned.

A brief setup: man kidnaps a young woman he met online playing a virtual game in which you live, shop, work, dance, etc. in an alternate computer world using a made-up name and avatar. Woman is rescued, but man is on the run and may have a second victim stashed in a cabin someplace. SVU cops have no idea where the cabin is, but Benson thinks it probably looks like the fake cabin in the game. So, she gets with the CEO and inventor of the game, who can access everything that every player--all 5 million of them--have ever done. He finds the virtual cabin, but can't identify where it is. Until...he says, "Wait! I'll compare the virtual scenery with topographical maps of the state of New York," which he can immediately do, side by side, and within seconds, he has found an area of New York that looks just like the virtual area. Now, the L&O series have always had an unrealistic idea of what computers can and cannot do (the crutch the writers always lean on is using their computers to blow up and make crystal clear tiny details in the corner of blurry b&w surveillance videos), but the way computers perform in this episode would make HAL 9000 jealous.

The show gets worse with Kevin Tighe, who has aged into a quite effective character actor in the right part, sadly overacting in his final scene with his eyes bugged out and his mouth hanging open. It's an embarrassing performance, but perhaps he isn't totally to blame, as the episode has by now reached a level of absurdity rarely seen in contemporary TV. It was written by Paul Grellong, whose name I didn't immediately recognize and who seems to be relatively inexperienced. The plot twist at the cabin is so mindbogglingly stupid that it opened at least a dozen plotholes that popped into my head in about four minutes.

And even before that; for instance, Lake (new cast member Adam Beach) mentions that he knows Tighe's character and has bought items from his rare book store. His personal connection to the suspect is never again mentioned, and it has no impact on the story whatsoever. So what's the point? For that matter, what was the point of the opening, which establishes a character with "sexsomnia" (yes, it's exactly what you think it is). Sounds like a good idea for an episode, but it's jettisoned in the first act for a story that asks us to believe that a man in his 60s could climb a fire escape, break into a woman's bedroom, and without waking her boyfriend in bed next to her, drug the woman and carry her out the window and down the fire escape.

This was probably the worst SVU I've seen, and I have probably seen them all. But if you like bad television, I urge you to catch it in reruns.

I totally forgot about the abandoned "sexsomnia" plot thread!

I love how Tighe has the cabin set up in the game so it disappears the closer you get to it! Clever! And how "making the sun rise" in the game can beat Tighe's evil plan!

Also, this priceless exchange between Benson and the virtual reality CEO:

Benson: "Make the sun rise!"
CEO, incredulous: "We've never done that before!"
Benson: "Do it!"
CEO: "Five million people are about to go crazy!" (or something to that effect)

I maintain that "L&O" in general and "SVU" in particular are essentially giallos for television, using lurid subject matter and absurd 4th quarter plot twists in the same entertaining way that Ernesto Gastaldi would in one of his scripts. Heck, in "CI" we even actually get to see the occasional pair of black gloves.

C'mon, if this same plot had been lain out in a feature-length Italian film, we'd be calling it genius, or at least a guilty pleasure. ;)

That may be so, but the tone and visual style have to be consistent with that type of material. I don't think you can proclaim your show to be "ripped from the headlines," and then do outlandish stories about incredible virtual reality games and 40-year-old kidnap victims still waiting around the cabin 25 years later for Kevin Tighe to come home. Yes, I know it's mostly the flagship L&O that uses the "ripped from the headlines" approach, but all the L&Os are set in the same universe with the same visual style, music, even actors crossing over (and, in fact, there recently was a sexsomnia case where a rapist was acquitted). I don't believe SVU can effectively mix its gritty photography and real-world sensibilities with storylines that are as "out there" as last night's was. Now, SVU has done some crazy plots in the past, this is true, but I don't recall any quite this ridiculous, and at any rate, the dialogue and performances in this one were pretty awful, no matter what you may think of the story.

That's my beef with the Goren character, whose instant recall of fingertip arcana makes him like an Edgar Wallace sleuth. If only CRIMINAL INTENT had the matching Edgar Wallace villains... and Edgar Wallace writing them!

This was something I noticed way back when on THE X-FILES as well. I used to joke about Mulder saying something like "I need a list of everyone who lives in that county who has blonde hair, drives a Dodge and believes in God."

Also, on last night's show, Lake was confronting a suspect who used an anagram of his name as his online name. Instead of just saying, "We know you're the guy because X is an anagram of Y," he pulled out a laptop that had the guy's name spelled across the entire screen in red, and then the letters all flipped and flopped like a slot machine for about ten seconds while Lake did his whole "it's an anagram thing," finally stopping with the actual anagram. There is no computer program that does what this computer did, unless it was specifically programmed for that specific action. Of course, there's no reason Lake would have wasted time on this program, but I'm sure 1) the director thought it was flashy (ooweee, really exciting) and 2) somebody thought the audience wouldn't know what an anagram was.

But the super-sharpening of poorly pixellated surveillance videos is what really kills me. A lot of crime shows do it, but L&O seems to all the time. And it's just lazy writing, pure and simple. You write yourself into a corner, and then, "Hey, we found the surveillance video from the ATM on 106th Street, and look whose license plate we spotted driving past at 3:15 am last night," which you can only see by taking a video image that looks like a fourth-gen Stones bootleg and increasing the magnification by 400% and clearing up the blurring. Instantaneously.

That's really food for thought!

Hey, there's always room for - aw forget it.

I've recently acquired standards.

CSI: NY is getting into the whole avatar thing.

As silly as this SVU show sounds, it was I think trumped by last week's episode of TORCHWOOD, on BBC-A, where an out-of-control "Cyberwoman" was doused in barbecue sauce to make her a more appealing snack for the pterodactyl the alien-repelling heroes happen to have on hand in their bunker. I took the (lousy) show off my DVR Favorites shortly thereafter. :)

Well, tonight's episode with Melissa Joan Hart was a big step in the right direction after the new season stumbled out of the gate. This would've been a good one to start the new season. I hope the series doesn't plummet to the depths of last week's avatar and topography nonsense. At no point in tonight's episode did anyone say "Zoom in that photo! I think I recognize something!" Major improvement all around.

Where's Munch? Is something up with Belzer?

They saved that for NCIS last night, and from an ATM camera no less!

Well, in World of Warcraft, which claims to have 9 million players, game masters can browse through the chat logs, actions, in games sales, etc of every player. So, like, if you report a player for whispering hate speech to your character two days ago, they can check, suspend him, and send him the exact quote of his offensive comments in their e-mail.
That episode does sound ridiculously bad; but that one point, at least, isn't so implausible.