Law & Order: SVU Kicks Off Season 25 With Its Oddest Case... Ever? Read Recap
The longest-running live action TV show of all time kicks off Season 25 with one of its oddest cases ever... and that's saying something.
However, Law & Order: SVU's season premiere begins under happier auspices: Olivia wearing the golden compass and thinking about the man who gave it to her. The episode opens with the christening of Rollins and Carisi's son, Nicky. Liv is the baby's godmother, and Carisi's cousin Steve is the godfather. Steve not-so-subtly hits on Olivia at the reception afterward, but she tells him that "You might as well toss your heart into a woodchipper" instead of date her, which slows his roll.
While Sonny and Amanda sneak off for a little smooching — it's the first time they've been alone in six months, the new dad notes — Steve tries again by inquiring about the golden compass around Olivia's neck. She tells him that the J on the pendant stands for "joy," the c for "compassion" and the "l" for love. He wonders if it's pointed her in the right direction. She stares at Rollisi necking in the next room (I can't blame her; they're adorable) and tells him, "Not yet." (And you know we asked Mariska Hargitay about that pivotal piece of jewelry — hear what she had to say.)
On the way home, as Noah is gently badgering his mom about adopting another kid, Liv thinks she sees a blonde teenage girl in the passenger seat of a commercial energy drink van. As she and the girl make eye contact, the girl brushes some hair out of her face; Benson notices a beaded bracelet around her wrist. How interesting, then, when Olivia and Fin soon after are called to the scene of the Case o' the Week: Maddie Flynn, a 15-year-old girl, disappeared while shopping with her parents. When the distraught parents show Olivia a photo of their kid, it's the girl from the van. And a uniformed officer searching the store finds a gun in the men's room.
Of course, Olivia instantly starts beating herself up for not using her SVU spidey sense to somehow know that something hinky was going on when she saw the girl she had no idea was going to be the person at the center of her future missing-persons case. When Maddie's phone is found in Brooklyn, her mother freaks out. "What are you doing to find my daughter that I couldn't do myself?" she yells. Benson lets it slip that "an eyewitness" might've seen Maddie after the alleged kidnapping, but when she starts giving too many details, Bruno lays a hand on the captain's arm to reel her back in.
The van turns up, abandoned, in Pennsylvania, with Maddie's beaded bracelet wedged into the passenger's seat. The squad thinks they've got a lead when they find a pervy guy who has stalkery photos of girls (including Maddie) playing soccer, but it's a dead end. Then in one of the most random moves this show has ever made — and that's saying something — a different guy marches into the precinct and announces that the garbage bag he's carrying contains the missing teen. At Benson's request, he places the bag on the ground... and there's a lifesize, RealDoll-type sex puppet inside that looks like Maddie and is wearing an identical bracelet.
Turns out, the guy works on a low-budget horror movie that uses the dolls as non-gross props — so he's innocent — and he brought the Maddie doll in as soon as he realized that it was a dead ringer for the teen. Through some tracking, the squad realizes that the doll's creator made that particular model (called "Birthday Girl") based on a photo of Maddie that her parents posted on social media around the time of her birthday. It's even wearing the outfit she's wearing in the photo. Gross. So to quickly and disgustingly recap this latest development: A sex-doll company is making inventory of underage girls based on photos found on Instagram. Lovely.
Benson goes to visit Rollins and her fabulous post-partum hair, both of whom are wrapping up a lecture at Fordham. They talk about how Liv is now wearing a Maddie bracelet from one of the dolls (um, what in the name of our lord and savior Taylor Swift is going on?) and how SVU is going to track down everyone who's bought a Maddie doll in case the perp is a buyer who's escalating. When Rollins slips and refers to "our" perp, Liv looks at her so fondly. "Don't make me miss you more than I already do," she says.
While recovering the dolls, Liv and her team learn that one of the buyers recently threw his in the dumpster... and he says he knows who took Maddie. In the interrogation room, the guy says he paid another guy $8,000 to kidnap Maddie because he was enamored with the idea that his beloved doll existed as a human being. He claims to have changed his mind, but it was too late. The cops eventually wind up at a motel in New Jersey, where Olivia and the guys find a different victim of the same guy who took Maddie. (Meanwhile, Olivia invites Sloane Parrish, the Bergen County SVU cop who was looking for that victim for a year, to come into Manhattan to help question her. The Jersey cop looks like she's going to Disney World as Minnie Mouse's personal guest.)
By the end of the hour, Chief McGrath is holding a victory-lap press conference for the girl they did find, but Liv is conflicted because Maddie is still missing. And she doesn't feel any better when Maddie's highly upset mother crashes the event, sobbing, "What about my daughter?!" Oof.
Now it's your turn. Grade the season premiere, then hit the comments with all of your thoughts!