About Last Night…GREY’S ANATOMY, LAW & ORDER: SPECIAL VICTIMS UNIT, LAW & ORDER: ORGANIZED CRIME, and More

Let’s talk about Thursday night’s TV!

LAW & ORDER: Well, that Price and McCoy tiff was interesting and feels like it could a part of a bigger issue for Price going forward. Thinking you’re right or being righteous is one thing—and Price may have been entirely correct!—but risking the whole case is something else. I’m really curious if this is going to be a pattern or if it’s a thing he works to change.

MASTERCHEF JUNIOR: Everything about that episode was among my worst cooking nightmares and I do not know how the kids handled it. (Realistically, cooking with seafood is also complicated? I wonder what checking they do ahead of time to make sure there are no allergies or religious exemptions.)

GREY’S ANATOMY: Addison! I cannot believe how much I love the scenes with Addison and Meredith together (2005!Marisa would be shocked), but they work so well together and Addie brings a bit of grounded history every time she shows up. I’m glad she also was able to take Richard to task, to a degree, for how everyone was treating Meredith. I mean, look, I don’t want Meredith to leave Seattle, but she’s more than allowed to go elsewhere. She’s given her entire career to this hospital and experienced massive trauma and loss there. Meredith’s rant to Nick about being allowed to leave after putting that much time in was, again, true; she’s also right that he was kind of condescending about planning things for her. But the compromise they stay in Seattle for now both makes sense for them as a duo and also may be a glimpse for how the heck GA is going to get out of this situation considering the show has already been renewed.

I really, really hope Teddy and Owen can handle the situation with Leo respectfully. They definitely need to go to therapy so they can be the best parent to their kid, no matter what they say their gender is.

(Link now seemingly wanting Jo because she wants—or wants to want—someone else…just oy.)

LAW & ORDER: SPECIAL VICTIMS UNIT and LAW & ORDER: ORGANIZED CRIME: It wasn’t officially a crossover, but things got blurry because they rolled straight from one episode into the second, so I’m combining these two blurbs, too.

The SVU case was messed. up. I have some sympathy for the family given how manipulative Nick was, but my goodness they all fell for him AND then all separately lied for him? (Some of it was self-protection, but once your kid is at risk, you’d think you would reveal everything?!) Yikes, yikes, yikes. I’m glad Claire was able to, finally, break free from her trance when she realized the abuse Nick inflicted on her kid, but she and Paul are going to have their hands absolutely full when Beth realizes how thoroughly she was played.

OC mostly paused its ongoing storylines—outside of the end of the episode—as the SVU and OC teams worked together to find Santos’ daughter. It was great seeing Velasco with the OC team briefly, both in him getting Olivia’s approval, but also having some nice scenes with Elliot and Jet. But, uh, Bell figuratively throwing a grenade at Cassandra feels like it’s going to have consequences for Elliot and also, possibly, Denise. (Also, of course Frank was setting up Elliot. And of course Elliot just got evidence from a freaking tree.)

But I find myself really frustrated with how both shows handled Elliot and Olivia. To be clear, their professional partnership was great; it was so much fun to see them working a case together. (And was very cute/meta when they bantered about whether this was an SVU or an OC case.) I loved “An Inferior Product” in OC season 1 and “The Christmas Episode” in season 2 (ditto SVU’s “I Thought You Were on My Side” this season)…the time apart hasn’t changed how well they navigate that working world together. But the personal? Eep.

OC’s “The Christmas Episode” made it very apparent that Elliot (and the entire Stabler family) was expecting that Olivia and Noah would be attending their Christmas party. When Elliot and Olivia talked in “Takeover,” they were in a good place, but she was cautious about having the trio spend a lot of time together when Elliot was undercover due to Noah getting easily attached.  (Which, to be clear, 100 percent fair.) “Takeover” didn’t say whether the Bensons had attended the Stabler holiday event, but did make it clear Olivia was worried about moving too fast. Given Elliot’s decade-long disappearance and behavior post-return (both with the stint undercover and his PTSD), that’s more than understandable.

The Noah-Elliot meeting last night confirmed at least Noah didn’t go to the party and this was the first time the duo had met. Part of me is thrilled we got to see their first real introduction—yes, they were in the same space in OC’s series premiere, but there wasn’t any conversation. It would have been a monumental moment to miss seeing entirely, so I’m glad that didn’t happen off-screen. But…by having this moment come at a time when Olivia and Noah happened to run into Elliot, it also removed all agency from Olivia. She wanted to introduce her son to Elliot when the time was right, and instead it was thrust upon her and she had to react. And then, of course, she was immediately called into work.

Even with my frustration about the decision being taken out of her hands, if they made this move to lessen the pressure on Olivia about when the time would be right or to push Elliot and Olivia’s friendship (for now) forward a step, whether they were ready or not…I would have understood it. But it was then promptly ignored on OC, in a way that actually didn’t make sense.

Olivia and Elliot both knew they had left their families, on a holiday, for this case. Elliot, who had been asking to meet her kid for months, finally had. There was, somehow, not a single word said about either thing? It didn’t need to be a long conversation—a simple “It never gets easier leaving the kids for the job” or “Can you salvage Mother’s Day?” or “Noah seems like a great kid” would have acknowledged the major step they accidentally took. And it was especially egregious considering they were looking for a missing kid who was Noah’s age. (Hell, if they actually wanted to dive into Olivia’s history, Elliot could have made a comment about not being able to fathom what the parents were going through and Olivia noting she lived through it.) This isn’t looking for them to have a conversation about Them, but the big thing that happened a few short freaking minutes earlier.

These shows are at their core crime stories, but OC, certainly, has had more leniency with the personal in the past. In the two previous collaborations, we got sizable moments amidst the case work. (Admittedly, a lesser degree in “AIP,” but we got multiple scenes in “TCE.” And SVU’s “ITYWOMS” had Elliot and Olivia reuniting after his undercover situation and all the drama and distrust that stemmed from that.)

And, look, I appreciate Elliot confiding in Olivia about Joe and the possible faked shooting. I’m not dismissing that is personal, even it’s also quasi-tied to a case he’s working. They weren’t each other’s first partners, but Elliot and Olivia certainly were each other’s longest and most meaningful partner; they had a working relationship that has never been replicated. It makes sense he’d lean on her in this, knowing that they’ve solved the seemingly impossible together in the past. But it fell flat in the second car scene, because it was supposed to be, in theory, hours after that first conversation…what would he have discovered about his dad while working the case and being with her for the bulk of the time?

For years, Elliot and Olivia lived in the unspoken. (And lord knows when they used their words it didn’t always go well.) But that was before ten years apart and a fractured partnership. There’s so much, in theory, they don’t know about each other and what they’ve been through in that time. Even looking at the past year, there’s so much trauma they’ve individually gone through the other isn’t aware of. That can’t and shouldn’t be fixed in a day, but it’s frustrating they didn’t, at the bare minimum, acknowledge at least the Noah of it all. And if it wasn’t going to be a thing they wanted to deal with, it would have felt considerably better if the SVU scene was just Olivia and Noah running into Elliot, who Noah hadn’t seen since Christmas. Why detract from something to add nothing new?

Which shows did you watch last night?

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