The first episode back from lockdown and the tumultuous summer of 2020 has our SVUs grappling with their own existence. Can they reckon with the role they've played in the realm of copaganda? Can they talk about systemic racism without doing the racism themselves? Can they figure out how to wear masks in the throes of the pandemic? These are questions that the Munchie Boys are forced to answer in this navel-gazing episode of SVU.

Sit back, and try to imagine an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit where Olivia Benson, be she Detective or Sergeant or Lieutenant or Captain, finds herself held captive in a hostage situation. Go ahead. Any scenario that could land her in the middle of a standoff with just her wits (and SWAT standing by) to get her out of the situation.

Now, in that hypothetical situation you concocted in your head, things happened to get her there, right? Well, "Townhouse Incident" presupposes a scenario wherein Liv finds herself in a hostage situation in MINUTE TWO.

Yes, you read that right. The 2:12 mark, in fact. In a show where the first 0:21 is taken up by the intro and title card.

This was our Vietnam.

NYPD officers who've been serving in Afghanistan are getting pretty violent, domestically, and the Unit has to race against a *gasp* journalist to get to the bottom of what's going on in this week's Ripped from the Headlines edition of SVU. The Army are very bad, doctors are huge cowards, and journalists may or may not be bottom feeders in this screed where no cows are sacred and no army wife is safe.

When a Nassau County Cop's awful, investment banker son rapes a woman after a miserable Halloween party next to a pile of disgusting New York City trash bags, you know SVU is getting the call. What you might not expect is that this time, the goose is Benson's former partner, the budget did not account for Halloween, and that the budget also did not account for requiring a script. Along the way, Benson gives such a subtle, loving prison-rape-taunt that you might well miss it, unless your brain is as thoroughly SVU-pilled as ours.

As we race towards the thrilling conclusion of this two-parter, we ponder important questions such as: did SVU throw the Catholic church under the bus in order to curry favor with the location-rich Episcopalians; and, would we watch a Mike Dodds-i-series? We also get to the (power?) bottom of the spicy, ripped-from-the-headlines drama that underpins our favorite interlude from this episode.

Special Guest Star(?) Erika Christensen swoops in from outer spa—er, the FBI to help the Unit find a gruesome serial killer and his likely next victim. Of course, nothing is as it seems and Lake and Benson have to try to figure out what all is amiss in an effort to find said victim. And obviously, the entire time you watch this episode, you wish that this Special Agent Cooper was a better-known Special Agent Cooper and that this one was not making mistakes that Dale Cooper would never make. The weirdness of this SVU also forces Josh and Adam to reckon with what might be the darkest Second Unit shoot in this show’s illustrious history, gets Adam looking into his urban foraging options in Central Park, and diving into the case of The Toy-Box Killer.

This week, SVU investigates the coldest of cold cases while dishing out hot servings of delicious Amanda Rollins fan-service content and heaping portions of Staten Island food. Rollisi come clean, Rolldhun never happens, and Benson meets two-time National League Cy Young Award winner, Jacob DeGrom.

Luscious Grape Distributors--yup, that's the name--seems like a truly awful place to work, if its depiction in SVU's Season 12 gem "Bully" is any indication. As a harrowing journey into abusive workplaces for the first two-thirds of its runtime, the ep succeeds on its own. Then? Well, then there's a turn so shocking, so inventive, and so ingenious that it had Adam and Josh wanting to do a five-season oral history on the making of this single episode of television. This one's got bad bosses, bad moms, and bad coworkers all packed into one delightfully disgusting package.

Imagine a world in which pilots were quasi-celebrities before having performed some heroic feat. No really imagine it. Then imagine a world where the heroic feat they perform to make them even more famous could only have happened because 9/11 must not have happened and a pilot could be left alone in a cockpit, locking the entire flight crew out while she erratically turns the plane around because she doesn't want to be trapped in the cockpit with her rapist. Then imagine that this is all occurring at an airline with a retrograde hypersexualized ad campaign that harks back to the ads for which Dick Wolf was responsible in his ad man days. Because this SVU does all that.

In an episode Adam already covered on his guestisode of the These Are Their Stories Pod, we watched a preposterous reimagining of the various Michael Jackson sexual abuse allegations in which an uber-wealthy toy mogul lures children into his low-rent pirate-themed sex lair to dress them up in precious pajamas and have his way with them. Was it fun? Yes, absolutely. Did it feature enough lemur? Sadly, no.

This week we meet a sex cult based in a mansion located north of Manhattan, so you know we are getting deep into a NXIVM-based, ripped-from-the-headlines SVU. Along the way, we talk knife handling, record collections, elite-level badminton, and extremely high-end security cameras. Also, Rollins is extremely pregnant (again), and this perp can smell the Al Pollack inside of her.

Josh and Adam--both of whom are pretty big fans of Cutty in The Wire--are forced to watch an episode this week where Chad L. Coleman is seen Ray Rice-ing his special lady friend, played by the wonderful Meagan Good. That's not fun to watch, but it's also not fun to watch the SVUs acting against the victim's vehement wishes. It's even less fun to watch after Amaro (who is just back from beating a perp to within an inch of his life) blows up in the opening scene of "Spousal Privilege" (Season 16, Episode 8), making the audience wonder just what qualities in outburst-prone people determine that they get a second chance.

Don't worry, the Munchie Boys also use this episode to revel in RedChanIt, take notice of how many of the SVUs were abused as children, and dive deep into the life of NYC’s first black mayor, David Dinkins, who randomly had two lines in this episode.

Have you ever heard the old joke about the longest-running scripted drama in television history doing a bizarre ripped-from-the-headlines episode about two aging, hoarder brothers as a convoluted excuse to say nasty slurs on primetime TV? Oh, you haven't? Well, after you've seen "Alta Kockers," you will have. Oh, and one of these brothers, who hasn't left his mother's house since 1976, somehow becomes the literary voice of the present generation via his anonymously published novel. Sure.

This one is about as absurd as SVU gets, but thankfully wonderful moments from legends Judd Hirsch and Wallace Shawn, and some truly standout background acting prevent this from being an all-time stinker.

Plus: Special Contibutor Natalie graciously joined Josh with a dissenting opinion to tell us why our ranking of 'Service" (S19E18) which we covered in MMB 119 - No, Rollins Is A Tactile Detective was unfair.

To say Law & Order: SVU's historic treatment of the transgender community is fraught with problems is an understatement of epic proportions, and this week's episode--S17E13 Transgender Bridge--makes, ummm, progress? Of course, it's incremental at best, and much of the ground gained is immediately lost by jamming the episode full of racial stereotyping that plays rough.

This week's episode pushed the Munchie Boys so far out of their comfort zone that they brought in reinforcements in the form of a guest segment (for Munchies, this will be as an entirely separate Bonus Episode) with gracious trans listener Summer, who hopefully makes up for the two cishet honkies who host this weekly show and is more qualified to speak on how this episode still had a lot of work to do to get things right.

Hold onto your butts. This is a long one.

Picking up where we left off last week, things get even Durstier as ME/murderer Carl Rudnick jumps bail, leaving the Unit in his dust, making a break for the border, and giving us as close as we’re going to get to an SVU/Midnight Run mash-up. And of course, Rollins needs to keep being the Clarice to Yates's Hannibal, so he can smell how pregnant she is. Unlike a lot of two-parters, this one’s actually a lot of fun, with anything from Rollisi’s cholesterol-hardened livers and Buffalo fair game to be cut into on the slab.

In Part 1 of an epic double-episode of SVU, we see Rollins Clarice-it-up with the truly disgusting serial killer Dr Greg Yates, whilst ME Rudnick Robert-Durst's-it-up in a shocking series of ante-mortem dismemberment murders. Along the way, we talk about State Fair fare, address justified criticisms of the podcast, and debate whether or not serial killers have a peculiar sense of smell.

What happens when SVU drops a fading Norman Mailer analog into a Ripped-from-the-Headlines family drama with his daughters pitted against his new wife, who the daughters think is sending dear ol' dad to an early grave by way of force-fed Viagra? Rectal probe electroejaculation and lewd talk of stiff, varnished eels, obviously.

We watched the impromptu finale of Season 21, which lost four episodes due to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. While that might not have mattered in most seasons of SVU, Season 21 was trying to do some things which definitely demanded resolution. Of course we talk about a whole range of ridiculous topics including early attempts at adding serialization to weekly procedurals, post-modern philosophy, and the Borg. Apologies for weird sound, particularly on Adam's track. He was having some software issues which hopefully have been resolved.

In a true whirling dervish of an episode that turns the audience around and around, we start at a "kick-ass loft party," careen into a sexual predator in an ambulance, and end up back where the B-plot started with Calvin courtesy of his mother filching jewelry from a different crime scene. "Rescue" (S12E10) takes us everywhere. Along the way, we touch on improbable sampling of large members, insane PowerPoint presentations, and the Duke faux sex thesis controversy. This one goes to some weird places.

Well, we've got ourselves another Mo-Mo incident in Times Square... Needlessly picking up right from the smoldering wreckage of Liv freeing herself from her captor William Lewis, we get a stark ripped-from-the-headlines episode delving into the infamous Ariel Castro case. Kidnapping victims are held in cages in the basement and raped for decades, and Liv's PTSD is still very real. This episode dwells in darkness.