Law And Order SVU / Tropes Q to Z

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Q

• Quip to Black: Usually Stabler or Munch, sometimes Olivia.

R

• Rape as Backstory: The reason Olivia tends to take rape cases rather personally is because she herself was born of rape.
  • She herself has also been a victim of attempted rape twice. The first time, she was saved by Fin; the second time, she saved herself.
  • New detective Rollins was raped by her old captain. He coerced her into sex in exchange for dropping charges against Rollins' sister; she changed her mind at the last minute and tried to back out, at which point he physically forced her.
• Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil: The monologue at the beginning of each episodes states that sexually based offences are considered especially heinous.
• Real Life Writes the Plot:
  • Because of the Real Life NYPD retirement policy, Dann Florek's character was written out of the main cast in Season 15.
  • Kelli Giddish got pregnant, so Amanda Rollins got pregnant.
  • The season that began following the rise of the COVID-19 Pandemic saw the pandemic as a recurrent plot point (especially as the pandemic wreaked utter havoc in New York City, where SVU is set). The very first scene of the season sets the gravitas of the emergency when Kat and Amanda offer to ride to the hospital with a victim, only for a paramedic to halt them with a "only two people in here. COVID."
• Really Gets Around: Ray Merino from Season 17's "Melancholy Pursuit" is this in spades. A familial DNA hit on a murder leads to a an adopted man, who points the detectives to his birth mother, who sends them to the biological father, Ray. Ray turns out to be dead, but one of his two sons points the detectives to another woman who had twins (one boy, one girl) through him. This son is dead, but his mother then sends the team to yet another family, this one with three sons. To recap: Seven sons and a daughter with four woman...that we know off.
  Fin: No wonder that man died of a heart attack.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Fin gives one to Elliot near the end of "Cold."
  • Olivia launched a classic one to the leader of the teen pregnancy pact in "Babes." Flaunting pregnancy (as a teenager) is one thing, but bringing up Liv's biological clock is just asking for it.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: You know the guy who replaced Olivia when Lewis escaped was reasonable because when Olivia told him the truth about beating Lewis with a pipe when he was already handcuffed (and not about to attack her like she told the court), his response was "you should have killed him when you had the chance".
  • Cragen was usually this as well.
• Recovered Addict: Captain Cragen is all about this trope. He finds himself bringing it up several times per season. Usually when somebody on his squad offers him a drink.
• Red Herring: Generally the first suspect that gets brought in, though occasionally subverted.
  • Usually you can tell when it looks like they've got their man and there's 40 minutes of show left.
  • Double red herring in Ep 06 "Redemption"
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: This is a Law and Order show after all. Pairings are:
  • Stabler (Red) and Benson (Blue)
  • Stabler (Red) and Tutuola (Blue)
  • Tutuola (Red) and Munch (Blue)
  • Tutuola (Blue) and Lake (Red)
  • Benson (Blue) and Amaro (Red)
  • Amaro (Blue) and Rollins (Red)
  • Tutuola (Blue) and Rollins (Red)
  • Benson (Blue) and Carisi (Red)
• Redshirt Army: The competence of the ordinary police officers inversely correlates with how dramatic the scene they are in is. Hostage situations, the Monster of the Week making an escape attempt, a gunman attacks the courthouse, will all see any rank-and-file policemen quickly neutralized to heighten the drama.
• Refuge in Audacity: In "Flight", the billionaire child molester who accused a 12-year-old girl of rape surely qualifies. He's shocked that the detectives don't appear to take his case seriously.
  • In "Father's Shadow," a man caught humping an unconscious woman tells the police: "I'm sorry! I thought she was dead!"
  • Alexandra Cabot's defense for presenting illegally obtained evidence in "Guilt"? A mix of this and Loop Hole Abuse. She admits to lying to the victim's mother and violating her civil liberties, as well as manipulating detectives in front of the judge. But argues that the evidence should be allowed anyway since she did not violate the suspect's privacy or civil rights. It actually works too. Although she did end up with a thirty day suspension and it took quite a while for Judge Petrovsky to let her live it down.
  • Casey Novak once subpoenaed Donald Rumsfeld, who was at that time the United States Secretary of Defense, in "Goliath". Arthur Branch was not amused.
  • Rafael Barba's Establishing Character Moment in "Twenty-Five Acts" was goading a defendant into strangling Barba with a belt, from the witness stand, right in front of the judge and jury.
• Relationship Reveal: "Unholiest Alliance" reveals that Olivia and Capt. Ed Tucker have been seeing each other romantically for some time when she kisses his fingers.
• Relationship Upgrade:
  • Between Detectives Amaro and Rollins, after he's seen walking around her apartment in a state of undress in Season 15.
  • Rollins and Carisi get one in the season 22 finale after Rollins has a Love Epiphany at Fin's not-wedding.
• Remember the New Guy?: Several episodes feature perps and victims who are well-acquainted with the detectives from previous cases, except they're introduced in the same episode(s).
• Replacement Goldfish: In the episode "Locum", a couple is revealed to have adopted a orphan girl simply because she looked almost identical to the biological daughter who was abducted and possibly killed ten years before. To make the newly adopted kid look as much like their lost child the parents (but mostly the mother) forced the 8-12 year old to wear the girl's clothes (she was originally a tomboy), straighten and dye her hair, and even get a nose job and a RFID chip implanted in her so her parents can find her if she gets lost. The kicker? The biological daughter is found by the police alive and at the end of the episode, is returned to her parents as the replacement daughter watches on.
• The Resenter: "Theatre Tricks" (which might be an homage to Perfect Blue and by extension Black Swan) had a very resentful plain, chubby wannabe actress who was so jealous of her naive, pretty friend that she set her up to be raped by a judge and pinned it on her director because the pretty girl stole the plain one's part just by showing up, while the plain girl had to prostitute herself in order to be considered and wanted her friend to "suffer for once in her life". The detectives found it ironic that, out of all the exploitative men in the pretty girl's life (she had a stalker plus a sleazy director), the one who actually hurt her was a woman who acted like her friend.
  • Similarly, FBI Agent Dana Lewis killed her ex-boyfriend's fiancee: a pretty schoolteacher who wasn't Married to the Job and when she revealed she was pregnant her boyfriend asked her to marry him instead of forcing her to get an abortion and then dumping her months later (what he had done to Dana when she got pregnant). The last thing Dana remembers before she realized she was cleaning the scene of the murder was "this girl's never suffered in her life".
  • James Van Der Beek's character goes the extra mile to get revenge on the (admittedly insufferable) med school classmate who ruined his life by stealing his identity and using "genetic attraction" to seduce his rival's three teenage sperm donor daughters (getting one pregnant) and the guy's "legitimate" daughter. When he's arrested he tells the wife (also his ex-girlfriend) that her daughter is dead — she isn't, but she's now convinced her "lover" is her real father.
• Retcon: A season 13 episode heavily implied that Jack McCoy was no longer the District Attorney, but his appearance in season 19 establishes that he is still the DA.
• Revenge Before Reason: Sometimes fall into this, despite all possible reasons why their actions wouldn't be a good idea. Especially if its an It's Personal moment.
  • A major example of this is in "Blinded" where Olivia deliberately informs the feds of a perp's location, knowing that he would be sent back to Louisiana to be executed. All to get revenge for him headbutting Elliot into a car window, which caused him to go blind (He got better). And after Casey calls her out on it, she informs the DA that she threw the case (Which she did, but that's another issue).
  • The shock jock in "Obscene" who was given a full confession by a rapist but it wasn't caught on tape because the FCC stopped his show from airing. The shock jock refused to testify about the confession in order to spite the FCC. It apparently didn't occur to him that the FCC wasn't prosecuting the rapist, no one at the FCC would ever know or have any reason to care that he wasn't testifying. In fact, the rapist was the son of a woman who was leading the charge to censor his show so his refusal to testify would feel like a favor to the people he wanted to spite.
  • Twisted up in "Reparations" where Terrence Howard's DA from Law & Order: LA appears to defend his cousin, who raped a woman who turned out to be the granddaughter of the leader of three men who raped his mother when he was a child and made him watch (and called her a whore to escape justice on top of it). Except he didn't — he couldn't bring himself to do it and she only claimed that he did do it because grandpa told her that no one would believe she was "just" assaulted and that "black men always rape". The DA's cousin still gets a measure of revenge though, because at the end, his mother's rapist A) is forced to watch his granddaughter go to jail for perjury because of the false accusations he manipulated her into making and B) must now face that the grandchild who once loved and adored him even in spite of his racism now utterly despises him for even just temporarily turning her into the same kind of evil person that he is.
• Revisiting the Roots: The series was forced by Christopher Meloni's departure to go back to a more rounded set of characters instead of being the Stabler & Benson Show. But as of Season 15, they seem to have stopped and are instead just making it The Benson Show.
• Revolving Door Casting: Are you an ADA? Is your name Cabot, Novak, Barba, or Carisi? No? Well, nice knowing ya!
• Rich Bitch: Holy hell, the grandmother (played by May Parker!) in the Mushroom Samba episode "Wet", who sees her granddaughter as weak for becoming a drug addict and needing silly things like therapy and emotional support. Later, she visits her granddaughter after a suicide attempt just to take back her necklace and disown her. The granddaughter did kill someone (who grandma saw as more of a granddaughter than her own) but even the detectives can see how grandma drove her to it.
  Granddaughter: All I wanted was a mother.
  Grandma: (in a sweet old lady voice and a slight smile) Yes, well... she died.
  • The grandmother in "Privilege" is even worse. She taught her own grandson how to rape women and use their wealth and privilege to get away with murder. She then tries to set up her own son in order to help her grandson evade justice.
• Ripped from the Headlines: The franchise has its own page.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: "Poisoned Motive" had one. The perp was the daughter of Fin's former partner. Angry at the wrongs that cost her her mother's life, her father's job, their home and her potential part of the Army and Police, she sought to murder those connected to those who wronged them.
• Romanticized Abuse: The show sometimes goes for having their cake and eating it too, denouncing the horrors of sexual abuse while displaying it in almost pornographic detail.
  • One episode, named "Slaves", revels in the details on how a young Romanian woman has been imprisoned, brainwashed and used as sex toy by an American couple. Lots of neatly presented details about the horrors she endured makes for a strange mix of Fetish Fuel and Nausea Fuel. Surprisingly, the detectives let the wife off the hook in exchange for selling out her husband, in spite of the fact that she murdered the girl's aunt without even informing her husband about it afterwards, though one could argue that there was some heavy implication that the wife was also the subject of abuse and brainwashing.
  • Another episode, named "Spectacle", runs on the principle that no one can resist watching a good rape. The episode starts with a video broadcast of a woman getting raped by a masked man popping up on the intranet of a university campus. It turns out that the guy who had the woman kidnapped and raped was filming it to get attention. His baby brother was kidnapped, and the police gave up searching after a certain point. After this cold case is solved, the unsurprising reveal is made that they was simply playing make-believe rape as a little Activist-Fundamentalist Antics plot to get the police's attention.
    • To be fair it was said they tried closing the window but couldn't. And everyone couldn't tell if it was real or not.
• Room Full of Crazy: The detectives have stumbled into many of these over the course of the series, often of the Stalker Shrine variety. However, the show also pulled a subversion in the episode "Manhattan Vigil," when a suspect's Room Full Of Crazy turned out to be exactly right about the crime they were investigating.
• Rouge Angles of Satin: In "Choice", the perpetrator tagged a mirror with "Suck it bich". This causes Cragen to instruct his detectives to check with the Gang Unit for groups who misspell things. The lab techs also note the misspelling on a note stuck to crime photos posted in their lab.
• Rule of Three: Apparently just being Ripped from the Headlines isn't enough, it has to involve three stories: "American Tragedy" combined Treyvon Martin's shooting, Paula Deen's Deep South racism, and the controversial practice of "stop-and-frisk" which disproportionately targets African-American men.
  • Josh Galloway, a No Celebrities Were Harmed stand-in for Daniel Tosh, uses Rule of Three as part of his standup routine. He claims that gangrape by three men is hysterical.
• Running Gag: As Benson puts it, "why does everyone think I'm a lesbian?"
  • Also the fact that Elliot gets terribly wounded every time he runs into a certain FBI Agent, Dana Lewis. In the episode "Penetration", he actually gets shot by her because a bullet she fired at her rapist ricocheted off of a metal beam. The resigned look on his face after getting shot is absolutely hilarious.
    Elliot: She's not gonna stop until she kills me!
• Russian Roulette: Happens in "Russian Love Poem". The player gets two clicks before the bang. Also, in "Beast's Obsession", Lewis forces Benson to play Russian Roulette and they get to the last bullet as rescue team is seconds away. Lewis "wins" by getting the last bullet and shoots himself (splattering gore all over Benson) to ensure that she'll never forget him.

S

• Saved by the Platform Below: "Solitary" sees the team trying to track down and ex-con who was desperate to avoid going back to prison and thus shoved Stabler off of a roof. Luckily for Stabler, there was a platform just below, so he suffered only minor injuries.
  • Averted in "Fight"; a murder suspect jumps off a rooftop while being chased by Fin and lands in a garbage truck, only to be crushed to death by its compactor.
• Saying Too Much: This is how the true culprit is finally caught in Season 16, Episode 13, "Decaying Morality". The detectives have the victim, Jenna, confront her dentist uncle in a restaurant, but at first he's too smart to give himself away. At the last minute, Jenna lies that she's "late" and probably pregnant. The culprit doesn't say that that's not possible because he never had sex with Jenna; instead he says that that's not possible because he had a vasectomy and thus couldn't have gotten her pregnant—which means he just indirectly admitted that he raped her.
• The Scapegoat: This is a common occurrence do to the Never My Fault mentality of the SVU detectives. Whenever the detectives mess up a case they often shift the blame to someone else. While this is usually the actual culprit, it is just as likely to be someone they don’t like.
• The Schizophrenia Conspiracy: A relatively common plot point. A notable occurrence in "Zebras" involved a dangerous schizophrenic involved with a circle of anti-establishment conspiracy theorists including one of Munch's ex-wives.
• Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!: The detectives regularly ignore protocol and procedure to make sure criminals don't get away.
  • In "Confidential" Stabler arrests a defense attorney after she admits that she could have stopped another man from being found guilty of her client's crimes. While attorney client privilege protects her she still let an innocent man rot in jail for twenty years. Stabler does eventually decide he went too far.
    • The lawyer's decision to give her client up, even though he's dead, also qualifies. According to the rules of privilege, she should have kept his secret forever no matter what the consequences, but she decided she couldn't have that on her conscience.
  • Alex Cabot breaks several laws in "Guilt" to secure the evidence to convict a pedophile. Including deceiving the victim's mother and the detectives to gain evidence illegally.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: Many wealthy and powerful perps find that this doesn't play in the L&O universe.
  • Screw the Rules, I Have Connections!: If you have government connections, your chances may improve.
• Secretly Gay Activity: In the episode "Lowdown", the squad investigates the death of a gay lawyer, and stumble across a black poker club that's actually a front for closeted gay black men.
• Secret Relationship: Detectives Amaro and Rollins.
  • Rollins and Carisi keep theirs a secret in the first half of season 23, but this has little to do with fear of professional reprisal and more to do with Rollins' emotional issues. They're forced to confront whether or not to disclose when Sonny starts spending so much at her apartment that her youngest asks if he's her father. When Carisi expresses how it makes him feel to hide their relationship from everyone they know, Amanda, in a sign of Character Development, takes the initiative to disclose to Benson—who has to retain a straight face and pretend like this is brand new information, rather than something that's been obvious for months.
• Security Blindspot: It's revealed that corrections officers at a New York prison have been exploiting holes in the security cameras to force themselves on female inmates, particularly and especially the blind that is the prison chapel, which has no coverage so that prisoners will feel comfortable offering confession.
• Self-Surgery: In "Shattered", Dr. Warner is shot by a grief-deranged mother, and has to talk Olivia through the procedure to insert a chest tube so her lung won't collapse.
• Serial Killer Baiting: In the episode "Demons," Stabler goes undercover to try and catch a paroled serial rapist who targets teenage girls. At one point during the operation, the cops send one of their junior officers out dressed like a teenager to try and bait the rapist. While he stops and gets close to her, he decides not to take the bait.
• Serial Killings, Specific Target: One episode features a man who killed his wife and then killed another woman for this exact reason. However, it doesn't fool the detectives, as they note that the second killing was cold and detached, whereas the original victim died brutally, showing that the murderer had a lot of genuine rage towards the first one, but didn't care at all about the second.
• Series Continuity Error: At the beginning of Season 9, Olivia gets her hair cut. However, in the 3rd episode of the season "Impulsive", Olivia's hair has suddenly grown significantly longer. In the next episode, it returns to its previous style.
• Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: Of the medical/psychiatric/legal terminology variety.
• Sex in a Shared Room: Several variants, all of which are pretty horrible (given that this is a police show about sex crimes):
  • "Dominance" alone has several rape examples, as this seems to be a huge fetish for Charlie. His crimes involve forcing kidnap victims to rape each other, but outside of that totally nonconsensual example, he is in a bizarre three-way relationship with his girlfriend and his younger brother. He persuaded her to take his virginity while Charlie was in the room, and then coerced them into participating in threesomes that may or may not have devolved into Charlie raping his younger brother in front of her.
  • Olivia invokes this when she's trying to seduce Stuckey in "Zebras", telling him after they kiss that she wants Stabler to watch them have sex (it's just an excuse so she and Stabler can get the upper hand.)

• Sex Is Evil, and I Am Horny: One episode featured a man raping other men, even though the thought of sex with males disgusted him, while another had a guy raping promiscuous women, whom he was utterly disgusted by; he believed he was "purifying" them by raping them.
• Share Phrase: Being a crime drama, it's only natural.
  • "I was raped."
  • "[Suspect], you're under arrest for [offense]. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you."
  • "Docket ending [number], people of the State of New York v. [suspect]."
  • "I would never hurt [victim]! I loved her!"
  • "I want my lawyer."
  • "Bail is set at [huge number]."
  • "Counselor, control your client."
  • "Court officer, remove this man/woman from my courtroom!"
  • "Somebody call a bus!"
  • "10-13! 10-13! Shots fired!"
  • "Remand, your honor."
  • "This is SVU Portable..."
  • "Objection!" "Withdrawn. Nothing further."
  • "Do you have any children, detective?"
• Share the Male Pain: Olivia is the most likely to do this, believe it or not.
• She Who Fights Monsters: Said by the FBI agent (who committed as Vigilante Execution) in "Signature" before blowing her own brains out.
• Shell-Shock Silence: A pretty eerie example in the appropriately titled Season 10 episode "PTSD": while trying to break up a fistfight, Liv, still working through her near-rape experience from the previous season, is knocked in the head when shoved off. The sounds become muffled as Liv comes dangerously close to reflexively blowing a suspect's head off...
• Ship Tease: With the show running as long as it has, there are plenty of ships for the writers to poke and/or play with. Some major examples:
  • Elliot and Olivia don't mind going undercover as a couple now and then, and Elliot's wife Kathy tells Olivia she's felt threatened by how much time Elliot spends on the job with Benson. Elliot himself says on several occasions that Benson and the job are the only things he has whenever he doesn't have his family, and he doesn't want to lose that. Olivia notably breaks down when Cragen tells her Elliot isn't coming back. And when Elliot becomes a recurring character (and widower) again in Season 22, he and Liv reestablish a very heavy chemistry again.
  • Fin and M.E. Warner may have been flirting in a Christmas episode in Season 14.
  • Lake has a moment with Casey Novak, but nothing ever comes of it, and it's never mentioned again. Of course, he's not around long enough to expect much.
  • Barba and Olivia share enough lingering held gazes and quiet, intimate moments together (not to mention concern for each other) that half the fandom thinks they have feelings for each other, despite their regular bickering. These fans are quite possibly right; Raúl Esparza (Barba) and Mariska Hargitay (Olivia) ship the characters in real life. Perhaps best exemplified by this exchange from "December Solstice":
  Barba: Where do you think you'll be when you're eighty-five?
  Olivia: [smiling] Squabbling with you?
  Barba: [softly] Wouldn't that be nice.
  • Rollins and Amaro are briefly implied to have slept together offscreen. It's touched on briefly once or twice and never brought up again.
  • For the past few seasons, the show has gotten a lot of mileage out of teasing Carisi and Rollins, though it was fairly inconsistent and it cropped up only a few times per season, if that. Until season 22, when it appears the writers have stopped playing coy and are now leaning into the shipping in a way that's pretty overt for the show. It finally does culminate in their Relationship Upgrade at the end of the season.
• Shipper on Deck:
  • USA Network itself supports Elliot/Olivia, if the fact that they dedicated an entire marathon to the ship is any indication.
  • Mariska Hargitay and Raúl Esparza ship their characters, Olivia Benson and Rafael Barba.
  • In "Can't Be Held Accountable," Amanda's therapist wonders aloud why she and Carisi aren't together, as apparently Amanda has told her he's "smart, kind, funny, you enjoy his company, [and] he's good with your kids" in sessions.
• Shoot the Hostage Taker: In the episode "Debt" the police raid a brothel run by a Chinese gang. In one of the rooms a gang member takes one of the prostitute hostage and uses her as as a Human Shield. The prostitute is saved when Detective Elliot Stabler dives through the door of the room and shoots the gang member in the head.
• Shot in the Ass: Happens to Munch when a bunch of Neo-Nazis shoot up a courtroom.
• Shout-Out:
  • Elliot and Olivia are named after two of Dick Wolf's children.
  • In "Wanderlust," Stabler and Benson meet a single mother and her daughter and must discover the nature of their relationships with their tenant, an older writer. Their surname is Hayes, which rhymes with Haze, the surname of Dolores and her mother in Lolita.
  • In "Pure", Huang basically outlines the premise of Lie to Me, including namedropping Lightman's real-life counterpart, Paul Ekman.
  • Possibly in "Imprisoned Lives" to the novel "Room", which also has a young boy with an odd way of talking because his mother (though in the episode he doesn't know which of the women is his mother) was kidnapped as a child and after being born both were hidden in a tiny room.
  • The episode "Debt" has shout outs for Mulan, of all things. The Victim of the Week was searching for her daughter, Ping. There are no fewer than three Asian-American actors in the episode who also starred in the Disney film.
  • Season 12's "Totem" features Jeremy Irons' character as a doctor (returning from a previous episode) who claims that a woman may have been responsible for the latest rape and murder of a girl. In discussing what kind of women seduce younger people, Olivia brings up "Mrs. Robinson-types."
  • One of Amaro's earlier episodes had him looking into a possible link between the crime of the week and a case that went cold years ago, and even remarks to the person digging through the archives that handling cold cases must be pretty difficult. Danny Pino was one of the leads on the show Cold Case before it was canceled in 2010.
  • Season 16's "Intimidation Game," shares its name with the working title of Batman Begins. At the end, a hostage has a gun duct-taped to her hands, similar to The Dark Knight.
  • Season 10's "Ballerina" features a suspect, played by Carol Burnett, who dresses and acts very similarly to Norma Desmond.
  • Season 10's "Trials" includes several instances of Munch mentioning his previous co-ownership of the Waterfront Bar in Baltimore (on Homicide: Life on the Street).
• Shut Up, Hannibal!: Olivia's kidnapper/torturer/wanna-be rapist (she notes he's only attacked older women and young girls, needling him that he's afraid of a "real woman") tells her to shut up with her pathetic story about how her old partner would know what to do with him. She eventually beats him into a coma with an iron bedpost.
• Sins of Our Fathers: In "Reparations", a man rapes a young woman as an act of revenge against her grandfather, who was a Klansman involved in the brutal rape of his mother decades earlier. Although it's ultimately revealed that he didn't actually rape her; he intended to, but when he actually saw her, it hit him that the granddaughter was an innocent third party in the situation and couldn't go through with it.
• Skewed Priorities: In "Alien", a young girl is being viciously bullied at the Catholic school she attends for being the daughter of a lesbian couple, to the point of needing therapy twice a week. When the detectives ask the girl's adoptive mother why she hasn't been transferred to another school if the bullying is so bad, the mother's response is that they want their daughter to have a Catholic education because it's important to their family. Her daughter's life is a complete hell...but it's okay, because she's getting a Catholic education! The prosecutor eventually calls her out on this, pointing out that because she forced her daughter to stay at the school, where her main bully continued to torment her, he pushed her far enough that she eventually stabbed him in the back with a pair of scissors, severing his spinal cord and paralyzing him for the rest of his life.
• Slap-Slap-Kiss: A one-sided one from Rollins to Carisi. She ends up falling in love with him, a feeling which he's all too willing to reciprocate.
• Slut-Shaming: Shows up repeatedly as the defense tries to smear the victim.
• Small Reference Pools: You can expect a prostitute/Sex Slave from some other country to usually say, "In our country, the police help nobody!"
• Smart People Know Latin: Dr. Huang effortlessly steps in to correct a mistranslated Latin word in the episode "Silence". Bonus points because Elliot, who studied Latin as a kid as part of his religion, didn't quite get it. (Elliot translated it as "I have sinned." The correct translation was "You have sinned.")
  • Hilariously subverted in "Spiraling Down" when Amaro rattles off a translation of a long Latin sentence for Benson and Cabot's benefit, and a totally unimpressed Cabot replies that she already knew what it meant.
• Smash Cut: The show loves doing this. Often uses the following pattern:
  Detective: Can you tell me where [X] is?
  Witness: [looks thoughtful]
  [Immediate cut to the SVU squad busting down a door and yelling "POLICE!!!"]]
• Smokescreen Crime: In "Raw", a grisly school shooting by a white supremacist is eventually traced back to a pair of greedy white adoptive parents who put out a hit on their adopted black son so they could collect on his life-insurance policy. By sheer dumb luck, the white supremacist happened to be affiliated with a terrorist group, and thus the SVU was too busy investigating their many other crimes to look at the insurance angle from the start.
• Smug Snake: Most of the recurring defense attorneys, which come in various shades of Jerkass and most of whom are as just as slimy, smooth and arrogant as all other Hollywood lawyers. On at least one occasion though, one such attorney (albeit reluctantly) helped the detectives bring in his AWOL client when he failed to show up at court.
  • The detectives themselves qualify.
• Snarking Thanks: "Criminal" has Captain Cragen meet a professor who it turns out he previously arrested for a serious crime when he was still a detective, and immediately suspects him of murdering the victim (who was in a relationship with him). Long story short, he ends up arresting him and destroying his career before realizing he's innocent. He apologizes and assures him he'll capture the real killer, earning a very bitter "My hero".
• Social Darwinist: The main villain of "Confrontation", whose motives for raping and impregnating so many women is because there are too many people with disabilities and he is trying to make children with better genes.
• Soft Glass: Averted in the aptly-named "Blinded" where Elliot gets headbutted through a police car window with enough force to shatter it. The blow knocks him out, gives him a concussion, and temporary brain damage that puts him in a short coma, and making him temporary blind when he woke up.
• Something Only They Would Say: In "Babes", a woman is charged in connection to a young teen's suicide. While going through the trial, the DA asks the woman to read off her final internet chat with the girl. However, when the prosecutor makes a statement translating "fath" as meaning "father", the woman's daughter, who was a friend of the victim and thus has additional context, realizes that's entirely wrong and bursts out that it's actually "first and true husband", a term used by their Catholic school's chastity club. Since no one to that point had put the boyfriend at the scene, the detectives realize they have a missing piece.
• Spousal Privilege:
  • One episode revolves around the concept that two abusers had married their victims precisely to abuse spousal privilege, something they openly mock the detectives with. Their overconfidence eventually backfires when investigations dig up a prior marriage license they hadn't gotten annulled, making their current marriages null and void...
  • In Criminal Hatred, two men were married in Provincetown. The detectives get one to confess what the other did, only to learn that they are married and they can't use what he told them. Trying to argue that the spousal privilege doesn't apply because they were married out of state before New York recognized same-sex marriages doesn't work.
• Squick: invoked Invoking this is a major chunk of the premises on the show.
• Standard Cop Backstory: Olivia Benson is a child of rape and was abused by her alcoholic mother, likely in part because of this fact.
  • Elliot Stabler, Nick Amaro, and Rafael Barba all had abusive fathers; Stabler also had a mentally ill mother who, while she never intentionally hurt him like his father did, occasionally did things that caused him harm in her manic phases (like going out for a reckless joyride with him in the car and crashing). Stabler and Amaro also both have military backgrounds.
  • Munch's father committed suicide when he was a teenager, and he's had a string of failed marriages.
  • Amanda Rollins has an irresponsible (and eventually outright backstabbing) younger sister for whom she feels responsible, a father who ran up gambling debts and eventually abandoned the family, and a mother who subsequently dated abusive men (and was herself emotionally abusive to her two daughters). She was also sexually assaulted by an authority figure at her precinct in Atlanta, hence her transfer to Manhattan SVU.
  • Mike Dodds averts the most traumatic pieces of this, but he does have the military background as well as having a drug-addicted younger brother who he frequently has to bail out of trouble. His parents are also divorced and he doesn't appear to have much contact with his mother.
• Status Quo Is God: A great deal of the main characters are static characters. Despite the many episodes that have carried anvilicious aesops about such, after twelve seasons Elliot is still abusing the Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique and bending rules without serious long-term consequences, Olivia is still getting too close to victims, and the precinct as a whole is still completely gung-ho towards convicting the first suspect that appears on their radar and trying to railroad them into a conviction despite shaky evidence. In particular to the last point, you could make a lengthy list of all the episodes where the first suspect they collar is a Red Herring and is completely innocent despite the evidence of their guilt, but they have not picked up on this nor have they learned from it.
  • Season 13: Complete, unexpected turnabout. The Unstabler is gone, the Jack Bauer Interrogation Techniques are gone, the questionable legal antics are gone, the It's Personal / Idiot Ball episodes are gone . . . it's like a miracle!
    • Sadly, seems to have gone back to normal as of Season 15.
• Stealth Pun: The Not-Michael Jackson episode has a scene where the medical examiner tries to take a pubic hair sample & finds the guy had laser hair removal done. Smooth Criminal, indeed...
• Stepford Smiler: Mandy, the victim in "No Good Reason," shifts into this after her rape, when her entire school is cyberbullying her, calling her a liar and a skank. After a few weeks of being (completely understandably) sullen and angry, she suddenly changes her hair, starts wearing bright clothes, cleans her room, and puts up a vlog, smilingly explaining that she's decided to quit focusing on the past and wants to start with a clean slate. Her completely unconvincing cheery demeanor and forced positive attitude makes it all too clear, especially to Olivia, that this is not a good thing.
• Stock Legal Phrases: Not as common as you might expect, given the heavy focus on the detectives. The most common is, of course, "you don't have to answer that."
• Straight Gay:
  • Dr. George Huang is so very Straight Gay that his sexuality was debated for nine years until the episode "Hardwired" made specific reference to it. In a fifth season episode, "Abomination", Huang says something about how gay people grow up hearing the same insults and stereotypes about gays "as the rest of us do", suggesting that either he was closeted or it was a Throw It In! case inspired by actor BD Wong's real-life sexuality.
  • In "Lowdown" all of the gay characters act the same as straight guys. This is not surprising, since they're are really deep in the closet.
• Straw Feminist: Olivia sometimes gets lines like this. At one point she stated she didn't think a woman could perform cold-blooded murder, and her general behavior around male victims likely gets her just on the edge of this trope.
  • Monique Jefferies only seemed to exist to get her hackles up anytime Munch said something.
  • "Devastating Story" has a college professor and self-appointed victim's advocate who believes that because campus rape is so common, sending a group of fraternity members to prison for a crime that some of them had nothing to do with, just to send a message, is an acceptable solution.
  • A Season 24 Villain of the Week was a Corrupt Corporate Executive who was facilitating the rape of women at sex parties so she could blackmail the men who brought the victims to the parties. She believes she is justified because men are responsible for all the war, violence, and suffering throughout history. Benson and Rollins can't find a flaw in her logic. (Worth noting that all three women are white, and none of them stop to consider what they would have to conclude if they applied this Insane Troll Logic to race instead of gender.)
• Strawman Ball: Elliot not believing that men could be raped by women, Olivia being scared of mentally ill people and/or being baffled as to why a gay football player would have it hard.
• Strictly Formula: And how. By the 20-minute mark it's possible to determine what the entire rest of a given episode's plot looks like, up to and including who else dies, why, and when, to the minute.
  • The show has two formulas: One for the There Should Be a Law episodes, and one for the It's Personal episodes.
• Surprise Car Crash: Happens to Olivia and Elliot's wife, Kathy, in "Paternity". Olivia gets out relatively unscathed but Kathy, heavily pregnant, is trapped in the wreck, and to make matters worse, the stress of the accident sends her into labor while she's still pinned and unable to move. They both make it, but it's a close call.
• Suspect Existence Failure: One notable example involved the demise of a rapist whom everyone was convinced had killed his victim. His death started them thinking that her killer had an entirely different motive.
• Swiss-Cheese Security: If the courthouse steps are the most dangerous place in Manhattan, the second most dangerous must be the SVU squad room, for all the countless times the detectives have a suspect and a victim (or victim's loved one) at the precinct and take absolutely no precautions to avoid them coming into contact. Occasionally it's done purposely to provoke a confession but far more often it's simply the Idiot Ball in play.
• Sympathetic Murderer: Once a season, if that.
  • Emma from "Wet", so very much, mainly because she's an orphan and her grandmother was SUCH a bitch who viewed her as The Unfavorite and berated and put her down constantly. Additionally the whole reason for her murdering Lindsay was to stop her grandmother from selling an aquifer, which would likely deprive people of drinkable water. She even begged her grandma not to do, only for her to do so anyway just to be a bitch. Even worse, the grandmother is a total Karma Houdini.

T

• Take Me Instead:
  • S8:E2 ("Outsider") ends with Chester Lake trying to coax a rapist/murderer to release a hostage by playing to his desire for attention, reasoning to him that taking a cop hostage will make him famous. This gives Fin a chance to shoot him and disable him long enough to be taken into custody.
  • S14:E7 ("Vanity's Bonfire") ends with a woman whose terminal brain tumor left her reliant on a cane to walk and too weak to handle a pitcher of water confessing to beating the head of her husband's physically healthy mistress in with a 20 pound hunk of crystal, while also swearing under oath that her 15 year old daughter came straight home from school that afternoon and never left the townhouse.
  • S14:E22 ("Poisoned Motive") sees this attempted when Fin speaks with his old Narcotics partner concerning multiple sniper attacks connected with them only to be presented with the weapon and a convincing Motive Rant centering on abandonment and betrayal. However it is rapidly made evident that motivation and marksmanship skill would not have let a man with a half-crippled leg escape the scene of the first shooting^note (a rooftop across from the precinct during a high profile perp-walk) as swiftly as the shooter did, but his twenty five year old daughter who was living with him, washed out of the U.S. Army and NYPD Academy due to emotional problems, and was still at large was a different matter entirely.
    • In the same episode, during the final showdown with the daughter, Fin tells her to shoot him rather than the civilian mother and child she had taken hostage. Fortunately, they manage to disarm her without anyone getting hurt.
• Take That!:
  • In-Universe example - Merritt Rook, after winning his case, appears on a morning talk show with a pet sheep named "Elliot."
  • "Assaulting Reality" is one to The Bachelor and Reality Shows in general.
  • "Granting Immunity" is one to anti-vaxxers as the main culprit who is one and was responsible for a huge measles infection acts like a Jerkass to everyone and especially Benson since her son was due to get a measles vaccine but got infected while waiting to do so. In the end, she was charged with child endangerment and sentenced to three months in prison and probation.
• Tautological Templar: especially Olivia Benson but essentially the entire team run roughshod over other law enforcement agencies in pursuit of sex crimes. They commit numerous violations such as not recusing themselves in cases where they have personal involvement, interacting with suspects after they've been represented by counsel and pressuring victims not to withdraw. This has had numerous tragic consequences over the years including deaths and innocent people convicted.
• Team Dad: Cragen's basic role. Lampshaded by Fin once: "Dad's mad!"
• Team Title: And a straighter example compared to the mothership.
• Teens Are Monsters: Many teenage rapists, drug dealers, Rich Bitches, and then there's Elliot's kids:
  • His middle daughter, Kathleen, goes out of control, which turns out to be the bipolar disorder she inherited from her paternal grandmother (which, it should be pointed out, is not how that works).
  • His eldest son wants to escape his dad's tyrannical rule by, uh, joining the military as a minor (the recruiter's creepy "we'll get him eventually" manner didn't help). When he's suspected in his ex-druggie friend's disappearance, he makes some stinging remarks about his sister and grandmother ("Well, I'm not the first Stabler to go crazy") and Benson and Stabler's UST ("So how many partners have you slept with, Olivia?").
  • To be fair to Elliot's kids, given who their father is, it's not entirely unexpected that they'd end up a little... neurotic.
  • As far as perps go, especially notable is the killer in "Lost Traveler." When asked why she murdered a small child, her only reply is a completely calm, "Why not?"
  • The ringleader of a group of three teenage girls who brutally murdered their friend over a boy in "Mean". Holy shit.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork:
  • Stabler and Blaine in "Fat". Also Stabler and Fin (depending on the episode), Stabler and Huang, Jeffries and Munch, Fin and Munch (at times, though it's usually more playful than hostile), Stabler or Fin when either is paired up with a detective from another unit, Novak and Stabler (depending on the episode). Notice whose name keeps popping up?
  • Amaro initially seems to be picking up where Stabler left off, particularly with Rollins and Barba, although in both of those cases a major blowout fight almost seems to improve his professional relationship with both (and in Rollins' case, gets a full Relationship Upgrade when they become romantically involved). He and Brian Cassidy still pretty much loathe each other, though.
  • Subverted with Benson and Munch, as she generally gets along with him, but pulls some amusing eye-rolls and other annoyed expressions when he starts going off on a rant.
• Temporary Scrappy:
  • Dale Stuckey is a crime scene unit tech who tries to make a name for himself among the other SVU members, only to get on everybody's nerves; especially Elliot Stabler. Eventually, after botching a trial due to a paperwork error causing crucial evidence to be ruled inadmissible, he goes off the deep end and tries to kill everyone he feels has wronged him, including stabbing his coworker and torturing Stabler. He is featured in four episodes total and is now presumably rotting in prison.
  • ADA Sonya Paxton is featured for a few episodes and annoys every detective in the SVU. Her relationship with Stabler was especially hostile. After a while, she is sent to rehab after blowing a case when she arrives at court drunk. She appears in a couple more episodes in the proceeding seasons.
• Temporary Substitute: Connie Nielsen, as Detective Dani Beck, replaced Olivia Benson for eight episodes while Mariska Hargitay was on maternity leave.
• Tempting Fate: DA Nora Lewin's final appearance in the Law & Order franchise was in the episode "Chameleon", where she shot down Cabot's attempt to seek the death penalty against the (female) perp for Straw Feminist reasons. When Donnelly called her out on this, she said "You don't like it, you can always run against me next term." Donnelly didn't, but Arthur Branch did — and won. (In fact, Fred Dalton Thompson had already replaced Dianne Wiest on the Mothership by the time this episode first aired.)
• Terminally-Ill Criminal: Benson and Stabler investigate the murder of a man who was HIV positive. It was later discovered that the killer was a woman he had infected with HIV. After she reveals he infected her, she tells them that she's dying from AIDS.
• Thanatos Gambit: Lewis, Benson's tormentor, has Benson handcuffed to a table and they're on the last bullet in a game of Russian Roulette. Instead of killing her, killing his young hostage, or killing them both, he kills himself in a way that makes her look like she killed him, which would cause her further problems with Internal Affairs Bureau (if she says he killed himself no one believes her; if she can't prove it and it goes to trial she could be found guilty of perjury and lose her job and her pension). He doesn't consider that IAB wants to end this thing and Benson has a lot of supportive friends, including the temporary chief.
• There Are No Therapists: Averted. There are plenty of them that come and go in addition to Huang (who is a profiler, but is always willing to offer advice to the detectives when the situation calls for it), but they don't seem to make that much difference to the protagonists despite Cragen's offers to the detectives for extra time to sort out their problems whenever something particularly traumatic happens.
  • Depends on who is going through therapy. Munch and Stabler (to a lesser extent, Cragen) are very resistant and only concede in dire circumstances, but Tutuola and Benson have attended therapy willingly - and are shown to handle their issues a lot better after their sessions than Stabler at the very least.
  Fin Tutuola: Just keep at it; the flashbacks will go away. They did for me.
  • Averted with Rollins when she not only refuses to take Benson's advice about going to therapy but then insults Benson for going to therapy. Gamblers Anonymous seems to have substituted for psychotherapy for Rollins.
    • Season 21 reveals that Rollins is seeing a therapist, one she is still seeing in season 23.
  • Averted with Olivia from Season 15 onwards, as she has a therapist she begins seeing regularly after her ordeal with William Lewis, and is continuing to see him as of Season 21.
• There Should Be a Law: To the point where the show isn't even about a sex crime half the time. Olivia has a particular problem with this, as she often fails to realize some laws don't exist (she thinks drunk sex is rape, she also thinks giving a woman a fake name then having sex with her is rape, unless of course the man doing it is her partner).
• They Look Just Like Everyone Else!: One of the recurring themes of the show, in fact, is just how easily pedophiles, rapists and other predators can pass as ordinary people.
• Those Wacky Nazis: In the episode "Raw" they have to deal with a neo-Nazi terrorist group that shot up a school. All the members are shown to be extremely racist and constantly spout racist rhetoric (for example one of them tells Munch, disgustedly, that Jews are the result of the union between Eve and Satan and his father's friend (who was really an undercover FBI agent) yells in the courtroom that the judge has been brainwashed by the Jew-controlled Zionist media).
• Those Who Fight Monsters: Quoted in the episode "Signature" by an FBI agent who murdered a serial killer as a personal act of revenge for her mentor who killed himself over the case. Said FBI agent also unwittingly caused the serial killer's last victim to die when they found her too late, which helps drive her to suicide.
• Title Drop: In most episodes, to varying degrees of awkwardness, similar to Lost.
• To Be Lawful or Good: "Dare" focuses on this dilemma. After the 12-year-old Victim of the Week dies due to an accident from a prank gone wrong by her friends, the doctor illegally harvests her heart and arranges for it to be sent to a boy in Buffalo who has been on the waitlist for three years.
  • First, Benson must choose between allowing the helicopter with the heart to leave for Buffalo, violating the girl's parents' right to choose whether to donate or not and their on-the-spot decision not to do so in order to save the boy's life, or taking back the heart and potentially condemning the innocent boy to die. She chooses to take back the heart. Notably, Benson feels extremely conflicted about it, and both she and the girl's father eventually conclude they should have let it go. At the end of the episode, it's revealed the boy indeed died without the girl's heart.
  • Second, the doctor is arrested for forgery, and this question is put to the jury. They choose to convict.
• Too Dumb to Live: In "Personal Fouls", a manager of the basketball star Prince Miller had told detectives he was wearing custom-made prototype shoes. He wore those shoes when he killed a man who would effectively expose the fact that Prince had been sexually abused by his coach years ago.
  • The head juror of the William Lewis case who sympathizes so much with him that she goes so far as to break out of prison by slipping meds into the muffins that she baked for him. And then, after managing to evade charges for that incident, she does something similar again two seasons later.
• Too Hot for TV: Downplayed In-Universe. At the start of "Assaulting Reality" (see Take That! above), the producers show sex footage from The Dream Suite. In reality, this would lead to the producers and the network getting penalized by the Federal Communications Commission for showing an actual sex act, which could fall under "Indecent Content" or even "Obscene Content."
• Took a Level in Badass: Melinda Warner in "Shattered"; she resisted passing out and guided Olivia through keeping pressure on her wound and even draining her lung, which was filling with blood after she was shot by an emotionally unstable mother whose son had just been killed.
• Torture Cellar: "Signature" had a pretty horrific one.
• Totally 18: The show sometimes treats the fact that a certain character is over 18 as an annoying technicality that makes it harder to arrest people for having sex with them.
  • In "Clock", the sex is consensual and the woman loves her boyfriend. It's just that she happens to have a medical condition that makes her look like a little girl. The detectives consider her chronological, mental and emotional maturity to be a technicality.
  • In another episode, a girl is raped at gunpoint. She looks very young, and throughout the episode, she is is consistently portrayed as a teenager who is not yet fully adult - neither intellectually nor emotionally. This is not held against her, instead it simply underscores how vulnerable she is. However, she happens to be 19, so the prosecution must prove that she didn't consent. And of course, the defense has Blatant Lies about the gun as one of their top priorities.
• Totally Radical: This happens a lot when the detectives use social media to dig up background on suspects, particularly when the suspect in question is a teen or young adult.
• Trapped by Gambling Debts: Random asshole of the week tries to pull this on Rollins. She shows an impressive presence of mind, promptly confessing the problem to fellow officers and seeking help.
• Traumatic Haircut: In "Alien", a little girl is being bullied by a homophobic boy for having two mothers. He tries to forcibly kiss her and then cuts off her ponytail with scissors; she grabs the scissors and stabs him in the back, resulting in a spinal injury that leaves him paralyzed from the waist down.
• Trailers Always Lie:
  • Previews made it seem like Tutuola was going Vigilante Man on the gay-bashers who beat his son's fiancee into a coma; actually, the gay-bashers were found fairly quickly and the real story was about a copy-cat.
  • Again, when it appeared that not-Rihanna's abusive boyfriend not-Chris Brown was found dead it was actually her producer/father figure (not-Jay-Z?) who was killed by not-Chris, and despite all the set-ups for a vigilante execution not-Rihanna wound up getting killed by not-Chris.
  • The promo for Psycho/Therapist said this would be "the final chapter of the #SaveBenson saga." Then the last scene of the episode showed William Lewis possibly breaking out of prison. Just in time for May Sweeps, too!
• Transplant:
  • Three of the show's main cast members are this; Donald Cragen from the parent series, John Munch from Homicide: Life on the Street, and Peter Stone from Chicago Justice.
  • There's also the inverse; Alex Cabot headlined Conviction while Elliot Stabler eventually headlines Law & Order: Organized Crime.
• Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: Happens fairly frequently. The most common version involves young children acting out sexually, situations where the behavior itself is largely harmless but it's cause for concern because it indicates that the child may be suffering abuse (i.e. a kid suggesting getting naked with a friend or acting sexual around adults because they were sexually abused and it screwed up their compass for appropriate behavior), but there are a few examples where a child commits horrific acts for no reason, just because they feel like it, as well as at least one case where the kid completely failed to recognize that he was hurting anyone. A couple of episodes ("Damaged", "Quarry", "Web") contain elements of both, where the perpetrator was abused, but then goes well beyond the usual acting out as they knowingly, intentionally inflict similar abuse on a younger/more vulnerable child.
  • In one particularly upsetting-for-grownups episode ("Conscience"), a little boy goes missing at a birthday party and is found dead shortly afterward. The security tape from the party shows him holding a balloon as he walks out of the camera's viewpoint— only for the balloon to roll by it without the boy only seconds later. The big kicker? He was killed by another child. An adult might have a healthy suspicion of other adults around their kids, but who would ever question another kid at a birthday party?
• True Companions: A notable subversion. Sometimes it's as if this lot are a family (there are certainly a few intensely close friendships among them, and woe betide anyone who hurts Casey Novak), but actually, they turn on each other pretty quickly. Fin and Elliot are consistently awful to each other, Munch took the sergeant's exam behind all their backs (though this was apparently because he lost a bar bet with friends and the writers were looking for reasons to lessen Belzer's screen time), and there is pretty sketchy support when any of them try a Clear My Name Bunny-Ears Lawyer gambit. It shows up when you compare it to something like NCIS: when Tony is framed for murder, they all assume he's being framed and do everything they can to keep him in the loop. When Liv is framed for murder, they all act suspicious and do everything they can to stonewall her. The immediate partners will usually go to bat for each other (Elliot does for Olivia when she's framed), but there's less unity in the team as a whole.
  • They've gotten better in more recent seasons. In general everybody is supportive of everyone else when there are issues. (Case in point, everyone goes to bat for Rollins when she's thrown under the bus by her own sister and charged with murder, for Fin when his brother-in-law is unjustly jailed right before Christmas, and for Amaro when his newly discovered son is in danger.)
  • The three-parter that closes Season 13 and opens Season 14 involves Cragen being framed for murder and the rest of the team fighting to clear his name.
  • As of Season 16 and beyond, the trope is finally played straight: The squad is regularly shown to take care of one another, with such examples as Amaro helping to watch Benson's son and Fin inviting Rollins to eat Christmas dinner with his family.
• Truth in Television/This Loser Is You: The characters display or outright express offensive, untrue, or ignorant beliefs about rape and sex in general. (See Double Standard for one of many examples.) They often reflect offensive, untrue, or ignorant beliefs about rape and sex in general held by people in real life. One of the most notable examples was in Legitimate Rape, where a congressman Expy of Todd Akin said that it was impossible for a woman to become pregnant from rape. This resulted in her rapist getting a mistrial because of one holdout juror, suing for custody of the victim's son, and thus forcing her to flee the country.
  • Season 9 sees ADA Casey Novak being disbarred after violating correct protocols in attempt to secure a conviction for an accused rapist who was likely to walk. As in real life, prosecutors cannot break the rules to get unfair convictions for defendants they believe are guilty.
  • Another scarily accurate case happens in "Crush" when dealing with a teenage rape victim, who had been going through and continues to go through a serious Trauma Conga Line. It gets to the point where the DA orders Benson to arrest the girl for her own protection, which Benson reluctantly does; when they try to drop the charges later, the judge overrules them and the girl winds up getting sent to a privately owned juvenile detention facility. It turns out that the judge who sent her there was a crooked judge, who gets paid to send as many kids there as possible because they get more money that way. This has happened at least once. Thankfully, they manage to get the abuser, and the judge is exposed and arrested.
• Twincest:
  • Rose McGowan's con-artist character truly loves her twin brother (it helps that they don't look alike at all).
  • The twins from "Identity" are forced to simulate sex acts by their therapist in order to train Lindsay to have the "correct" sex role attitudes. See Wrong Genetic Sex below to explain the scare quotes.
• Two Girls to a Team: Benson and Jeffries in Season One; Benson and Rollins since Season 13.

U

• Ultimate Job Security: Over the show's 11 seasons, the SVU detectives have gotten at least a couple dozen innocent people killed, either through insane violation of common sense (putting a (wrongly) accused sex offender in the same cell as a biker gang, allowing a blatantly unstable victim to interact with an accused suspect without first searching her for a weapon) or railroading a (incorrect) suspect combined with suggestively leading a traumatized victim or family member to the mindset where they're ready to commit a vigilante execution. They've suffered no consequences for any of these incidents, and even Internal Affairs never brings it up even when they're butting heads with the team. You'd think that after so many deaths somebody would file a civil suit, or at least the media would pick up on the pattern and jump all over it.
• Undercover Cop Reveal: This is how Declan Murphy is introduced and ends up joining the show.
  • Before that, Dana Lewis reveals herself by taking out a courtroom shooter before identifying herself as a federal agent to the responding officers.
  • Occasionally done as an Internal Reveal when one of the main cast members goes undercover.
• The Unfair Sex: Comes up fairly often, especially in the case of female perps. The episode "Totem" has one of the worst examples: the detectives, or at least Olivia, initially doubt that a woman can commit sodomy and murder. While they come around relatively quickly, it all starts rolling downhill once they find a suspect. The killer is sent to a mental facility without any mention of her going to prison because she was traumatized from being sexually abused herself and was therefore mentally unfit to stand trial. Male perps who use that defense usually earn nothing but disdain from the squad and everyone around them. Further, the woman who sexually abused her is stated to be going to jail, but unlike male abusive parents, doesn't spend any time in interrogation, put on trial, or offer a flimsy excuse for the squad to be disgusted by or scoff at.
  • In "American Disgrace" Barba mentions how they don’t like to go after women who make false rape claims because it would make it harder for actual rape victims to come out. Keep in mind that it is repeatedly shown that rape allegations completely ruin the victim’s lives, even when they are proven to be false. Not only did these women make a false claim, they went out of their way to frame this man, they lied to the police, lied in court, and even went so far as to secretly tape him when he started getting desperate. Yet they got off with a slap on the wrist which is a common occurrence.
• Ungrateful Bastard: Kim Rollins never shows any gratitude toward her older sister Amanda for getting her out of trouble.
• Urine Trouble: Dead serious example. In later scene in the episode "Bullseye," Olivia proposes that a recent child rape victim and her mother take karate, implying that self-defense instructor/leader of neighborhood anti-pedophile watch group/cleared suspect from the last episode Eric Weber will teach them. Upon meeting him however, the victim appears to zone out; Olivia later finds that she (the victim) peed herself out of horror that she just came face-to-face with her rapist.
• Used to Be a Sweet Kid: According to his mother, Teddy from "Web" used to be a happy, normal boy before he was molested by his father, after which he became sullen and withdrawn, spending all his time in his room playing computer games and refusing to eat dinner at the table with the rest of the family. And then it's revealed that he was not only molesting his kid brother, but making pornographic videos of him to sell to pedophiles online.
• Useless Bystander Parent: Sometimes comes up in episodes with Abusive Parents.
  • Downplayed in "Hothouse" — Elsa's mother did try to confront her husband about him beating their daughter and burning her with cigarettes as part of her genius training regimen, but he said it was necessary since her test scores were improving. She shows clear regret for her actions.
  • In "Home Invasions", when Joan was told that her husband was raping their daughter, she didn't care that it was happening.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom:
  • In "Influence", famous rock star Derek Lord^note A No Celebrities Were Harmed Captain Ersatz for Tom Cruise expresses anti-psychiatry and anti-medication views in a TV interview, saying that pills destroy people's brains. One of his fans, a high school girl with bipolar disorder, watches him and decides to stop taking her medication, resulting in her going through a week-long manic phase where she has sex with two boys, falsely accuses them of rape, gets them and herself expelled from school, then tries to kill herself in a car accident, injuring 6 people and killing a 14-year-old girl.
  • In "Responsible", a high schooler named Becca gives a popular girl at her school the keys to a neighbor's house so she can throw a party. A girl dies at that party by drinking way too much and choking to death on her own vomit; nobody at the party helps her or even calls 911 because they're afraid of getting in trouble.

V

• Vigilante Execution: More than once. For a while, it bordered on Once per Episode territory.
• Vigilante Injustice:
  • An episode had a child molester who actually reformed. He was framed for a murder-rape and got off, but then someone shot him.
  • An accidental example occurs in another SVU episode; a teenage girl accuses a man of rape, and the detectives let him go due to a lack of evidence. The girl's father then kidnaps him and tries to beat a confession out of him but winds up killing him by accident. The kicker? He was just an innocent bystander trying to return her purse, the real rapist was the girl's dentist uncle who drugged her, and the ending implies that the father will probably get off easy since he attempted CPR.
  • in Wannabe (S11E23), Brad Fletcher passed himself as a cop, nearly ruining the investigation.
  • "Real Fake News" deals with a Congressman and a Chinese restaurant being smeared by a fringe website with false accusations of child trafficking. Earlier in the episode, a man with a rifle shows up at the restaurant to "rescue" children allegedly being held in the restaurant's basement and finds neither a basement nor any captive children. In the epilogue, the Congressman comes to the restaurant to prove that nothing sinister is going on, only to be shot by a man who sees the Congressman playing with his daughter and mistakes him for a pedophile.
• Vigilante Man: Throughout the series these pop up, usually as part of "concerned citizen" groups, and invariably they cause problems. At best, vigilantes enflame the situation and get innocent people Convicted by Public Opinion, while at worst, more than once it's turned out the vigilante group leader is using his position to deflect from the fact that he's a rapist/child molester himself.
• Villainous Breakdown:
  • A spectacular one at the end of "Snitch", when Chukwei, a witness to a murder by an otherwise suave and dangerously savvy Dennis King, finally musters the courage to testify.
    Dennis King: "You're dead! You're family's dead! EVERYTHING YOU LOVE IS DEAD! YOU'RE DEAD!"
  • When Abraham/Eugene is trying to convince Melanie to shoot Benson at the end of "Charisma", he loses it.
    Eugene: All these men have come to kill me!
    Benson: Shut your mouth, Eugene.
    Eugene: WHY? BECAUSE THEY KNOW! THEY KNOW THAT I AM GREATER THAM MAN, I AM GREATER THAN GOD! AND THEY ARE AFRAID OF WHAT I CAN DO!
• Villainous Lineage:
  • A major plot point in "Hate": the defense for a man who killed Arabs out of hate argues that he carried out the murders due to the fact that he was biologically and genetically driven to hate and kill Arabs as a result of his father, who fought in Desert Storm. Ultimately averted: the father didn't hate Arabs and actually remarried to an Arab woman. His mother taught him to hate Arabs out of spite.
  • Also brought up in "Inheritance", where the defense argued that a man of mixed African-American and Asian descent raped women in Chinatown due to a genetic defect he inherited from his biological father, who was also a rapist. Olivia also ponders if she could've also inherited something from her father: both she and the rapist she collared were products of rape whose fathers were violent rapists.
• Vitriolic Best Buds:
  • Munch and Fin, to the point of Ho Yay.
    Munch: I'm your Jew?
  • Amaro and Rollins, eventually bleeding over into Belligerent Sexual Tension.
  • Barba and Benson squabble a lot, but are repeatedly shown to be very close friends (one of the very few ways to make Barba overtly angry is to threaten, hurt, or generally breathe unpleasantly in Olivia's direction, and Olivia stands by Barba during the Humiliation Conga that is "October Surprise", just to name two examples).
    Barba: Where do you think you'll be when you're eighty-five?
    Benson: [grins] Squabbling with you?
    Barba: [sincere smile] Wouldn't that be nice.
• Vomiting Cop: Olivia throws up in a dumpster in the first episode after talking to a victim of ethnic cleansing. A season two episode had Elliot sick as a dog due to the AIDS medication he was on at the time.
  • One of the cops called to the scene in the season 6 episode "Charisma" sees the interior of a house full of murdered children and immediately rushes out to collapse and retch.
  • Rollins does this in the Season 17 premiere, Foreshadowing that she's pregnant.

W

• Walk of Shame: Once, the detectives tried to get information about someone involved in the swinger scene. After raiding a sex club, one detective announced that anyone willing to talk about that person would be taken out the back door; anyone not willing could go out the front where the press had already gathered. (The "dress code" for that club was full-nudity.)
• Was Too Hard on Him: In "Babes," Benson starts to feel that she may have been too harsh with a teen girl who deliberately got pregnant and convinced her three friends to do so, after spelling out to her why having a baby at 16 would ruin her future and her chances of finishing high school, as well as explaining the health risks to babies of teen moms. Munch comments that the girl could probably have used a reality check.
• Weather Dissonance: The season 4 episode "Soulless" is supposed to take place in early May—so what's up with all the snow?
  • Another episode that takes place mid October had visible cherry blossoms.
• "Well Done, Son" Guy: The perp in "Outsider" had this as his Freudian Excuse.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Elliot and Olivia, as well as quite a few of the perps.
  • Erik Weber, a member of COAP (Citizens Organized Against Predators), a New York-based organization dedicated to protecting children from sexual predators. The group is prone to zealotry, with a tendency to railroad anyone labeled as a sex offender, justified or otherwise (such as a mentally-disabled man whose only crime was public urination). Subverted in Weber's case, however: he's a pedophile himself, and joined COAP out of self-loathing and to keep the police off his tail.
  • The anti-abortion doctor in "Rockabye" who tries to force pregnant women to keep their babies. He publicly advertises his clinic as an abortion clinic to lure in pregnant women, then delays their appointments for weeks until it's too late for them to have an abortion under New York state law. His clinic was the last resort for a teenage girl who had tried every other method of abortion available, and when he refused to give her the procedure, she resorted to having her boyfriend beat her with a lamp until she miscarried. As he's being arrested at the end of the episode, he yells, "I'm saving innocent lives!"
  • Casey Novak and Chester Lake both veer into this territory in "Cold" in their attempts to keep a rapist/murderer from pulling a Karma Houdini: Novak lies to a judge, and when that doesn't work, Lake flat-out shoots the guy down and doesn't even bother trying to hide what he did.
• Wham Episode:
  • Season 5's "Loss". Alex is seemingly shot to death by orders of a powerful drug lord whom she came after, but is actually Faking the Dead to be in Witness Protection. In the end, she only tells Elliot and Olivia about her status.
  • Season 9's "Undercover". Olivia and Fin go undercover in a women's prison to find out who's been dealing drugs while raping an inmate and her daughter. Olivia finds out just who the guy is when he tries to rape her, too, coming dangerously close before Fin saved her. Even then, the experience leaves its mark on her for a long time afterward.
  • The Season 9 finale "Cold". Lake goes rogue in pursuit of a rapist he couldn't catch and ultimately executes him, being imprisoned in the process. Casey also violates due process for the suspect's trial beforehand, leading to her suspension (she's reinstated near the end of Season 12).
  • The Season 12 finale "Smoked": Stabler is forced to shoot the victim's daughter dead after she goes on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge and shoots the people responsible for her mother's rape and murder, accidentally kills Sister Peg and hesitates in surrendering when her mother's killer taunts her. Though an extremely dramatic and harsh ending for the season by itself, the announcement that Christopher Meloni was leaving the show meant that it was the last time (at least until Season 22) the show's central Action Duo are seen together.
  • The Season 13 premiere "Scorched Earth" became this because of the subplot and the episode's ending which connected to the ending of the previous example. Essentially, it's revealed in the subplot that Stabler was deeply traumatized from the shooting and being forced to do what he did that he sought counseling, a leave of absence and Cragen reveals to Benson that in the end, he decided to resign.
  • The Season 13 finale "Rhodium Nights": SVU ran on a major sex trafficking ring, which leads to Cragen being framed for the murder of one of the escorts. Amaro's marriage also begins falling apart when his wife suggests a divorce. Also Brian Cassidy returns for the first time since Season 1.
  • Season 17's "Manhattan Transfer", in which Olivia is apparently fired during an investigation of a teen sex-trafficking ring linked to a Catholic school. This one doesn't stick, though.
  • The Season 17 finale, "Heartfelt Passages", ends with Mike Dodds dying of his injuries, marking the first and to date only time SVU has ever had a member of the unit Killed Off for Real.
• Wham Line: End of "Trophy".
  • End of "Internal Affairs". "Munch put his papers in. The Mehcad Carter case hit him pretty hard."
  • Before that, "Scorched Earth": "Elliot put his papers in."
• What the Hell, Hero?: Often pulled on Stabler — and sometimes, on Olivia — when going too far.
  • Amaro got this from his wife in "Street Revenge" when she found out he had beaten up her army buddy after basically stalking her for days after he started to suspecting her of cheating. It seems that they're just friends.
• What the Hell Is That Accent?: Lieutenant Murphy's Irish accent while undercover is....unconvincing at best.
• What You Are in the Dark: "Pandora" has Stabler chasing a pedophile to the Czech Republic and back, and uncovering a huge child prostitution ring in the process. At the end of the episode, he finally goes to arrest the particular pedophile that they've been looking for. Upstairs, with his gun drawn, he finds the man asleep, alone, in a room with no witnesses and too far away for anyone to intervene in time. You can see the battle raging on Stabler's face. He wakes the perp up and arrests him instead.
• Whole-Plot Reference: "Branded" is a version of The Millennium Trilogy, with a vigilante hacker Lisbeth Salander Expy, who was gang-raped at a summer camp a la Dexter Season 5 and, like Lisbeth, carved "rapist" into her perpetrators' chests.
• Whoopi Epiphany Speech: Guest star Whoopi Goldberg tries to deliver a rousing one in "Institutional Fail". Subverted by the fact that she has knowingly neglected actually caring for children in favor of paperwork and self advancement. Despite the message being an important one, the speech rings hollow with both the characters and the audience as a result.
• Who's Laughing Now?: Stuckey the lab rat. Holy shit...
• Who Writes This Crap?!: "Damn, who thinks this stuff up?"
• Wife-Basher Basher: Considering Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil, brutal violence is applied with infamous frequency in the interrogationg of suspects in this show, by Captain Olivia and Detective Elliot Stabler in particular.
• Willing Suspension of Disbelief: Anybody familiar with the American legal system can tell you that murder and rape cases usually take months, if not years, to get to trial. However, the show is written such that the investigation, arrest, arraignment, trial, and conviction for almost every case all happens within a week or two. This is highly unrealistic, but it is necessary in order to have new stories every week.
• Womanliness as Pathos: Women are usually the primary focus of the series, as they are most often portrayed as the victims of rape or sexual abuse. Many stories deal with the negative assumptions of this trope, such as Victim-Blaming a woman who should have "known better" under the assumption that rape was an inevitable consequence of a woman being in a particular place, time, or situation. Other negative consequences, such as men being raped by women (or other men) and not being believed or receiving the same sympathy are also brought up. This trope even extends to the personal struggles of the main characters. Olivia Benson is a Child by Rape who empathizes with female victims and, later, endures a sexual assault herself. Her original partner, Elliot Stabler, is overly-protective and feels it's his "duty" to not only protect his partner but to apprehend the perpetrators of these crimes because he fears something like it happening to his wife and daughters.
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: "Signature", "Authority", "Shattered", "Smoked", "Making A Rapist", etc.
  • Many characters over the years could qualify. "Poisoned Motive", for example, gives us Gloria Montero, whose father's taking a bullet for Fin set off a Disaster Dominoes in their family, and who decides to deal with this by going on a killing spree.
• Worth It:
  • In "Spectacle", the criminal states that it's worth being arrested and punished for faking a kidnapping and rape because he accomplished what he set out to do: to get the police to revisit his kidnapped brother's cold case.
  • Huang at the end of "Users". He effectively kidnapped a teen heroin addict to give him an illegal drug, Ibogaine, to cure his addiction. When the boy's guardian/quack shrink threatens to report him, Huang says he already reported himself, received a thirty day suspension of his license, and it was worth it.
• Worthy Opponent: One of the only defense attorneys who is consistently portrayed in a positive manner is constitutional lawyer Barry Moredock, who clearly despises many of his clients but represents them anyway for the sake of the constitution. He even becomes a judge later in the show's run.
  • Bayard Ellis is a defense attorney, but he's also a close friend to Olivia.
  • Rita Calhoun, a former prosecutor, is presented as this. Her first episode makes it seem like she's the same scumbag defender the others are, but later episodes show her sometimes helping the detectives and having a friendly relationship with them.
  • Minonna Efron also notably averts the "scumbag defense lawyer" cliché.
• Would Hit a Girl: Given how many episodes involve rape, the name of this trope hardly says it.
• Would Hurt a Child: The series runs on the trope.
• Wounded Gazelle Gambit: Used more than once, like in the case of "Burned" where a woman has consensual sex with an investigator from her lawyer's firm and then accuses her ex-husband of raping her... purely out of bitchy spite and to ruin his life. The guy can't prove that he wasn't a marital rapist, loses it and sets her on fire. In her very death bed, she keeps lying to Olivia about how she was "raped". Olivia only finds out the truth casually, as she speaks to the investigator, and is appalled by how it got Worse.
  • "Chameleons" has a prostitute perp (based on serial killer Aileen Wuornos) who tries making herself out to be some kind of Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds, and it appears to be working with the court, since her victims included guys like a known wife beater and a fellow serial killer. In the end, it's discovered she had lied about her horribly abusive past, and the baby son she claimed to love so much isn't hers; she stole him from the real mother, a random woman she strangled to death.
  • In "Conscience", a boy claims he was abused at a survival camp his mother sent him to, showing burn scars on his arm as evidence. He was actually the psychopathic one; according to the other boys at the camp, he tried to drown another kid, left a dead gopher in someone's bed, and would regularly burn himself with a cigarette. His school records also show that he was kicked out of two schools for arson and violent behavior.
  • In "Design", a pregnant woman is about to commit suicide and claims her baby is the product of a rape. It is...only she was the rapist, having drugged a wealthy scientist to collect his semen, impregnate herself, and frame him for the crime. She previously drugged 34 other famous or rich men and collected their semen, trying to do the same thing to them, and proceeds to scam the potential adoptive parents of her baby out of $50,000 each. The whole thing was a massive con.
• Wretched Hive: In the Law and Order universe, Hudson University is such a known hotbed of rape and rape cover-up that the R.A. of the victim in "Pornstar's Requiem", season 16 episode 5, tells the detectives he knows better than to ever take one of his students' rape complaints to campus officials.
• Wrong Genetic Sex: "Identity" starts with a rapist getting killed by his victim and the DNA evidence leads the detectives to a teenage boy who just happens to have an ironclad alibi. It turns out his twin "sister" is actually his twin brother; it seems he lost his penis when they were circumcised as babies and the doctors who botched the operation covered their tracks by completing the job and talking his parents into raising him as a girl. Sadly, this is based on a real case. Just like the character in the episode, the real man vehemently reverted to a male gender identity as soon as he got the chance. Sadly, both the real man and his twin brother ended up killing themselves (in separate incidents) instead of killing the doctor like his fictional counterpart in SVU did.

Y

• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: A particularly sickening example in "Design". April uses her pregnancy to scam prospective adoptive parents out of $50,000 each and frame the father of her baby for rape. As soon as the baby is born, she withholds its location to get herself a deal and escape jail, knowing the detectives will give up the chance to imprison her if it means saving the baby's life. When that's all said and done, she and her mother flee to Florida, abandoning her newborn daughter without a second thought.
  • April struck again in "Flaw", an original series crossover that serves as a sequel to "Design", when she shot her mother's boyfriend for his share of a scam they pulled, and betrays her mother in the courtroom to try and cover her own ass. Thankfully the detectives manage to throw her in jail this time.
• Your Princess Is in Another Castle!: If someone is abducted, they're very rarely in the first place the detectives search. If they are, then it's usually a set up for a Halfway Plot Switch.
• You're Insane!: Elliot to a particularly disgusting pedophile perp who's trying to defend his rape of young girls (and dressing a woman as a young girl to rape her) as "natural". When he calls the "love" he has "natural" as that which [Elliot] feels for his wife, Ell is visibly trying not to leap up and beat the scumbag to death.
  • The prisoners at Riker's do everyone a favor and take him out.

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