YMMV / Law & Order: Special Victims Unit S8 E11 "Burned"

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Miles and Valerie. Neither comes out innocent by the end of the episode, but there's a lot of unanswered questions left about exactly what happened between them, which in turn leaves each of their motivations open to speculation.
  • On one hand, Miles could be seen as someone who wasn't a bad man originally but was pushed over the edge; he was falsely accused of a crime he didn't commit at a point when there were already other stressors in his life (like his visits with his daughter being cut short). On the other hand, he proved to be someone who was capable of creating and carrying out a plan to set another person on fire; even before that, he was exhibiting stalker-like behavior (putting a GPS tracker on the car, swiping his daughter's keys to make copies), and even his daughter admits that he had violent tendencies as he would "break things or hit the wall" when he got mad, which is a type of abusive behavior and can also be a precursor to physical abuse, and he did physically attack Valerie on the night of the supposed rape, so he did clearly have violent/abusive tendencies even before he was "pushed over the edge", suggesting he could have been a ticking time bomb all along. Most likely, it's some combination of the two.
  • As for Valerie, on one hand, her accusation could have been out of spite and vindictiveness, which would make her completely unsympathetic. On the other hand, there was some degree of legitimate reason for her to be afraid (see previous point), especially after he entered her home and attacked her, and given that her fear of him up to that point had been dismissed by the judge who was convinced she was faking for sympathy points, accusing him of something worse and more concrete could have been not an attempt to retaliate against him out of spite, but rather an act of desperation to get someone to take her fear seriously — which, while still not okay or legal, would be a lot more sympathetic than doing it out of spite. As with Miles, the most likely reality is that she too fell somewhere in between the two absolutes.
• Moral Event Horizon: Miles falls in when he burns Valerie alive.
• Take That, Scrappy!: Kathy Stabler makes a few derisive comments about Dani to Olivia.
• The Woobie: Poor, poor Tessa really deserves a hug considering the things she witnessed with her parents and having her more or less be orphaned at the end of the episode because both of her parents did horrible things to each other, leading to a situation where her mother died a horrible death and her father is likely to spend the rest of his life in prison. She's the one person in the episode who's unequivocally innocent of any wrongdoing and yet she probably suffers more than anyone else.