Will Law & Order: SVU ever weary of humiliating its female characters?

Cafe Society
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In which anyone foolish enough to have watched last-night’s stomach-churning episode gets to vent his or her spleen.

I’ll put a synopsis in spoiler space:

[spoiler]Gambling-addict Rollins leaves work early one Friday evening, claiming to be going to Niagara Falls but actually heading to an illegal gambling club, because apparently she’d never heard of Atlantic City. There she is recognized by a waitress whom I suspect was a victim in an earlier episode (I’m not sure about that) and gets accosted by club security and dragged into a back room so her blouse can get ripped open and everybody can ogle her boobs.

The club’s managers blackmail her into getting them information on a juror in a case they want to fix. Rollins does their bidding but ultimately can’t bear to go through with it, and so lies when asked what she’s found; when the villains of the week then threaten to out her for patronizing the club, she offers to work off her debt by fellating the chief henchman–and, when it’s clear he’s going to film her doing so, still gets onto her knees. Break for commercial.

After the break, the CH’s immediate boss, a pregnant woman, then gives Rollins two more tasks: stealing a handgun from the evidence lockup to screw up a case, and driving a drunk patron of the club home. Doing so, Rollins inadvertently facilitates a rape; the aforementioned patron of the club is refusing to pay up, and a junior henchman is sent to rape the guy’s wife as a lesson. When Rollins goes to interview the rape victim, the woman freaks out, thinking not unreasonably that Rollins is a dirty cop and her presence is a message from the people who had her ravished.

Fin & Amaro discover Rollins’s several duplicitous acts, and Benson, in an act of mercy, agrees to let her turn herself in the next morning rather than arresting her then and there. Rollins then goes to the club and takes both the pregnant lady and the chief henchmen hostage, forcing them to take her to their ultimate boss. There it’s revealed that the chief henchmen is in fact an undercover cop, and the implied blowjob from the second act never happened; rather, he was recording himself telling her what his real mission was and enlisting her assistance. At the end of the episode Rollins suffers no repercussions from the department, but Benson does tell her she no longer trusts her and if the situation permitted would transfer her out of the squad.[/spoiler]
Actually it wasn’t completely vomitous. The final twist allowed me to stop hoping that Amanda Rollins would be fired, arrested, and imprisoned for a decade or so; now I merely want her fired. Don’t get me wrong: I have nothing against the actress; Kelli Giddish is reasonably talented and v. pretty. She turned in a good performance, I thought. But not only did Rollins’s pre-twist behavior make her lose all claim to sympathy, but the producers’ insistence on putting her (and also Benson) into sexually-degrading situations is horrid.

But that’s just me. Anybody else catch the episode?

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I’m a big fan of the show.

You forgot how Finn paid off Rollins gambling debt. My heart went out to Rollins dog.

Rollins is either going to have a come to Jesus moment or she is going down. She skated again last night. Her gambling addiction leads her to make one stupid move after another, time after time. I thought it was all coming to an end last night, but once again, she skated.

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I think we’re supposed to take it that this episode was her come to Jesus moment–or, rather, her hitting rock bottom. Not stealing the gun from Evidence (that was part of the con) or abetting the rape (that was inadvertent), but her offering to blow the chief henchman before she knew he was an undercover cop.

Since when is Fin rich? Rollins is implied to be in the hole for thousandsof dollars, since she’s only servicing the interest at this point. How does Fin know exactly how much money she needs? Where does he get it? Is she going to offer to fuck him to pay him back?

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Since they tipped the twist early on I was never really thinking Rollins was in trouble. The surprise to me was how far into things it was before she was involved on the law side. I don’t really buy the UC’s willingness to lie on her behalf an cover up her attempted criminality (not just the illegal gambling) prior to bringing her in, or that being a man short would really be a reason for Olivia to keep her around (even with the limited scope of what she knows).

As for the OP, there is definitely a difference in tone, nature, and intensity of the degradations visited (or in this case supposed to have been visited) upon the female cast compared to the male cast. Hard to imagine them writing Amaro offering a blow job in exchange for debt relief.

Am curious if they’re setting up Amaro for something more serious involving his ex-wife. I’d consider it more seriously if this show was as loose with cast changes as the original L&O was.

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Wish they would get some new blood in there.

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She’s a fuck-up but pretty much every one on The Shield in Vic’s team has her beat.

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I was cooking dinner while watching,so maybe I missed it–but how did they tip the twist?

Apart from the impossibility of Kelli Giddish remaining a cast member if Rollins had done what she seemed to be doing.

I’m assuming Lt. IBelieveInRedemption didn’t tell anyone that Rollins offered to sexually service him in exchange for leniency on his debt. I can’t imagine that, if Benson knew that, she’d be okay with Rollins staying. She’s a ticking time bomb with no more integrity than an alley cat.

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I can’t remember specifics of the commercials but somehow I came into the episode under the impression she’d be working undercover.

But within the episode, when Amaro and Finch first come in to tell Olivia they were worried about Rollins, they first showed 10 seconds of Olivia on the phone with someone saying “you know I’m short staffed, right” heavily implying that she’d just been given orders to do something that would make that worse. Then she kept telling them to stop digging into Rollins.

I don’t know if it would have definitely tipped me all on its own, but like I said, I came in already somehow being aware of it.

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I thought that was Rollins she was talking to, Rollins giving her bullshit explanation of the flu.

I didn’t see any commercials for the ep, so I can’t comment on that.

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Didn’t she already have her chance when she changed the story about shooting her sister’s boyfriend during the fake rape or something? She’s in shit up to her knees every third week, so it’s hard to keep track.

Fin is financially stable. Rollins owed $15,000. Fin would be the last detective on that squad to cut a moral corner. He gave her the money because he cares about her and didn’t want her to get in to something she couldn’t get out of, not because he wanted anything from her. He would be disgusted if she offered.

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Oh, I agree that Fin would expect nothing from Rollins expect an eventual repayment of his money. I was just commenting on how scuzzy they’ve turned her character.

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Didn’t see the ep, but a couple of thoughts,

Was it a gratuitous ‘check out Kelli’s cleavage’ sort of shot? I ask because I can certainly see how some thugs would try to intimidate a woman by tearing her blouse up.

A Rollins blowjob is not worth 15K

Fin beat a perp until he gave up some information when they were looking for a cops daughter, that was awhile back, though.

IIRC is was the sister who changed her story about the BF shooting, Rollins was clean.

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Show hasn’t been the same since Benson and Stabler worked the beat.

Stabler flipping his shit on pedophiles then taking it out on his ex-wife and daughter never got old. Poor guy.

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Unfortunately, L&O:SVU has fled from any semblance of realism long ago and it’s always been the worst of show of the franchise. The officers in the unit simply do whatever they want and the prosecutors left American jurisprudence behind six or seven seasons ago.

That it continues to dig ever deeper for salacious stories in which to ensnare their female officers isn’t a surprise. That it took them this long to do so IS

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Olivia wasn’t in on Rollins being undercover though, so it’s funny that even though you read the scene wrong you ended up being right. I hadn’t seen any previews, so I had no clue she was undercover. I did twinge to the fact that the gallery owner would be the main bad guy as soon as I saw him, because as is *always *the case on L&O, the actor who played him was a name I recognized who was too big to just have three lines in one scene.

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He opened her shirt to check for a wire. The waitress had tipped them off to her being a cop.

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Yes, thanks, now I remember. The sister was pulling a scam and Rollins was cleared of the insurance scam and wasn’t charged with the murder of the boyfriend. But a few weeks later … there was another fake rape or something that she was involved in. She keeps ending up in situations where her habits or ethics land her in a place where she can be compromised. When she’s on the screen, I think “train wreck”. Olivia is right in not trusting her.

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The 13 March 2014 episode isn’t even the lowest they’ve gone. Benson’s two near-rapes have the two top – well, bottom – spots.

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Okay. Before I watch it, what about the dog?

The show has gone off the rails. When Stabler first left, I liked Amaro (liked him in the exact same role with the same clothes and hair in Cold Case, too) and I **really **like Barba (he’s a Broadway singer, for Pete’s sake). They were still doing procedurals and I liked not watching Stabler a) clench his jaw and/or b) turn and stomp out of a room, c) refuse to talk to the shrink.

I never thought I’d be nostalgic for the good ol’ predictable Stabler.

The show and I both miss the heck out of Munch and Cragen, too.

The two-parter with Olivia being kidnapped set the tone for the nonsense to follow.

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That reminds of the 1980s television series Hunter. The female lead, Stephanie Kramer quit the show because the producers wanted her to get raped a SECOND time to increase ratings. It was also an NBC program.

Having seen the entirety of both the original series and L&O: Criminal Intent, SVU always comes across as the poor bastard stepchild of the entire franchise. Yet oddly, it was the only one that NBC wanted to SAVE when it came time to make a choice.

Go figure.