LAW & ORDER: SPECIAL VICTIMS UNIT Vet Neal Baer Looks Back on Season 12: ‘Pop,’ ‘Possessed,’ ‘Mask,’ ‘Dirty,’ ‘Flight,’ ‘Spectacle,’ and ‘Pursuit’

September 18, 2024 by Marisa Roffman

Credit: NBC

[To read more of the LAW & ORDER: SPECIAL VICTIMS UNIT retrospective with former showrunner Neal Baer, check out part 1 and part 2.]

After Benson (Mariska Hargitay) lost Calvin (Charlie Tahan), things didn’t exactly get easier for the detectives (or lawyers) in the next arc of LAW & ORDER: SPECIAL VICTIMS UNIT season 12.

Here, former SVU showrunner Neal Baer—who recently released a book, THE PROMISE AND PERIL OF CRISPR, and is teaching Master of Science in Media, Medicine, and Health at the Harvard Medical School graduate program—breaks down the next batch of episodes, as the team faces a gutting loss, a case introduces a new recurring figure to the team, and more. (And check back tomorrow for the final episodes of season 12.)

“Pop.” (Photo credit: NBC.)

“Pop” (Written by: Jonathan Greene; Directed by: Norberto Barba): An underage fight ring (coordinated by the adults in the young men’s lives) led Stabler (Christopher Meloni) and Fin (Ice T) to the troubled Roberts family. After realizing that Hank (Adam Senn) was abusing his teen stepson, Nicky (Al Calderon) Stabler tried to protect the young man…though Hank’s pregnant wife/Nicky’s mother, Sandra (Drea de Matteo), initially tried to tell IAB that Stabler had attacked Hank and her son.

But when Hank wound up dead, both Nicky and Sandra tried to take responsibility for it. With forensic evidence making it unclear who was telling the truth, Hardwicke and Stabler acknowledged they’d be freed—but they wanted to know who actually did it. Again, both mother and son took responsibility for the shooting.

Through the years, many episodes left viewers reeling, either from twists or tragic outcomes. But a few installments intentionally left them in the dark about what exactly went down or how things were resolved.

Most notable was season 6’s “Doubt,” where the episode ended right when a “he said/she said” trial verdict was about to be announced. But it’s another season 6 episode, “Identity,” where the cops can’t prove which identical twin murdered the doctor who abused them, that Baer cites as being more similar to the end of “Pop.”

“It’s like a homage,” he acknowledges. And like that episode, “they’re going to get off because neither is going to confess and they’re not going to point the finger at the other. But that was the story [the cops and lawyers] get.”

“Possessed.” (Photo credit: NBC.)

“Possessed” (Written by: Brian Fagan; Directed by: Constantine Makris): “We weren’t as much ‘ripped from the headlines’ as the mothership,” Baer acknowledges. “We would be sometimes. We always wanted to shake it up, because, unlike LAW & ORDER, which could cover everything, we had limits.”

One instance of shaking things up was the haunting episode “Possessed,” where Larissa (Taryn Manning), a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, was targeted and assaulted in her own home—and then assaulted again while at the hospital.

“[Twisting the format is] always about what does the story call out to?” Baer recalls. “If you watch the shows [in Baer’s tenure, from seasons 2] till 12, you’ll see the evolution. When I came on the show, it was [more formulaic]; a whole scene [then] the whole scene. And then it was, ‘Okay, how do you deal with that?’”

One of Baer’s strategies to keep things feeling fresh was to utilize scenes being intercut with each other. “The audience accepts it, because then it cuts all this [talking], and it makes the pace much faster,” he says, noting you could put multiple interviews with suspects or witnesses in the same sequence to change the pace of storytelling. “It’s like always pushing, pushing, pushing the envelope, always in the service of the episode.”

The writer also points to how technology changed over the years as a help for storytelling, too. “I always say that by season 12, technology kept the show going, too,” Baer says. “When I came on, they had blackboards—blackboards and dry-erase boards [moved to] computerized things. We had no GPS, [then] GPS. We had no cell phones that you can track, [then] cell phones. We had no iPads, [then] iPads at the crime scene. If I was doing the show now, there’s all kinds of new stuff I would use.”

“Mask.” (Photo credit: NBC.)

“Mask” (Written by: Speed Weed; Directed by: Donna Deitch): “You have an Oscar-winning actor, a star like Jeremy Irons, who says ‘Yes, I want to do this,’ you have to give him some rich material,” Baer recalls.

Irons kicked off his arc on the series entangled in a case: Dr. Cap Jackson (Irons) met the detectives after his daughter and her girlfriend were brutally attacked. The doctor realized his daughter might have been the true target—and the suspect pool might be the group of patients he was treating.

Cap, however, was also estranged from his daughter. The detectives suspected he might have raped her when she was young, but Cap admitted he wasn’t sure—he was a sex addict and addicted to alcohol back then, but he couldn’t remember what happened the night their relationship deteriorated.

“You want Jeremy Irons for this kind of brooding [role],” Baer says. “You’re not sure—did he do it? Did he not do it?”

Stabler went to the rehab facility where Cap was treating patients with sexual issues while Cap was busy with his daughter (“I love that Chris goes in [to the group] undercover,” Baer says), but when Cap caught him, Stabler was able to convince the doctor it was necessary he remained. They were able to find the attacker—and they were also able to get closure for Cap, who learned he didn’t attack his daughter: He slept with her friend. But his daughter was in love with her friend and blamed her father for the encounter.

Clearing Cap’s name also allowed the character to come back later in the season: “We had planned to do two shows with him.” Baer also has fond memories of watching Irons work on- and off-screen, “I just so remember on the set he would be smoking a cigarette and doing crossword puzzles.”

“Dirty.” (Photo credit: NBC.)

“Dirty” (Written by: Judith McCreary; Directed by: Helen Shaver): Though cops were frequently painted as heroic figures on the show, the series also showcased plenty of corrupted and harmful members of law enforcement.

“I don’t think, given the show, there were any dos or don’ts,” Baer says of any pushback to portraying cops in a negative light. “[Series creator Dick Wolf] never said, ‘Don’t do an episode.’”

“The dirty cop, that’s just the facts,” he continues. “We did IAB a lot…[Robert John Burke’s Tucker] was fun to work with. And Dann [Florek, who played Cragen] was so good in all the shows when Stabler misbehaves; he was always great with them. But they’re very good friends in real life, so that’s why they play so well.”

What made “Dirty” a bit rare was the dirty cop in question was a woman, Sunny (Shohreh Aghdashloo), who was defiant about her actions and warned Benson she might end up that way in a decade, too.

Though thankfully Sunny’s prediction about Benson hasn’t come true, with other cops, and in the real world, Baer points out, “violence perpetrated by cops…it’s in the zeitgeist, often.”

“Flight.” (Photo credit: Screengrab/NBC.)

“Flight” (Written by: Dawn DeNoon & Christine M. Torres; Directed by: Alex Chapple): Years before the story made front-page news, the series tackled the Jeffrey Epstein allegations.

“There’s so many episodes that are sparked by real things,” Baer acknowledges. “In 2011, [Epstein] wasn’t talked about very much.”

“That’s an amazing episode because of the research,” he says. “Chris Torres was the real deal. She was the SVU attorney in New York. And so she came on the show and we did research. There wasn’t a lot, but there was talk [at the time]. And he has a partner—it was all there.”

Despite the tricky nature of this real-life influence, “it wasn’t hard to get it approved,” Baer recalls. “We did [high-profile cases like] the Michael Jackson one with the late Cindy Williams [back in season 5].”

(The series would go on to touch on the Epstein allegations/case in season 21, too.)

“Spectacle.” (Photo credit: Screencap/NBC.)

“Spectacle” (Written by: Chris Brancato; Directed by: Peter Leto): An apparent assault was broadcast on a college’s intranet—but it was really a ploy by a desperate young man who wanted to get attention from the cops in the hopes they would help find his long-missing sibling.

The hour, notably, was directed by Peter Leto, who still stands as one of the longest-running directors on the show. (Leto helmed 41 episodes between 2005 and 2012; only Jean de Segonzac—who has been directing the series since the pilot—and David Platt have more.)

Being able to hand an episode to Leto was “utter relief,” Baer recalls. “Utter relief, because we had some directors who didn’t know [how to direct this show].”

“The show was a big show,” he says, also crediting longtime director/executive producer Ted Kotcheff for helping to set the tone. “David Platt and Peter would alternate prepping, and then they would each do like five episodes. So it’s like, ‘Phew, I don’t have to worry about those shows.’ But they would prep the [other] directors so that the directors understood as much as possible what we did. We didn’t go through walls and do CSI stuff and all that.”

Baer kept working with Leto after both men left SVU, too: The duo reunited on the Baer-run UNDER THE DOME and DESIGNATED SURVIVOR.

“Pursuit.” (Photo credit: Screengrab/NBC.)

“Pursuit” (Written by: Judith McCreary; Directed by: Jonathan Kaplan): The series called on Hargitay’s “very close” friend Debra Messing to portray an ambitious reporter who was trying to get answers about her sister’s abduction. But it was the returning ADA Sonya Paxton (Christine Lahti)—who was close with Messing’s Alicia—who paid the ultimate price in the hour as they tried to find answers.

“I remember calling Christine and saying, ‘We’re going to do something that I bet you’ve never done before,’” Baer recalls. “She goes, ‘Oh my God, you’re going to kill me.’”

The decision to kill off Sonya was story-dictated. “I just thought we had run the course, and Christine works all the time,” Baer says. “It’s always an effort to find the space and make it all work [with recurring guest stars].”

“It was going to be a big show, and I thought it was going to be unexpected in the story,” he continues. “It wasn’t planned all along, like, ‘Oh, we’re gonna kill her’…I thought it’s gonna be shocking, but real. And I think we were starting to move into that era, slowly, of the unexpected star getting murdered, or the lead getting murdered. Like when I killed off [a notable regular] in DESIGNATED SURVIVOR.”

Still, it wasn’t an easy decision given how dynamic the character was. “We played Sonya as tough as Stabler—like Stabler met his match,” Baer says. “And yet she had a vulnerability that made Olivia [draw parallels to her mother, Serena].”

The heavily charged emotions of that loss also showcased Stabler and Benson at one of their most vulnerable places of the series thus far.

The duo, whose relationship was self-admittedly complicated at that point, allowed themselves a rare moment of physical comfort in the hour, sharing an emotional hug after being reunited in the aftermath of Sonya’s death. Baer notes “a lot of things” went into balancing that relationship’s complexity, especially in a season where Stabler and his wife were relatively drama-free.

“If you remember the Lou Diamond [Phillips] episode [“Fault”], [Stabler] has to make that choice, and that takes him down a road,” Baer points out. (In that hour, Benson’s throat was sliced by Phillips’ Gitano and Stabler opted to go to try and save her life—thinking she was more injured than she was—rather than try to grab the young boy Gitano was holding; Gitano killed the boy and Stabler spiraled.) “And even with ‘Ripped,’ we were like, ‘Let’s understand the anger.’ And so we talked about the father, and it occurred to me, even when doing that, that someday we will have to meet his mother to understand this.”

“It was trying to move [Benson and Stabler] forward in a way, too,” he continues of the “Pursuit” hug. “We know he loves her in some way…These are intense moments, making them make choices.”

Of course, it wasn’t all serious doom and gloom: The episode featured Stabler offering to come home early from a work trip, pre-Sonya’s death, to help watch Benson’s back; she insisted she was fine, and that Fin would cover her. Stabler joked Fin might have her back, but he wasn’t him. Fin got the last laugh, though, by saying he was actually better at this protection gig: He actually watched her back and not her backside.

“I think you can put anything in Ice T’s mouth, inappropriate or whatever, and that will be okay,” Baer says with a laugh.

LAW & ORDER: SPECIAL VICTIMS UNIT, Season Premiere, Thursday, October 3, 9/8c, NBC

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LAW & ORDER: SPECIAL VICTIMS UNIT Vet Neal Baer Looks Back on Season 12: ‘Pop,’ ‘Possessed,’ ‘Mask,’ ‘Dirty,’ ‘Flight,’ ‘Spectacle,’ and ‘Pursuit’

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