Law & Order: Special Victims Unit - Fight (Season 9)

After the brilliance that was last week's episode of Law & Order, this week's goes back to being the somewhat pedestrian and sensationalist. One thing to notice about this season is that, with the introduction of Adam Beech's Chester Lake character, there seems to be bit more of a balance in the detectives work, with Stabler and Benson finally taking the back seat to Tutuola and his partner - this season, of course, being Lake.

Lake gets to take center stage as he two black boys are arrested for the murder and rape of a young woman in a park. Yes, sure it was trailed by Ten as being all about X-treme Wrestling and the possiblity of a wrestler being the rapist, but lo and behold they ruled him out before the first ad break. Appealing to the sensationalism of the world the victim had her lips torn off - so not only do we hear about it, but we briefly get to see it, and it looks pretty bloody awful (as in disgusting, not poorly created). Once Lake and Tutuola alibi the wrestler we go to two black kids who are having problems trying to fit into the world of the rich white. It's a theme that's not underused in L&O:SVU, and there's a certain predictability about it, particularly when the detectives don't think that the boys actually committed the rape.

Of course they didn't, and the confession by one of them is simply to cover for his brother who he thinks did it, but didn't. Thankfully they don't become too cliched as it transpires that the real killer was the black leader of a gang (although perhaps that is cliched...it's so hard to tell these days). In the most surprising moment of the show, however, the killer jumps off a roof into a trash truck and gets compressed. Just a little gross...

An enjoyable romp the episode perhaps fails to deliver because the Tutuola/Lake combination is still not as secure as we'd like it to be (this episode was obviously one of the earlier ones to be filmed, particularly as Cragen makes a bizarre comment to Lake suggesting he hasn't been there for very long). Or maybe we're just so used to Stabler and Benson doing the investigating it seems wrong to us.

"B-"