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

There are a number of "big" experiments in the world and Law & Order has dealt with most of them, so it's not such a great surprise to see Milgram's experiment get an episode. Milgram is the guy who effectively made the Nazis feel good about themselves. By essentially convincing people to electrocute their friends, he showed that, more often than not, people will happily choose to follow orders rather than think for themselves. In SVU, the effect is slightly different -a fast food manager strips and locks away one of his employees. Dubious? More than possible, sadly.

Enter Robin Williams playing a disgruntled man who wants people to buck the system by showing how they are slaves to it. There are a lot of "lazy" actors in the word. Al Pacino, Robert De Niro and Jack Nicholson are all content, these days, to play themselves. Every so often they will put the effort in, but most of the time they are just phoning in their performance. Williams is another such actor, though to be fair he usually injects some pathos into his performance, although maybe that's still just Williams. But when these actors Williams included) actually act, it's mesmerising. Happily, if playing a villain, Williams usually shows his true (exceptionally talented) colours. As a result in this episode, Williams earns his "Special Guest Star" credit.

Over the past few years, and even more so after the first episode of this season, poor old Munch has been sidelined, leaving other cast members to do the main episode work. The great they about this episode is that it not only gives Munch the chance to do something, it gives him the chance to go back to the paranoid roots of his character, actually sympathising with the William's character. It's always great when the defectives have different points of view, but more So when if comes out of the character.

So, the episode itself. Unfortunately it tends to fizzle just a little. It's one of those episodes when the detectives feel that, despite having a clear cut offender, they need to go after the person who convinced the suspect to do what he did. This, ever so slightly, smacks (to me anyway) of not accepting responsibility for your actions. When it eventually does go to trial Novak, quite naturally, loses. Despite a somewhat tense ending, the Williams character is a little odd. At times he is portrayed as a manipulator, relatively harmless except to those who are easily lead. Then, at the end, he becomes a cunning threat, disappearing to potentially be Stabler's Nicole Wallace. obviously Williams still gets the chance to do his range of silly voices (though how he fools anyone is a little beyond me), but that doesn't necessarily make a great episode.

There's a lot of great elements to this episode - Williams, the regulars, the concept, but for some reason the whole is not as great as the sum of it's parts. A shame really.

"B-"