ep 1 - Surrender Benson. No Barba. A really tough episode, with poor Olivia in William Lewis' hands. He had her prisoner for days, made her watch while he did horrible things, tortured her... finally takes her to a beach home where she gets even more scared when a woman comes in with her little daughter. She manages to free herself, like a true hero she's now more worried for the little girl than she was for herself. She knocks him down than tells the woman to run away because she's illegal and if found there they might take her daughter away from her. Alone with Lewis, he's the one tied up now, he keeps torturing her with words. She tells him that her old partner would know what to do with him... oh Liv, you really like that macho attitude, don't you? When will this change and you will start looking for something more suited for you? Like Barba?
Anyway, he gets to her, and she beats him badly, crying out loud. Finally the team arrives to take her away, in the sort of scene we've often seen, only this time she's the victim taken away.
ep 2 - Imprisoned lives. Liv has a hard time adjusting to life again after what Lewis did to her, but of course she'll come through. It was very touching the scene when Barba went to talk to her and she barely looked at him, she was just so angry about the situation (having found a basement where girls and a kid were kept as prisoners) and the fact that the place was already surrounded by the press, and he couldn't talk to her, and only after she went back into the car again with the child he said "welcome back"...
ep 3 - American tragedy. A serial rapist terrorizes a neighborhood; the only description is very vague, like: tall young black guy :-/ so when Jolene Castille (Cybill Shepherd) sees a black guy following her she gets scared and shoots him dead. At first it seems legit, but when it comes out that he was not the rapist, just a young boy making his way home, and that she's kind of a racist, Barba indicts her for murder. He makes a strong case, stating that he had no weapon and never did anything bad but he didn't have to, he simply needed to be there... but the defense goes on about her right to defend herself, and the jury lets her go. I like the last scene, with the squad outside, with Liv asking 'what happened?' and Barba saying 'I'm sorry, I..' and Liv 'No..' and Fin saying it's not his fault, 'it's just how it is'.
ep 4 - Internal affairs. No Barba. A Cassidy episode. He works undercover at a precinct where officers are rapists, corrupt. Cassidy finds himself in a very bad situation at the end after they find out he's undercover, and it was Tucker's fault. He revealed it to get proof that their commanding officer was corrupted as well.
ep 5 - Wonderland story. No Barba. Munch retires!!! :-( A girl that was raped once already calls Liv saying she thinks she was raped again, by someone acting as a friend :-/ disgusting guy.
ep 6 - October surprise. Lots of Barba here :-D My fav ep of the season. Barba grew up in a poor neighborhood with Alex Muñoz and Eddie Garcia. Alex is now running to become the new Mayor of New York, and he's using Eddie as a bag man to pay off women he exchanges explicit images with on the internet. He did that with a 15 year-old girl too, but send someone else to pay her off because Eddie is a good man and would not have liked that. When Eddie is arrested on attempted rape Alex goes to Rafael for help. He talks to Liv to make sure they give him the benefit of the doubt and of course Amaro acts like a jerk. He's got a point though, in the elevator scene. I loved that whole scene, specially the 'are we done?' line. Barba lets them investigate as much as they want, and he can't believe it at first but then he has to admit that Alex's conduct is not suited for a Mayor. Another complication, other than the fact that they are old friend, is Alex's wife: apparently Barba was in love with her :-/ Anyway, at the end he helps Eddie out, giving him immunity if he tells them everything, and leaves Alex's case to another prosecutor, of course. Love the ending scene, when Amaro leaves Barba and Benson alone at the bar and they talk :-) I love when they are together, because I love them both and I want them to be happy (Rafael and Olivia, that is, obviously. I love Raúl and Mariska too but she is married and I love her with Peter, so let's not confuse actors with characters. I want Rafael and Olivia together)
I loooove this episode because of all the great Barba scenes :-D
ep 7 - Dissonant voices. A sad episode about a man wrongly accused. Two girls plan for their former singing teacher to be accused of rape by their younger brothers, so he's ruined. All charges are dropped when the truth comes out but we know how these things are, and his career and his life will never be the same.
ep 8 - Military justice. So sad what happened to this poor girl. All svu cases are horrible and sad, but sometimes it's harder. This girl, an Admiral's daughter, always had a tough time at the Coast Guard base being a woman, but now she was brutally gang-raped. All scenes with her and Barba were amazing. I love when he tells her how tough the trial is gonna be, 'but he's gonna be right there, in her corner', and when he says "keep going?" I love how she nods her head in such a touching way, she appears so fragile and so strong all together. A good episode, and I really appreciated how her father supported her all the way.
ep 9 - Rapist anonymous. Rollins is attending meetings for her gambling problem, and also sleeping with her sponsor. One night a girl met at a meeting comes to her saying she was raped, but Barba won't prosecute the case. Later on the guy she accused dies, and Barba accuses her of deliberately accusing him to create a pattern of behaviour that would justify his murder. Amaro is on his side this time, and gives him vital information. Rollins is crushed when she hears at the trial that her guy also slept with Lena and that she played her. Barba and Rolling were great here (Raúl and Kelli Giddish were great here). So sorry that I did not like Lena at all, I didn't like how the actress played her, not at all. I loved every Barba scene, most of all his victorious scenes at the trial and when he went to apologize to Rolling, and was very sorry to see how Rollins reacted to this by falling again into gambling :-(
ep 10 - Psycho/therapist. It's William Lewis' trial. Loved all the Barba scenes. Raúl and Mariska were absolutely great here. It was a tough trial because Lewis represented himself so he got to interrogate Liv. It got to him when he learned how she had described her beating him as self-defence to subdue him. He was determined to have her admit that she beat him while he was defenseless. At the end he is found guilty of something, although not everything, and Liv thinks it's finally over, but we see at the end that he will escape.
ep 11 - Amaro's one-eighty. No Barba here. This was all Amaro, obviously. He helps two officers chasing down a black guy, and when they tell him the guy has a gun and he hears a shot, he shoots too killing what turns out to be a young innocent kid. They all go after him: the city, internal affairs, but Liv tries to help him.
ep 12 - Jersey Breakdown. I liked Barba's scenes, of course, but the episode in general is not one of my favourites, at all. This is the ep with young Claire who is svu's victim but gets arrested so they can't use her help, so Barba brings in the FBI, and it turns out powerful people were behind this whole thing.
ep 13 - Betrayal's climax. Same here. I appreciated Barba's scenes, but the ep was so-so. Avery gets raped by some gang members, and her boyfriend Manny is sort of part of that gang, and when he wants to help her he gets killed in prison, but the squad gets the gang leader anyway. He threatens Liv, but she refuses protection because she 'doesn't want to live like that'.
ep 14 - Wednesday's child. No Barba here. A poor child given to a couple who uses children for pornographic videos. They save him fortunately.
ep 15 - Comic perversion. I liked this episode. The beginning was rather upsetting because that comedian making rape-jokes was not funny at all and it is outrageous that he could be allowed to do that. I know Barba talked about free speech and blah blah blah, but maybe there should be limits. Jokes about rape are allowed because of free speech; would it be the same if the guy had done jokes about religious persecution? I mean, jokes suggesting that such horrors are funny, would that be free speech too? Or is it just because rape is not considered so important??
Anyway, moving on for now; we got to see Renée from Lessons Learned again, which was nice. She was almost raped because some guy had fun at this comedian's show and decided to have fun on their own. Liv insists they should prosecute this Galloway when a girl accuses him of rape. Barba accepts of course, because he can never say no to her, this is already quite clear. To me at least, if not to him or her. This was a difficult case and he would have lost but for Renée's help. Barba accuses Liv of choosing to go on with this case because of her ego "you want to show everyone there's no special treatment under Sergeant Benson's watch" and because she's had a very tough year, then he says "actually my judgement was impaired. I never should have let you convince me to take this case" . Right, so why was his judgement impaired??? Why couldn't he just say no to her?? Barson, that's why. And the way he said, at the end, "I want you to stay commanding officer" was melting!
ep 16 - Gridiron soldier. No Barba. Bad things go on with a college football team.
ep 17 - Gambler's fallacy. No Barba. This was a Rollins episode, and a tough one to watch because she was falling down badly. She was still gambling when she met Claire at a club and she ratted her out as a cop, so the manager took advantage of it blackmailing her. She was falling pretty low. Luckily for her she found and undercover cop there, Declan, who helped her giving her a second chance, and she came out ok.
ep 18 - Criminal stories. A Muslim girl is raped by a rich guy in his office. Her brother is working for him, so at first she lied saying she was raped in the park by some unknown guys. The trial is very difficult because of her lies and because a famous reporter keeps publishing articles that tend to destroy her. This journalist is played by Alec Baldwin :-) At the end Benson gets to him and he takes it all back writing a big article supporting their case. Problem is, the jury reads it so the judge is forced to call for a mistrial.
ep 19 - Downloaded child. One of my favourite episode. A terrible story, but with some great great scenes and an unbelievable, lovely happy ending. It starts when a little girl is found alone at home because her mom Jenny is in prison for shoplifting and nobody is guarding her. It turns out the baby's father is in jail, and Jenny won't let her husband alone with her daughter. Investigating, it turns out that Jenny was a victim of child rape, that her horrible mother's partner used her for pornographic videos where he did every sort of thing to her. Detectives called the child Lacey Unknown because the man called her Lacey in those videos. Liv and Rollins have to inform her of the whole thing, and it's very hard on her. She speaks about her story at a guy's hearing, and he's so touched, he feels so guilty about what happened to her that not only he gives her money in restitution, but he gives Barba a lot of names of pedophiles that shared her videos. Barba finds a millionaire in there and goes after him for the whole four millions, so that Jenny won't have to go through that torture ever again, and will be able to take care of her daughter. Good.
ep 20 - Beast's obsession. No Barba. This is all William Lewis and Olivia. He escapes, rapes and kills again, and takes a little girl hostage to lure Olivia to him. She goes, of course. He wants her to admit that she beat him and lied under oath, and she does that, then she goes to him. He has her hostage now, and his obsession goes to the extreme. He plays russian roulette with her, and at the end he shoots himself making it look like she killed him.
ep 21 - Post-mortem blues. No Barba. Why???? Anyway, Liv told the truth this time, about everything. She's now under the microscope and sort of accused of killing Lewis for a personal vendetta, and she is ready to resign but Declan saves her, lying to the grand jury, saying he ordered her to make that public confession, stating that she's a hero, convincing the jury.
ep 22 - Reasonable doubt. I liked Barba scenes, yes, but not much the story itself. A producer (played by Bradley Whitford) is accused of molesting his own little daughter. His wife is bitter because he left her for her younger sister, so it's not totally clear if he really did it or not. It would seem so when the wife's other sister confesses that he molested her too, but still it doesn't mean that he molested his own daughter. He's scumbag, that's clear anyway. At the end he escapes to France, avoiding justice. I loved the scene with the two lawyers in the judge's office, talking about it. I like judge Catano a lot, and I like this lawyer as well (Cohen, according to imdb, but I really don't remember anyone calling his name..), and I like their scenes together, and I love how Raúl says "that would be..wrong" :-) love it.
ep 23 - Thought criminal. A difficult case for Barba, because he wanted the guy put away but he also knew it was a stretch, and that maybe the other counsellor was not wrong after all. I mean, this guy never did anything criminal, but everybody is sure that he will sooner or later, he's escalating and won't resist the temptation much longer, and knowing what his fantasy is Barba and the others are scared of what he will do if let free, but the counsellor defending him (played by Nia Vardalos, always a pleasure) is not wrong in her defense: is it right to get put in jail for what's in our heads if we never actually did anything wrong??
ep 24 - Spring awakening. No Barba here. Amaro is arrested for assaulting the photographer from last episode, Munch comes to help him but at the end it's Rollins the one who saves him, although they probably have no idea. Benson finds baby Doe's mother Ellie.
