Josh Hopkins portrays a law enforcement officer who is investigating the murder of a fellow officer who was killed via a car bomb by a ruthless group of mobsters. Guess what happened to him midway through the Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episode "Loss" just six years later?note And even worse, he played a law enforcement agent there too, only this time it was for the FBI
The plot of "Blondes Have More Fun", which has a jealous, social-climbing gay man kill numerous successful gay men to gain fame and fortune and who commits suicide once he's cornered by the police is eerily similar to the crimes, disputed motivation, and ultimate fate of serial killer Andrew Cunanan.
Fans of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit will find it to be a shock that Ice-T, who plays the heroic badass Detective Odafin "Fin" Tutuola, playing such a ruthless killer here. What's more, the shows are set in the same continuity, so Danny Up, the aforementioned killer and a notorious drug kingpin to boot was racking up a body count while Tutuola was still a narcotics detective busting up drug rings, pre-SVU. One wonders how their paths never crossed.
In between his stint as Danny Up and his joining SVU as Tutuola, Ice T also portrayed a pimp in Exiled: A Law and Order Movie.
Narm: In the first season finale, any scene that featured Sandy Gill was accompanied by a weird, airy-sounding, light instrumental music that almost sounded out of place with the rest of the show.
Replacement Scrappy: Malcolm Barker, Nell Dellaney and Alec Stone in season 4. Not even the former being portrayed by Thomas Mikal Ford (of Martin fame) could cause fans of the well-liked Lt. Cooper to warm up to him. The other two were generic detectives that were brought in to still try to bring in a White demographic who replaced the beloved late Det. Eddie Torres and the widely despised Det. McNamara (see below).
Regina King portrays a grief-stricken mother in the season one episode "Tasha".
Before gracing primetime as Detective Odafin Tutuola, rapper and actor Ice-T got his first start working with Dick Wolf as arc-villain Danny Cort on this series. He even credits Wolf casting him as Cort for ultimately leading to his current success.
The deaths of Danny Cort's younger brother and Sandy Gill, especially with J.C.'s reaction to both deaths. Whereas he felt incredibly guilty and remorseful in having to shoot the young man in self-defense (and him staying with him before he died and his pleas of "Don't let me die, man" not helping matters), he was sitting only inches away from her dead fiancee's body as he cried for the investigators not to touch her or to perform an autopsy, saying how he didn't want them to "cut up his baby" (as Sandy was two months pregnant at the time.) Also, their accompanying funerals with the young man's and Danny's grief-stricken mother and Sandy's students attended.
The episode where the young girl is assaulted and raped while walking to school. She was left so traumatized by the event that she was mute-struck and wasn't able to begin to heal until the assailant's other victim, now a college student, was able to speak with her. Also during the episode, during a protest against the man, someone attempted to do a drive-by, but hits the man's mother instead, killing her.
And at the episode's conclusion, as the cops go to arrest the guy, he goes to the roof. After several minutes of blasting himself for his sick behavior—"I was out for five minutes and I did it again!"—and being indirectly responsible for his mother's murder, he leaps to his death.
They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Season four: Torres was dead, Lt. Cooper and the hangout Natalie's were gone (and therefore so was all of the musical guests) and a crop of new characters that fans didn't like were the ultimate death knell to the show.
The Un-Twist: An episode in which a young girl was raped had the prime suspect being a recently paroled sex offender. The man repeatedly insisted that he was innocent, angrily reminding the detectives that he had served his time and was now trying to get his life back together and lamenting the fact that he couldn't because of what he'd done, seemed genuinely sickened by his previous actions, and was devastated when his mother was killed in a vigilante attack directed at him. At the episode's end, the little girl, who until now had been rendered catatonic by the trauma, was shown pictures of potential suspects and asked if she could identify her assailant. The next scene showed the cops breaking down the door of none other than the convicted rapist who had been declaring his innocence.
The Woobie: Moreno. She gets pregnant as a teen, is forced to give up the child by her overbearing mother, straining their relationship as a result, is shot and nearly dies Taking the Bullet for Torres, reunites with her daughter years later, only for her to be kidnapped and eventually lose a custody battle for her to the girl's adoptive Aunt, falls for and marries Torres and then unceremoniously loses him via a car bomb only a day later.
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