Stabler shot svu season 22 episode 14

Law & Order: SVU showrunner Warren Leight knows we’ve all been through a lot recently, and that’s why he and the NBC series’ writing staff are going to take pity on us in Season 22’s final hour.

“It has been such a horrible year for so many people,” Leight tells TVLine. “We chose to end on a more hopeful note, rather than having somebody held hostage.” (And if you’re wondering whether Det. Stabler may be involved in that hopeful note… make sure to read to the end of this post.)

Lest you fear the long-running procedural is going soft, however, the two episodes preceding the June 3 season-ender — starting with tonight’s installment at 9/8c — deal with the return of a psychopath fans will remember and a complicated domestic violence case, respectively.  But before we hear what the executive producer has to say about those eps, we had to check in with him about a certain Benson/Stabler scene that was teased in promos for the most recent SVU/Organized Crime crossover… but missing from the actual episodes.

DINER? I BARELY KNOW ‘ER! | Promos for the crossover (and a TVLine video with Organized Crime stars Chris Meloni and Dylan McDermott) prominently featured shots of Mariska Hargitay’s Olivia Benson and Meloni’s Elliot Stabler meeting up at a diner — perhaps to talk about all of the feelings stirred up by Stabler’s wife’s death and its aftermath. But when the episodes aired, that scene was missing. What gives?

The reason behind the cut, Leight says, is “so mundane:” Essentially, scheduling delays on Organized Crime meant that SVU and its spinoff became out of sync. “So we had written our diner scene two episodes before [OC] shot the episode that preceded our diner-scene episode.” And thanks to changes along the writing-and-editing process, “the diner scene was filled with references to things that hadn’t happened.” So instead, a similar exchange between Liv and El at the morgue, simply because the diner scene “didn’t make sense once we’d seen the episode that preceded it.”

QUICK TO ASSUME | The May 27 episode centers on a domestic abuse storyline that flips expectations, with the couple in question played by Michael Gladis (Mad Men) and Anna Wood (The Code). “We’ve done a number of domestic violence storylines. People have a hard time wrapping their head around what happens,” Leight says. “Not all domestic violence works along the gender lines you might think it does.” For instance, “When you meet a couple like this, you might be more worried about the woman than the man,” he continues. “And in this particular case, you would be wrong.”

The last time Olivia Benson and Elliot Stabler spent more than a few minutes together, he blurted out an inopportune declaration of love and then bolted from the room, and she stopped taking his calls. So of course, we were more than a little intrigued to see how things would go when they had to be in each other’s company for Wednesday’s two-hour Law & Order: SVU and Law & Order: Organized Crime crossover. (And make sure to read a recap of the OC episode here.)

INTERVENTION AFTERMATH | The case of the week involves high-end call girls who get their marks drunk and drugged before they rob them of cash and credit cards. After one guy — a billionaire who happens to have been involved with Kat’s cousin, Lily — dies after his night with the ladies, SVU is called in to investigate. Medical examiner Melinda Warner (love to see her!) theorizes that there’s a bad batch of drugs going around.

“Yes, yes,” you’re saying, “but when is Stabler going to show up?” In the parking garage outside the ME’s office, as it turns out. At the start of the hour, we saw that Olivia screened his calls for all of a nanosecond before calling him back, but he didn’t pick up. Now, he’s asking her to reach out to her connections within the department to find out about the investigation into Kathy’s death, because he’s (rightfully) being blocked from getting too involved. “I can’t,” she says. “You have no idea how many people are telling me to stay away from this, to stay away from you.” He’s shocked, SHOCKED at that. But she’s got something else on her mind.

“Elliot, did you hear anything that we said to you the other night?” she asks softly, but he quickly replies that he doesn’t want to talk about the intervention. She begs him to slow down, eat something and get some rest. “You have to do this for yourself. For your kids,” she says. Unsaid: “FOR MEEEEEEEEE.”

It seems like he’s going to walk away, but then he tells her that he hears her. “We good?,” he asks. “I hope so,” she says.

Melinda points out that the mix of drugs in Simon’s body wasn’t exactly the same as the recent victims. The officer who investigated Simon’s death tells Liv that he still had all his cash, credit cards and his watch — unlike the recent victims. Still, she is determined to prove the connection.

And when another guy gets rolled and leads them to one of the women, Liv & Co. find a selfie on the woman’s tablet that proves Simon and one of his high school friends were with her the night he died. Simon reached out to the friend, looking for a job, and they wound up doing drugs together. “I couldn’t help Simon, so I thought I could change his mood, show him a good time,” the guy says. Long, sad story short: The guy called the blonde woman, whom he knew from a strip club, and she and some friends brought some potent new drugs with them to party. The next morning, the women were gone and Simon was dead. “So you just left him there, alone?” Liv wonders. The guy stammers that he called 911, and adds the incredibly unhelpful caveat that “Simon died happy. He had one last good time.”

Eventually, Kat and Fin get Felix in the interrogation room and he agrees to wear a wire — but it’s too late. His connection is suspicious about why the police just let him go… and then he is shot while Liv and Stabler sit in a stakeout car — which is also hit by gunfire — just a few feet away.

Now it’s your turn. What did you think of the episode? Sound off in the comments!