Tonight on NBC Law & Order SVU returns with an all-new Wednesday, May 23, 2018, episode and we have your Law & Order SVU recap below. On tonight’s Law & Order SVU season 19 episode 23 & 24 finale called “Remember Me – Remember Me Too,” as per the NBC synopsis, “In the Season 19 finale, a young woman takes a man hostage at gunpoint; and Benson makes a dangerous attempt to defuse the situation. Meanwhile, the SVU discovers the shocking motive behind the abduction. In the second half: Benson’s suspicions about a kidnapping victim uncovers a dangerous criminal network prepared to silence anyone who gets in their way.”
Tonight’s Law & Order SVU season 19 episode 23 & 24 finale looks like it is going to be great and you won’t want to miss it. So make sure to bookmark this spot and come back from 9 PM – 10 PM ET for our Law & Order SVU recap. While you wait for the recap make sure to check out all our Law & Order SVU recaps, spoilers, news & more!
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Noah still mentioned his Grandma Sheila. The two had grown close before the woman revealed she was crazy and kidnapped him. Noah, however, hadn’t suspected that something was off with his grandmother and so he continued to ask after her until Benson realized he needed closure. He was a little boy and still needed to see his grandma, so Benson took him to see Sheila at the “hospital”. It had been a convenient lie at first and it didn’t become a problem until Noah started to ask when was Grandma Sheila getting out of the hospital. Benson hadn’t known what to say and had tried on her own to explain that his grandma wasn’t sick like how other people were sick. She explained that Sheila’s sickness had something to do with how she thinks.
Noah hadn’t understood either and had asked when she was going to get better, but Benson didn’t have an answer for him or at least she didn’t have an answer for him right then. She didn’t get a lot of nights off and had just wanted to read Noah the story Grandma Sheila suggested. Benson had did her best to answer as many of Noah’s questions and had spent the rest of the night fretting only to wake up to a nightmare of a situation. Benson and the others got called in by Carisi. Carisi had been working the night shift and was about to leave for the day when a man approached him with a video of what looked like the hostage situation. The man had found a cell phone at a nightclub and had turned it on to find out who the owner was so that he could return it only the cell opened to that.
The video was live footage being streamed from the real owner’s apartment. It showed a man tied to a chair and a woman standing over him with a gun. Carisi called in everyone and they tried to figure out what was going on at first because the woman didn’t seem intent on robbing anyone or holding her prisoner for ransom. She was instead ranting at the man about the night they met five years ago. She said she had been eighteen then and that she never forgot his face, his voice, or even his smell. He still smelled the same according to her. She said the only thing that changed about him had been his voice. His voice was sweeter now and so she explained that she changed as well. According to her, she didn’t look the same because she lost the hope in her eyes.
The woman had also shown this man her scars. She said he cut her across the stomach after he decided he shouldn’t cut her face because he hadn’t wanted to spoil her beauty. It had been clear that something did happen to this woman and that she believed this man had been the cause of her suffering yet the police had looked into this man. His name was Miguel Lopez and according to everyone, he meets he’s a good guy. He helped out his neighbors and had friends. Miguel just didn’t seem like the monster this woman was describing and the police hadn’t been able to find them. They had gone to Miguel’s apartment and found out he hadn’t come home. He had actually taken this woman to another plan that he was perhaps borrowing.
The detectives asked his friends if there was any place where Miguel would go if he wanted to impress a woman and they got nowhere even as the woman was running out of patience. She had wanted Miguel to confess to what he did to her and he refused to. He said he had been in Portland five years ago working as a web developer and that he never met her until that night. Miguel kept claiming he was innocent and the woman wouldn’t believe him. She said he was lying and that he took away her future. She said she would never get married or have children of her own because of what he did to her. And so she eventually got to a point where she said nothing would change if she killed him.
The woman believed she unfixable and that’s why she kept saying she had no hope or future. She later went out on the balcony and a gunshot could be heard through the video feed, so everyone thought she had killed herself until she eventually came back. She had thought of killing herself and hadn’t gone through with it. The noise that everyone heard had been from a starting pistol being used in Central Park and so that told the detectives what area to look in. They limited the sound of the gun to ten blocks and split up to go every penthouse in all the buildings. They were working their way through the buildings when something happened in the apartment. The woman was about to untie Miguel when the apartment owner came home.
Miguel yelled at Jorge to make a run for it while he could and Jorge either hadn’t heard him in time or hadn’t truly grasped what was going on when walked in to see Miguel tied in the chair. The apartment owner had then asked what was going on and hadn’t gotten nearly bludgeoned to death for his troubles, so the woman turned around to see Miguel staring at the camera in the corner. She followed where his eyes were going and had then taken apart the camera. The police were operating blind after that and had gone back to searching the buildings. Benson had gone with a patrolman to one building and as luck would have it the young officer went rushing into the problem.
He went in when he saw the door ajar and had gotten taken, prisoner. The woman then threatened to shoot him if Benson didn’t hand over her gun and so the lieutenant played ball. Benson did everything the woman and had even agreed to be a witness to Miguel’s “trial”. Miguel was told to confess and he wouldn’t because he said he would never rape a woman. Miguel said he had two sisters as if that was an explanation and so Benson asked a woman, who finally said her name was Lourdes, why she thought Miguel had raped her. Lourdes said he came to her house and offered to bring her to New York where she could get hired as a nanny. She said he then shoved her in a cooler in his truck to get her across the border and raped her not long after that in Texas.
Benson asked Lourdes if she was sure Miguel was that man and Lourdes said she would never forget. She recognized everything about him and so Benson told her that she believed her. Benson said the same thing happened to her because she never forgot the man that hurt her. Benson was adamant when said she believed Lourdes and so everyone believed her. Miguel had been offended and had asked why she was believing a crazy lady over him though Lourdes felt vindication. She told Benson the rest of the story. Lourdes came to the country with two other women and they tried to run away. Lourdes said Miguel tracked them down and had made her pick between her friends on who should die.
Lourdes claimed that Miguel said someone had to die as a lesson to the others. Only she hadn’t been able to choose between her friends and so she said Miguel killed Estella, so Lourdes had wanted to kill Miguel right then and Benson stopped her. Benson had already called for help by telling her team to pick up a daughter she didn’t have from school and so she got Lourdes to hand over a gun just moments before the police came. They arrested Lourdes and Benson made sure they also arrested Miguel. Miguel was being accused of rape, torture, and human trafficking. Benson, it seems hadn’t been lying when she said she believed Lourdes and she was surer than ever once she learned the video feed was being transmitted through the dark web.
Benson suspected the cartels had been behind what happened to Lourdes and her friends. She said these young women were being sold into domestic slavery and so she asked her team to investigate Miguel. Miguel had tried to downplay his relationship with Jorge Diaz (the man that owned the apartment) and had even claimed that he hadn’t known about the dark web connection because Jorge had set it up because his apartment kept being robbed. The detectives would like to have asked Miguel several more questions however Miguel’s lawyer showed up and had kept Miguel quiet until the police were forced to let him go. They didn’t have anything on him while they did have Lourdes on murder because her victim died on the operating table
With Jorge dead, the detectives had no one to ask about the dark web connection and they had to treat Lourdes like a criminal. It didn’t matter that she never meant to harm anyone besides Miguel. Lourdes bludgeoned the victim and she wouldn’t consider a deal with Stone. Stone had believed Benson when Benson said she believed Lourdes and so he tried to help. He had even offered Lourdes protection and she denied that as well. She said it wouldn’t make any difference because she would get deported and the cartels in Mexico would then kill her. Lourdes was so sure she was going to die that she didn’t bother to fight. She left that to her lawyer who did do his best by her. Santino Rojas had placed in protective custody during her trial and he got her additional help.
Rojas entered a not guilty plea because he said she was mentally ill. She was checked by the doctor and deemed to be suffering from PTSD. The therapist didn’t believe that it affected her state or why she had accidentally killed Jorge and so Rojas planned on using Benson. Benson couldn’t find any witnesses willing to come forward about the human trafficking and still she persisted in saying Lourdes was right. She had tried to get Stone to back off some and he wouldn’t. He said there wasn’t any “real” evidence. Stone was concrete proof that the cartel brought these young women to the United States under false pretenses to the point where he pushed Benson away. She hadn’t wanted to stay around him and had left him at the bar alone. Stone had been nursing his drink when he had been approached by a man that turned out to be Jorge Diaz’s brother.
The brother wanted Lourdes returned to Mexico so that she may face his justice and he threatened to harm Stone’s sister Pamela. Pamela had been institutionalized from a very young age and so the first thing Stone did once his sister was threatened was to lockdown that hospital. He informed local police and had armed guards bumped up to protect his sister. Except Stone hadn’t changed his plan in court. He had gone after Benson as a hostile witness and had done everything possible to ensure Lourdes was tried in an American court. He was never going to send her back to Mexico and so sadly his sister was kidnapped because he made a case that Lourdes committed a crime against several Americans. And so Stone filled in Benson everyone when his sister was kidnapped and by offering Lourdes asylum they got her to agree to a plea deal.
Lourdes figured why not once she heard how Miguel became an American. Miguel came to the States as a baby and use that to become a dreamer, so it hadn’t mattered that he used a fake social security number to work or re-enter the country on his various trips to Mexico. He got away with everything that he did back then because there hadn’t been a legal recourse he could turn to and so that upset Lourdes. She told the police everything he did to her and they used that to bring Miguel back in for questioning. They questioned him about the girls and what it was like before he became a dreamer. It turns out Miguel hadn’t needed much to express his frustrations. He told them how he went to college and that no one would hire him until he found out he could make some cash driving a van over the border.
Miguel had used that situation to his advantage. He was looked down everywhere else, but in that van with those girls, he convinces himself that he was a god. Miguel said he could do whatever he wanted to them before he dumped them out a warehouse and so Stone asked about that warehouse. When they got information on where it was, they called in SWAT and they found several women being held thing including Stone’s sister Pamela. And as Pamela was the only one that was mentally ill, she didn’t truly grasp that someone had a gun pointed her and had just run over to her brother like she normally would have it.
Unfortunately, Pamela was shot by Diego Diaz and she later died in Stone’s arms though Diego did perish as well when police opened fire at him.
THE END!