Tonight on NBC Law & Order SVU returns with an all-new Thursday, January 18, 2024 episode and we have your Law & Order SVU recap below. In tonight’s Law & Order SVU season 25 episode 1 “Tunnel Blind,” as per the NBC synopsis, “As the squad celebrates the birth of Rollins and Carisi’s child, another child goes missing in broad daylight.”
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In tonight’s Law & Order SVU episode, the detectives of Manhattan Special Victims Unit gathered together for a special ceremony. They baptized ADA Carisi’s newborn son, Nicky. Nicky was adorable. He was really good at his christening and the event helped introduced Captain Benson to Carisi’s newly single cousin.
The same cousin he told Benson was single too. The cousin tried to shoot his shot and Benson said she’d put his heart through a blender if they ever dated. She’s realized by this point that she’s not that good at relationships. And if she was going to put her heart out there again, everyone knows it’ll go to Detective Stabler.
Benson was driving home after the reception when she noticed someone. She noticed this teenager who looked a little out of it and she was the passenger while a man wearing a baseball cap was the driver. Something about seeing that girl seemed to ring her alarms.
She was going to follow it when she remembered she had her son in the car and that he wanted to go home, but she remembered that girl when she later got a call about a missing teenager. The missing teenager’s name is Maddie Flynn. Benson saw a current photo of Maddie and she instantly recognized her as the girl from earlier.
It was such a fluke that not even Benson’s own boss believed her when she told him. He told her not to tell the parents or the press just in case she was right. They wanted to hold onto the information because it didn’t make them look good. Benson only remembered it because she thought it was odd a teenage girl was a passenger in a delivery van.
The delivery van was very distinctive. It had a lot of art because it should have been selling energy drinks. It shouldn’t have been used to transport a teenage girl. Benson blames herself for what happened.
She knew she should have trusted her gut. The only reason she didn’t was because her son was in the car. He was her first priority. Benson had everyone check on the route she drove in.
She drove in from Staten Island because that’s where the baptism was held. She spotted the van leaving the city. The cops later found Maddie’s smashed up cell phone by the battery tunnel into Brooklyn. They also found the energy drink delivery van. It had been abandoned at a gas station. Maddie’s bracelet with her name on it was still inside the vehicle.
Which meant Benson was right. She really did see the girl. She saw the girl and she knew something was off, but she hadn’t intervened. The family doesn’t know about it because they were already snapping at each other. Maddie’s parents couldn’t be in the same room without snapping at each other.
They each blamed the other one for taking their eyes off of Maddie. They didn’t realize Maddie was missing until they went to the cashier to ring up their items and Maddie wasn’t with either of them.
The father was calm at first. He wanted to give the cops all the information they needed. He was cooperating with them and that couldn’t be said for the mother.
She refuses to stop yelling. She got Benson to promise to find her daughter. She now uses that promise to badger Benson. She yelled at them for being ineffectual. She yelled at them when they tried asking questions about Maddie’s friends. The family recently moved to New York from San Francisco because they thought New York would be safer.
Maddie was just starting to make friends. Her social media posts were in her age group. There were plenty of parental controls on and so it makes no sense that she was taken.
She wasn’t at risk. Or at least that’s what they thought until someone brought in a sex doll that looks exactly like her. They used a photo that was posted by her mom of Maddie’s birthday to make a sex doll. An underage teenage girl that they could do whatever they wanted to do to it. It wasn’t illegal. Her sex doll was being sold by Golden Rabbit Importers.
The guy running the place said the dolls are made in Taiwan. They’re bestsellers as it happens. They’re even sold with Maddie’s bracelet remade for all of them.
Benson turned to her old friend Former Detective Rollins for help. Rollins told her their perp was on that buyer’s list. Someone might have gotten tired with the fake one and abducted the real one to do whatever he likes with her. SVU hunted down everybody on the list. They came across one guy who said he didn’t do anything to the real girl only he does know who might have taken her.
Hal Chapin had met an enthusiast of the doll online. The other guy said he met the real person. Hal was enticed and he wanted to meet her until he got cold feet.
He didn’t think it was a good idea to meet. He tried to cancel on his friend. What his friend did after that had nothing to do with him. The cops track down the person he was messaging. It led them to a hotel. Their perp and Maddie were no longer there, but they did find Tanya in a body bag. Tanya was abducted over a year ago. Most people wrote her off as a runaway. And so finding her alive was a miracle.
The Chief wanted to do a press conference for finding Tanya and unfortunately Maddie’s mother interrupted it. She demanded to know where her daughter was. She was screaming. She wanted answers and frankly they weren’t even sure if Maddie was still in the country.
THE END!
