Tonight I finally got around to watching last week’s LAW AND ORDER: SPECIAL VICTIMS UNIT. There’s a big debate about whether or not seeing someone shoot someone makes you more comfortable shooting someone yourself. At the end of the episode, a lawyer asks the A.D.A. if she really believes that theory. The A.D.A. makes a speech about how her daddy taught her how to shoot guns and she hasn’t shot anyone yet… then again, she says, she’s never seen anyone gunned down in front of her. But regular viewers of the show know that isn’t true. Three or four episodes back, the A.D.A. saw an entire courtroom full of people gunned down in front of her — a judge, a witness, two guards, two cops and two gunmen. In fact, NBC re-ran that episode tonight.
I can’t believe the producers would have made such a huge continuity gaff. All I can figure is that that last week’s episode was shot before the other one and, for whatever reason, and was aired out of production order. If that was the case, I don’t understand why the producers didn’t cut the speech or loop a new line. That’s just sloppy.
She must have blacked it out–her mind just hasn’t been able to deal with it yet. Yeah. I’m sure that’s it.
I don’t think the Wolf folks have every been interested in character arcs or continuity.
I don’t know if there’s been a change in the production staff, or in the writing staff, or what, but SVU seems to have changed – not for the better – over the past season or two. I still like the characters, but I’d much rather watch the reruns than the new episodes. Maybe they’re just getting sloppy, in general.
Was the debate about seeing a family member shot in front of you? Or just any random person? I saw the Tuesday episode, but that’s already slipped my weary mind …
Ah, but that was the ADA’s evil twin. The one with amnesia.
Big Boo-Boo!
I’d rather watch bad continuity than hear looped dialogue.
Continuity problems like this one ruined ALIAS for me–from Season 3 to now, there have been so many mistakes and more mistakes made trying to correct the mistakes that it made trying to follow the story impossible and thus I stopped watching and thus excitedly await the impending cancellation of my once-favorite show.
I may be wrong, but I think the info screen on my TV stated that this episode of SVU was from Sept., which would have made it a rerun – possibly answering the continuity question.
(And it’s possible that it didn’t play in Sept. It might have been bumped for some reason and shown out of sequence.)
SHE didn’t see it. It was her alter-ego. The character Diane played the first time she was on the show, the auto-erotic-asphixiater.
There have been much more serious continuity errors on the other shows, but this the first biggie to hit SVU. I agree with the others, what was once the crown of the Law & Order franchise is getting dull and askew.
Despite the continuity error, I think the current season of SVU has been one of their best.
Maybe she lied just to save face in the argument?
Nowhere near as bad as a huge goof on THE X FILES, wherein (and this is from memory, so do NOT flame me if I get the seasons wrong), it was set up that Mulder’s father and the infamous Cigarette Smoking Man worked together in the intelligence community to cover up an alien invasion in the 40’s, then a couple of seasons later it was shown that no, the two men met for the first time in the military in 1961/62.
All kinds of fan based explanations shot across the Net, but what bothered me was the prodcuers stance: “We’re the highest rated show on the air right now, what are you gonna do, stop watching?”
There’s also the the infamous error of James T. Kirk’s headstone reading James R. Kirk. Roddenberry’s explanation that Gary Mitchell had become like unto a god but was still human, hence “he made a mistake” never sat right. Mitchell and Kirk were supposed to be “best friends since the Academy”. Uh-huh. Don’t know your best friends middle name, eh?
Such lapses happen. With everything that goes on and needs to happen for an episode to make it on the air, sometimes I have to marvel that ANY of it works.