Where, oh where, to begin?Mary-Stuart Masterson (whose agent must have demanded that she be on screen 94.5% of the show, to the show's great detriment) has morphed into this Louise Fletcher-esque crazed c-movie actress -- she's so twitchy and heavyhanded that you expect her to pull out a carving knife and slash all of the detectives to death.Amanda Plummer delivers such an embarrassing performance that you cannot tear your eyes away from the screen. It's as if the director told her (and the script only makes it worse) "okay Amanda, take Betty Buckley and Liza Minnelli, combine them both together with a pound of crack, and now multiply x 5000 percent -- that's the level I need you at!"Meloni has clearly checked out, having to deliver lines such as "this is blood!" (pointng, yes, to blood) when he isn't being forced to be bizarrely smarmy with Masterson.Ice-T and Berger are so superfluous that they scarcely exist, except to periodically appear from the wings a la Snidely Whiplash and deliver one expository line and vanish.
The supporting actors are all so over the top that the episode is a capital C Camp melodrama, but then this episode is totally the eat or be eaten school of acting and directing there's no other choice. Amazingly, Hargitay manages to remain as gorgeous and as balanced as ever. But you KNOW that she and Meloni must have been having some meetings in their trailers saying to each other "okay, if this show continues to blow downhill like this, then we're either out of here or they quintuple our salaries"I am still agog, but am somewhat terrified to move forward with this series after this