Law & Order: SVU season 19 episode 23 review: The saga of Lourdes and Miguel
Early on in the episode, viewers were introduced to two characters in Lourdes and Miguel who were involved in a perilous situation. Lourdes trapped Miguel in a room and pointed a gun at his head, while at the same time footage of it played out online. There were many people around Miguel in New York who vouched for him and said that he was a good person — yet, as time went along more of his secrets started to come out.
As it turned out, Miguel so many years before had trafficked Lourdes into the country many years before and raped and abused her every step of the. He has promised her that he would have a better life in America, and instead he buried her in so much trauma that she was never able to move forward beyond that. Both Miguel and Lourdes were arrested at the end after a violent stand-off, one in which he did confess to his horrific crimes.
It’s hard to view this episode as an independent entity for a number of different reasons, with one of the major ones being the sole fact that everything that transpired here is so intricately linked to what is coming in the second part of this episode. Nonetheless, credit does have to be given to the writers here for taking their time before getting around to the big twist at the end of the episode, one that allowed the show to tell an extremely topic story in a slightly different way that expected.
In terms of intensity the way in which the drama built was also palpable. For the SVU, it was really a race against time in order to ensure that Lourdes was found before she actually went ahead and committed murder — for starters, they didn’t initially know that she was a victim herself. Beyond just that, though, they know of course that there are so many other ways in which justice can be achieved and it does not have to be through the end of a gun. Unfortunately, all they had to rely on were the tiniest of clues based on outside surroundings.
CarterMatt Verdict
This was an intense, dramatic, and fantastic start to the finale — it also tested SVU in terms of how quickly they were able to find suspects. In terms of the subject matter, there was no better time to remind viewers that everyone deserves justice and, unfortunately, there are many people out there in the world who don’t receive it.
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(Photo: NBC.)