Ranking Every Episode of ‘Law and Order: SVU’ (Part 1) | ScreenCrush 

Ranking Every Episode of ‘Law and Order: SVU’ (Part 1)

18 years. 18 seasons. Roughly 16,800 minutes, plus more cameos, crimes, and criminals than you could imagine. This week

fan I’m celebrating by ranking every single episode ever. Crazy? Yes. Possibly damaging to my mental and emotional health? Likely. Worth it? God, I hope so.

for 13 years. The show serves a few purposes for fans. Sometimes it provides emotional catharsis, sometimes it sheds light on real-life issues of violence and discrimination, and other times – okay,

of the time – it’s utterly bonkers sensationalism that’s so salacious and twisted you can’t help but slurp it up.

To rank all 400 episodes, I took a few things into consideration: How original is the premise? How clever is the twist(s)? If the episode is based on a real-life incident, how well does the show comment on it? But most important: How much did the episode leave me crying / screaming at the TV / gasping in shock? Find out my bottom 200 episodes below, then come back tomorrow for the top 200 just in time for

(Expect all the SPOILERS. This article also includes some graphic language relating to violence and sexual assault.)

fan for 13 years, but this was the first episode that really left me angry. Attempting to comment on Ferguson and Freddie Gray, the episode finds three (never-before-seen) detectives shooting and killing an unarmed black man they pursued as a rapist. I’ll give it this – it presents an interesting angle of showing the perspectives of fictional cops we’ve grown to love and trust (and the circumstances are notably different from real-life incidents). BUT when Benson and the squad defend the shooting, my

heart broke a little. At least Barba, a supporter of Black Lives Matter, grills them hard in front of a grand jury. But jeez, bad move guys.

A custody battle is spurred by the reveal that a fertility clinic gave a mother another woman’s embryos. An interesting idea on paper, but tedious and plodding onscreen. An

episode without sexual assault, twisted sexual relationships, or murder?! No thanks.

I’d seen this episode and couldn’t remember the plot until watching it all the way through a second time. A playwright daughter has it out for her aging sexist father. Then there’s a trial and … I already forgot what happened again.

Who knew investigating a multi-city serial rapist could be so boring?

still depicted queer homeless youth as feisty caricatures slathered in lipstick. This is also a

crossover (snooze); the writers couldn’t come up with a more creative title than “Chicago Crossover”?

is full of terrible mothers, but this one is pretty tame. Josie Bisset plays a pregnant alcoholic who gets arrested by Benson when she violates a court order not to drink. And that’s pretty much it. Not that I’m begging for soul-shattering episodes only about assault and kidnapping, but c’mon, this is

This episode opens to a terrible pop song playing over a montage of a teenage girl getting ready to go out. Then she wakes up stuffed inside of a suitcase. I never called

classy but c’mon. Also, the main suspect is a painfully bad Shia LaBeouf rip-off who wears a paper bag on his head.

– there’s a tense rooftop shootout, a kidnapped victim, and Ice-T one-liners. But this is also the Gamergate episode, which did a terrible job of giving insightful, non-sensationalized commentary about this real-life story. You can do better,

episodes are about crime rings. They’re set up to be suspenseful pursuits full of undercover work, but often end up being pretty dull and redundant. This one about illegal immigrants definitely is.

A young actress tried for statutory rape leads the squad to a pervy producer who sleeps with underage girls. Same old story, just set in Hollywood.

A young girl joins the porn industry and gets assaulted by two college students at a party. Pretty forgettable.

A case that leads back to a doctor (Elizabeth McGovern) who teaches military torture techniques. It’s the Lifetime movie version of an

episode, mostly for the bad music plays as former prisoners recount their stories.

“Hey guys, we gotta do an episode about Trayvon Martin! But instead of depicting George Zimmerman, let’s kill two birds with one stone and make the shooter a Paula Deen-type!”

Cybill Sheperd doing her best Paul Deen (NBC)

A college professor stalked a girl, watched her die, and then dragged her body outside to engage in some necrophilia. Admirably gross, but a pretty simple case full of too many red herrings.

Rollins’ sister gets tangled up in a rape case involving a flutist. Ever notice that the later seasons often depend on the detective’s personal lives for drama and suspense? Yeah, those are not good.

A detective for the D.A. has been stealing drug money, and when the ADA finds out the detective plots her murder. Interesting mystery, unsatisfying reveal.

A jealous gymnast kills another gymnast with a brick to the head. Sounds more thrilling than it is.

After tackling the Ray Rice elevator assault (tacked on to the Solange-Jay Z incident) four episodes before this one,

does it again, only with a sportscaster as the abuser.

The squad finds a girl’s dead body and uses her DNA to find her killer. Never seen that on a crime show before!

Real-life celebrity incidents are perfect scandalous fodder for

, but the show often depicts those stories of real-life violence and weighty topics as cartoonish. That was especially the case for this Rihanna-and-Chris Brown-inspired episode.

Whoopi Goldberg plays the head of child services who’s accused of manslaughter. Episodes about good intentioned people who screw up might be more reflective of real-life, but don’t make for engaging TV.

episodes that are more about the detectives’ personal drama than twisty cases are always the most disappointing. Points for giving Rollins an interesting addiction to explore, but can we get back to solving crimes?

A group of friends orchestrate the gang-rape of their friend (Lola Kirke) at a concert. In a weak twist, it’s a former vet and bouncer with PTSD who miraculously remembers something that helps the squad prosecute their suspects.

Tribeca teenagers gone wild! Rainbow parties! Nude photos on the internet! Missi Pyle as an anti-vaxxer mom! There’s way too much going on in this scattered episode.

Just another negative portrayal of a trans person played by cis actress Kate Moennig. Her character is a trans woman who murders a guy who threatens to out her. Points for trying to tell a story about the real-life violence in the trans community, but still, not great Bob.

When a terminal cancer patient (Brian Dennehy) asks to see his daughter one last time, he reveals he committed a series of bank robberies and murders 35 years ago, but someone else took the fall for it. One of those episodes that tries something different, but it ultimately ends up being a bore.

In this episode Amaro finally stands up to his abusive father. Feels more like a soap opera than a cop procedural.

This episode starts out with a bang (pun intended, sorry) when Rollins gets shot by a sniper, but it quickly devolves into a forgettable exploration of Fin’s Narcotics backstory. At least 2 Chainz shows up with a fantastic line about his face being sewed onto a soccer ball.

2 Chainz after his happy ending massage gets interrupted. (SVU)

Too bad the real Solange-Jay Z elevator incident was ten times more exciting than

I’m sorry but did the writers have so few ideas that an episode about a dad plotting the kidnapping of his own son to make his “spaced out” ex-wife pay more attention seemed like a clever idea? I mean, it had my attention but

When Rollins asks a model if a famous photographer forced her to have sex with him she retorts back, “He didn’t hold a gun on me! Well, actually, he did. But it wasn’t loaded.” If you’re going to take on Terry Richardson’s sexual assault allegations, maybe don’t make it so laughable.

Another episode where Amaro is a carbon copy of Stabler. He shoots a kid in this episode, but we’ve been there, done that.

The squad teams with a sex worker (Patricia Arquette) to track down a murderer in what’s a fairly traditional manhunt episode with some added sentimentalism.

Stabler is talking to his wife about predators and she says, “They’re out there” and he corrects her with, “Honey, they’re in here,” and points to his computer monitor. This is an episode about DUN DUN DUN the internet.

The Anthony Weiner episode where a mayoral front-runner uses the online alias “Enrique Trouble.” Doesn’t quite have the same ring as Carlos Danger.

What begins as a suspenseful search for a missing baby becomes a manslaughter case with the parents as prime suspects. Turns out the baby died of SIDS and the parents blamed themselves. Anyone else feeling depressed?

Carisi goes undercover in a homeless shelter and meets a convicted sex offender who returns from Season 9. Turns out the rapist was a defense attorney, but what a waste to bring back such a creeper from the past just to be a red herring.

In one of the show’s most generic and overdone storylines, a student rapes a younger student. Running outta ideas are we?

Rosanna Arquette adopts children and uses them for child porn. Who is Wednesday and why is this episode called “Wednesday’s Child”? I honestly can’t remember.

’s “A Rape on Campus” story, which has a moment or two of insightful commentary on campus rape culture, but fails to criticize the media as strongly as it could’ve. Like so many other recent ripped-from-the-headlines episodes, this one just isn’t as fascinating as the real life story.

This episode starts with a case of spousal abuse starring Clea DuVall, then pivots to an unsolved crime involving a woman who murdered her rapist husband. Doesn’t live up to the great title.

Estella Warren guest stars and has the line, “I’m too beautiful for prison.” She’s pregnant and claimed she was raped, but turns out she drugs rich guys, uses electro-ejaculation (look it up!) to steal their sperm. Weirdest of all, she sells their “super sperm” to a doctor intent on creating genius babies.

double-hitter: Poussey (Samira Wiley) plays a woman who recants her accusation that her father raped her 17 years ago and Caputo (Nick Sandow) plays a detective having an affair with her mother. A relatively minor slow burn episode until the finale throws an uncomfortable curve ball.

trope of unremorseful teens who bully and kill a classmate.

An episode about a polygamist, a murder case, and female circumcision with a Method Man cameo should be way more exciting than this.

Oh goodie, a timely episode about a racist extremist who kills the children of immigrants.

Hazing, sexual assault by football coaches, and gay hate crimes; there’s way too much going on here.

It’s the Daniel Tosh rape joke episode, only the standup comic is accused of rape to make matters more dramatic. The best part is an Ice-T line. When Rollins says, “He’s bating you, Liv,” Fin replies, “Masturbating!”

Two teenage girls accuse their famous music teacher (Billy Porter) of pedophilia because they couldn’t get on his

-like reality show. Clay Aiken, Ashanti, and Taylor Hicks guest star as the judges. Painfully cringe-worthy.

Part 2 of the Season 17 premiere finds a serial killer confessing to his crimes, à la Robert Durst in

. The worst part is how the writers use the stereotype of crossdressing psychotic men. It’s in poor taste, especially since the next episode tackled violence against trans people.

. In this one a mother goes undercover as a brothel owner to try to find her kidnapped daughter. It’s not as original or suspenseful as it’s set up to be, but hey, at least Benson and Finn go undercover as pimps.

349. “…Or Just Look Like One,” Season 1 Ep. 3

A dead girl’s body is dropped outside a hospital. A former model turns out to be the killer, which we knew because the killer is almost always that suspicious, seemingly irrelevant character we meet early on.

A gang rape case gets complicated when the victim says she experienced multiple orgasms during the assault, and yet again, an

A Howard Stern-like radio host becomes connected to the rape trial of a popular TV actress and later a staged shooting. A mediocre episode that gets a bonus point for its opening: On the set of a police procedural.

, only if Gretchen and Karen murdered Regina, only not as great as that makes it sound.

Oh great, a guy sleeps with a woman of color because he wanted “something strange” and some “jungle fever” before getting married. And there’s a cop who gleefully admits to killing 18 sex workers. The world is trash.

A guy’s lube mixed with his medication ends up causing fetal abortions, then a girl dies of Toxic Shock Syndrome. It happens!

Benson and Stabler go undercover as a swingers couple. Rose McGowan plays a woman who used to date her twin brother. Only on

Just some casual swinging with Rose McGowan (NBC)

Shiri Appleby plays a Coast Guard officer who’s gang raped by her fellow officers. An important topic, but doesn’t get the powerful episode it deserves.

Bradley Whitford is a Woody Allen-esque child molester, but that’s just a distraction from the fact that Amaro and Rollins are totally hooking up.

Moral of the story: Don’t trust the Catholic Church.

A teenage girl falls for an older man in her apartment building and when he refuses to take her away with him, she strangles him and stuffs her underwear in his mouth. As one does.

A dead body leads to a bunch of nasty murders tied to the Columbian drug cartel. It’s nothing special except Alex returns to testify against the hitman who tried to kill her.

A doctor leads a cult of young women who he says he’s impregnating with the cells of dead babies (?!?). He’s actually just getting them pregnant with her own sperm. Cults, man. Don’t join ‘em!

A photographer has a secret torture chamber but claims he only uses it to imagine sex crimes, not act on them. (Um, okay.) An interesting premise, but without a crime there’s not much going on.

Sex addiction, an underground sex club, and Munch and Fin debating the privacy of people’s sex lives.

A 20-year-old rape case gets reopened. Feels more like a traditional

In a slog of an episode, two brothers get framed for raping a girl by a gang leader who wanted their tuition money.

A group of street vigilantes get in the way of an investigation. Then Benson punches a guy in the face.

A mom convinces her son to shoot her other son. Then we find out the same mom abused a third son years ago and lied about it. That’s tonight on a shocking episode of

The first trio of episodes introducing Benson’s half-brother Simon in Season 8 were great. But did he really need to return to get Benson’s help on a custody case?

The entire episode is about Rollins shooting and killing her sister’s abusive boyfriend. Must have been a sex crime-free week in New York City!

Stabler kisses Beck and you’re like, “Dude, Benson’s only been gone for six episodes.”

The squad captures the head of a pedophile-rights group, then Rosie Perez is blamed for her husband’s abuse of her son. At least it ends happily.

crossovers but this one’s not bad. Dallas Roberts is creepy as hell as a twisted rapist serial killer. 10 points to Barba for knowing just how to make this guy crack by teasing him with forensic photos in the courtroom.

The series’ first story about a sexually abusive father ends not with the detectives grilling him in the interrogation room, but a powerful confrontation between an adult daughter and her dad.

A female counselor at my high school was caught having a relationship with a teenage boy. Same thing happens here, only worse; a male coach has also been assaulting boys. One of the few recent episodes not inspired by current events, this has all the makings of a classic

, only instead of journalists the squad tries to uncover the Catholic church’s sex trafficking ring.

Sometimes the dullest episodes end up having a pretty intriguing payoff. A vegan is killed after she tries to expose an unsanitary meatpacking company and while one guy confesses, the killer ends up being an old granny who makes the meatballs. (Don’t eat the meatballs.)

A woman’s affair with a cop leads to a rape and him framing her for murder.

Erika Christensen guest stars as an FBI Special Agent who, uh, isn’t cut out for Special Victims work. She can’t handle it and ends up killing a serial killer, then when she gets caught, she kills herself. Bleak.

With 400 episodes, there have been plenty of opportunities for

to follow-up on cases from earlier seasons, but they’ve rarely done it for a full episode. Except in this one, which brings back Tom Sizemore’s kidnapper from a Season 14 episode.

Finn Wittrock plays a douchey tech millionaire who rapes his best friend’s fiancee. But who cares what the plot is, it’s Munch’s goodbye episode. 😭

A teenage girl accuses a pizza shop employee of rape. Her father kills him, but it turns out the guy was innocent and it was actually her dentist uncle. And then I never went to the dentist ever again.

Part 1 of “Unholiest Alliance” kicks off a scandal full of predatory Catholic priests, dirty cops, and a sex trafficking ring. Benson gets transferred to another bureau because of her relationship with Tucker.

Is catfishing someone for consensual sex the same as rape? One of the weakest

episodes tries to make that argument when a con man pretends to work at a university so he can sleep with moms desperate to get their kids into school. You know the writers don’t have a good story when a uneventful episode ends with a sudden (and pretty unnecessary) suicide.

A guy who kills and rapes Arab women because his dad left his mom for an Arab woman.

You’re really going to make me sit through a murder case with multiple suspects and tell me the killer was just some random homeless guy on bath salts? What a waste!

Mae Whitman is a wealthy private school girl who pretends to be a homeless punk (dreds included), starts a street gang, and convinces her new boyfriend to kill one of her classmates.

That time convicted rapist Mike Tyson played a rape victim.

What do you do when your wife threatens to divorce you when she finds out you’ve been stealing her money to take ecstasy with prostitutes? Murder her in Central Park of course!

word play, this episode brings a whole new meaning to violating parole when Carisi’s brother-in-law accuses his parole officer of raping him. It’s an interesting twist about male rape victims and features a sly final move from Barba in the court room.

Now this is just ridiculous. Marcia Gay Harden’s Dana Lewis guest starred in 3 great episodes, always as the hero. Now her FBI agent is suddenly a killer who murdered the pregnant woman her ex left her for, then she frames a serial killer for it. Harden, you deserved better.

This case is as simple and as boring as they come. Beck and Stabler can’t find enough evidence to convict a rapist on one case so they track down another victim and convince her to testify.

Cassidy goes undercover to catch dirty cops who raped a drunk girl. It’s a refreshing break from the sensationalized ripped-from-the-headlines eps, and sustains tension outside of Benson’s William Lewis arc throughout the season.

Why write an episode about sex trafficking rings or terrorism when you can capitalize on both at once?

A rape investigation leads to an ADA who’s secretly partnered with a sex trafficker.

An intoxicated woman is dragged out of a coffee shop to be assaulted and, as the title says, a hell of a lot of witnesses watched and didn’t do anything. Sometimes New Yorkers just suck.

A fairly traditional case about consensual sex that turns into a violent rape, only the victim is an Olympic pole vaulter with bipolar disorder who gets off on being an escort.

’s attempt to modernize their kidnapping storylines (just look at that episode title), this one follows a guy who kidnaps girls and live-streams child porn.

Ari Graynor plays a former victim of abuse who later repeatedly assaults her younger sister, then has her murdered when she threatens to tell.

The first installment in a two-parter where Brad Garrett’s Riker’s correctional officer rapes multiple female prisoners. Best line: “What’s going on?” Barba: “Not much, just someone trying to kill me.”

throws their holiday party in the Medical Examiner’s office. (How do I get an invite?) Denis O’Hare reprises his

priest who’s investigated for a molestation the Monsignor committed.

A cocky reporter, played by none other than Alec Baldwin, is profiling SVU. He gets in the way of an investigation when his articles claim a rape victim is lying.

Controversial opinion, I know, but this episode really pisses me off. Sure, it’s some of Hargitay’s best acting. Sure, having your show’s hero get kidnapped by the same man for the second time, forced to play Russian Roulette, and nearly raped (for the, what, 4th time?) makes for suspenseful TV. But this episode went way too far, and much like Season 15 overall, felt emotionally manipulative. Leave Benson alone.

The episode picks up from the end of “Beast’s Obsession,” and makes us rewatch Benson playing Russian Roulette all over again. I’d rather not.

A victim refuses to give up her rapist’s identity, claiming she’s moved on from the assault from five years ago.

A taxi cab rapist case connects to Stabler’s old mentor (James Brolin), an astronaut who killed a woman who got in the way of his efforts to go to the moon.

A wealthy woman from a well-known family is suspected of killing a salesman. Besides being a

crossover, it’s mostly an overly complicated snooze.

A man plans to assault a woman who’s the granddaughter of a KKK member who raped his mother years ago.

A student streams a video of a kidnapped girl to get the detectives’ attention so they’ll help him on the cold case of his missing brother.

An Evangelical preacher kills the gay man his closeted son had been sleeping with. Best line about a gay hook-up: “I asked him to pick me up after the Satan’s House rehearsal. Then we went back to his place.”

Kevin Tighe plays a creeper who stalks and rapes a woman he met online, then frames someone else by stealing their video game avatar. But that's not even the weirdest bit. The woman's sister is raped by her boyfriend, who suffers from sexsomnia – aka “sleep sex.” It happens!

The least compelling episode of the three-episode arc where Cragen is framed for murder.

A guy murders a college student because she lost a bunch of money playing poker.

Boo, I guessed the twist 10 minutes in. A retired cop becomes obsessed with a young woman, then rapes and kidnaps her. It’s a typical high-stakes hostage situation where, yet again, the writers put the detectives in grave danger (Carisi almost dies) to make up for a trite plot.

-like video game inspires two people to murder and rape a sex worker.

I can only imagine the glee of the writer who came up with the episode title about a kinky businesswoman who gets killed because of money laundering.

A super convoluted murder mystery where a man tries to make an accidental death look like a drunken suicide. How do you get a corpse drunk? Shove a wine bottle up her butt, of course.

, Rooney Mara made her acting debut as a formerly overweight girl who beats up people who are overweight.

A private-school student jumps through a whole serious of ridiculous hoops to cover up his affair with a teacher, including his father paying a gang to commit hate crimes. Then the kid ends up shooting the teacher when she breaks it off.

A rich and powerful septuagenarian slips a bartender Quaaludes and rapes her, forcing his grandson to testify against him.

A stalker and rapist assaults and kills the ADA who prosecuted him in a previous case. He gets Benson to meet him at the park and holds a knife on her.

The head of a drug-trafficking ring has a six-year-old boy killed after he witnesses a murder. Then a hitman shoots up a church during the little boy’s funeral. On a lighter note, Fin gets to go undercover as a drug addict.

A hotel maid accuses an Italian diplomat of rape in Rollins’ first episode. Benson finds out Stabler has resigned without a goodbye. And yes, I’m still mad about it.

A woman struggles to remember what her rapist looks like. But more importantly, Benson and Cassidy sleep together for the first time.

Bob Saget plays a jealous husband who injected a GPS into his wife’s shoulder. When he finds out she was cheating, he kills his wife’s lover’s wife, then framed the husband. Unnecessarily confusing? Yep.

A madam throws boiling spaghetti on a male escort. Forget that she tried to murder him, wasting good pasta is the most heinous crime of them all.

A woman gets revenge on her three rapists years later by hiding inside a delivery box to break into their homes, drug them, and carve into their chest,

Closer to a soap opera than a crime procedural, this one finds a former detective (Jaclyn Smith) murdering the wife of the man she loved and pinning it on a serial killer named the Bedtime Butcher.

Chloe Sevigny plays a woman who has at least 5 affairs, then plans her own kidnapping and rape to get ransom money from her husband. It doesn’t stop there; she also seduces a juror, which leads to a mistrial.

When a black man is accused of rape and gun possession, Andre Braugher’s DA attempts prove that the NYPD’s case is racially motivated.

Serial killer buddies Greg Yates (Dallas Roberts) and Carl Rudnick (Jefferson Mays) break out of prison in a

crossover. A woman also hides a burner phone and carving tools in lasagna, and now I’ll never not be suspicious when I eat lasagna.

does the Bill Cosby allegations where a vlogger accuses a TV actor of rape and Rollins goes undercover to catch him.

Two sorority sisters drug another girl (Tammy Blanchard) to set up one of their ex-boyfriends for date rape.

Benson and Stabler go undercover as a couple trying to adopt a child from a Bulgarian baby trafficker.

A 14-year-old commits a series of rapes as a result of child abuse by his nanny.

Teachers abusing male students is a story we’ve seen again and again on

, but this episode about allegations in an all-boys private school didn’t feel like a rehashing of old tropes. It’s told with more heart than melodrama.

After 16 seasons of endorsing transphobic attitudes the series finally included a positive portrayal of a trans character in a story about a hate crime. There’s some educational moments around gender identity and the rise in violence against the trans community. But the episode still focuses more on the grief of the boy accused of the crime than on the trans girl’s perspective.

Denis O’Hare plays a delivery man with a mental disability who rapes and kills an elderly woman after finding her tied up by robbers in her apartment.

In a ripped from the headlines twist, an Islamic terrorism trial becomes a rape case when the killer’s wife reveals she’s a victim of sexual assault. It’s an interesting angle on recent mass shootings, and asks how to handle a terrorism accomplice who’s also a victim.

A serial rapist targets women on the subway. Benson goes on a date with a reporter who wants to act out a rape fantasy. Wrong woman to try that kink on, buddy.

episodes where the detectives guest star as victims or perps before they joined as full-time characters. In this one Kelli Giddish plays a rape victim.

Ya know what sucks? When your husband dies on a safari, then you get a blood transfusion that saves your life, only it gives you HIV, then you give you’re daughter HIV and decide to take her to an AIDS denialist doctor.

A girl was raped and found with blue ink inside of her. The perp turns out to be a paramedic who assaults women in the back of ambulances. As

A construction site in a playground digs up the bones of a boy’s body from a 1970s cold case. It’s a bummer of an ending when they find the killer, who’s dying of cancer and doesn’t remember the victim’s name.

A teenage fight club leads to a domestic abuse case where the wife frames Stabler for assaulting her husband.

John Stamos plays a “reproductive abuser” who willingly gets multiple women pregnant – he has 47 kids and counting. One of the mothers stabs him with an injection knife that, I kid you not, makes his chest explode.

John Stamos, losing track of the women he slept with.(NBC)

Michael Pitt has always been good at playing menacing, twisted weirdos. He’s not the killer or rapist here, but he helps the squad catch the bad guy. Always helpful to have a sociopathic animal killer on hand.

Benson’s undercover name is Persephone Jones. That is all.

A porn producer murders one of his actresses when she contracts HIV. Then the actresses’ best friend (Hayden Panettiere) kills a doctor who videotaped all three of them having sex.

tackled campus gang rape, suicide, slut shaming, and silenced victims, but by cramming so much into one episode, it barely scratched the surface of these issues.

A drug addict kidnaps his little sister (who has freaking leukemia) to get ransom money from his parents to pay off a drug dealer. He later holds Stabler and Warner hostage at a bank heist.

episode where Anna Chlumsky plays the author of an S&M book (horribly titled

) who is raped by a TV host re-enacting scenes from the book. Best of all, Barba chokes himself with a belt in court.

An Afghani ambassador kills his daughter when he finds out she isn’t a virgin, then kills his wife when she testifies in court.

A female psychiatrist misdiagnoses a 16-year-old as schizophrenic then gets pregnant with his child and claims he’s her soulmate. This episode is full of some ridiculous sexual puns like, “Easy come, not so easy go.”

type show who’s being stalked by the serial killer who murdered her sister years ago. That same killer murders EADA Sonya Paxton.

Benson tries to find her mother’s rapist while the squad investigates a hate crime against a gay man.

It’s not always creepy old guys behind online porn. Connor Paolo guests stars a second time as a teenage boy running a kiddie porn site.

The third episode in the Cragen dead escort shabockle leads to a ridiculous shootout where three cops all arrive on the scene shouting, “I’m a cop, don’t shoot!” Then Benson finally rekindles her Season 1 romance with Cassidy.

A son kills his wife for cheating on him with his father and getting pregnant with what would’ve been his brother-in-law.

We’ve seen this episode so many times – a child gets kidnapped to teach an irresponsible parent a lesson. Only this time the parents are two lesbians. Bonus points for depicting well-written queer characters who aren’t victimized because of their sexuality.

In her first guest role, Hayden Panettiere plays the daughter of two country singers. She becomes attached to Benson and pretends to be abused to get her parents to pay attention to her.

A young girl is bullied at school for being the daughter of two lesbians. When the bully chops her hair off, she grabs the scissors and stabs him in the back, paralyzing him.

A judge’s stepdaughter winds up dead, and later reveals that he raped her, got her pregnant, and sent her away to boarding school to hide it. His wife killed her own daughter when she learned who fathered the baby.

episode would open with a naked guy running through Central Park while hallucinating. Natasha Lyonne plays a patient in a psychiatric hospital whose uncle has been raping her for years.

Michael McKean plays a producer who drugs and rapes actresses during their auditions, including one played by Miranda Lambert. His son (Cameron Monaghan) holds his father’s girlfriend hostage, and Benson, doing what she does best, ends up talking him out of killing himself.

Kyle MacLachlan plays an Arnold Schwarzenegger-like politician who has an affair with his housekeeper. Only it’s messier than the real-life scandal and involves the rape of a 13-year-old girl and murder of his secret son.

Cragen goes undercover when the body of a kidnapped Russian mail-order bride leads to a scam by the Mafia. It’s one of the rare times we see Cragen get vulnerable and talk about his past.

A TV reporter (Jennifer Esposito) reveals she was raped in a news segment, only to die from a bomb planted inside of a flower vase. In a twist, it wasn’t the rapists who killed her but a weirdo who became obsessed from watching her on TV.

Aisha Hinds plays a trans woman who attacks a man who disagrees with his transgender daughters. For an episode from 2009, it’s impressively sensitive to struggles in the trans community, except that it uses the reveal that a character is trans as a “shocking” twist.

 when a woman on a reality dating show accuses another contestant of rape. The two execs behind the show (Wendie Malick, Michael Gross) tweak the footage to blame a producer (Larisa Oleynik).

A woman’s plot to kill her lover’s wife goes wrong when the guy she hires for the murder is actually in love with her, so he kills her lover too.

A serial rapist leads Benson to Maria Bello’s character, who is also a child of rape, and Benson becomes her son’s legal guardian. But the real winner is Fin’s line: “He’s got a solid alibi. He wasn’t born yet.”

Based on the Ariel Castro kidnappings, the squad chases down a kidnapper who’s been holding three women prisoner in his home for nearly 18 years.

A nursing home manager (Mary Kay Place) injects patients with epinephrine to give them heart attacks so she can then save them and look like a hero. It happens!

Based on the Colleen Stan kidnapping, a Romanian woman is abducted and hidden underneath a kidnapper’s bed until Benson and Stabler rescue her.

Rollins starts dating her sleazy Gambler’s Anonymous sponsor. When a woman (Amy Seimetz) breaks up with her boyfriend, she accuses him of rape, lures him to her apartment, sleeps with him, and pushes him off the roof.

Tracy Pollan reprises her rape victim from the Season 1 episode of the same name, now stalking her rapist to try and catch him. When the perp’s wife testimony leads to a mistrial, she shoots and kills him.

In a twist on hate crimes, a slew of gay men are attacked murdered by another gay man because they were closeted. A stripper tells Fin she likes his new haircut. (Note: Fin’s hair hasn't changed by more than a one-sixteenth of an inch in the past 10 years.)

Stabler goes undercover on a sugar daddy website (called Tasty Sugar) to find the killer of a woman whose body was stuffed in a suitcase. Eric McCormack also plays a sugar daddy.

A police officer has a vendetta against drug dealers after his brother died of an overdose. so he starts assaulting and killing them.

Surprise surprise, Amaro loses his temper then winds up in an orange jumpsuit. Munch returns after retiring a hot minute ago. Noah enters Benson’s life, and DA Trevor (Hargitay’s real-life husband Peter Hermann) returns.

12 seasons later Cassidy returns! Then Captain Cragen gets framed, and finds a woman with a slit throat in his bed.

Cassidy gets framed for rape by a drug dealer’s girlfriend. Amaro learns that a kid being used as a drug mule is actually his son from an undercover relationship years ago.

, a couple find a dead man’s body posed in a store window display. He’s one of two victims killed by an activist who murdered two gay men who gave his now-dead brother AIDS.

A police officer starts acting out and rapes his wife (Amy Landecker), a reaction caused by an anti-malaria drug given to him by the Army in Afghanistan.

A flashback explains the opening of Season 6’s “Quarry” when Benson interrogated a rapist for nine hours, only now that rapist is revealed to be innocent when the real perp starts committing crimes again.

A rare episode where only women are the sexual abusers. A female piano teacher is suspected of assaulting and killing a young girl. But wait! It was her half-sister, who’s mentally unstable after years of being molested by her mother, who she still lives with. Isn’t this show so uplifting?!

The one where Munch realizes his uncle is a mentally ill homeless guy and murder suspect played by Jerry Lewis.

Two men at a homeless shelter who suffer from schizophrenia are involved in a murder case. One murdered a woman, the other witnessed it, but can only testify if he agrees to take medication.

A 10-year-old child abuses his little sister, drowns his dog, then holds another kid at gun point before shooting Amaro.

only if Steven Avery got out of jail and raped and killed the daughter of the woman he was wrongfully convicted of killing. Plus Joe Biden shows up, confirming he is indeed our nation’s coolest former Veep.

After facing her gambling addiction in Season 15, Rollins get another big backstory episode. It’s some of Kelli Giddish’s best work on the show as she faces her former boss, who raped her years before. A lot of the episodes around the squad’s personal lives feel distracting. This is one of the better ones.

has a thing for devastating stories about piano teachers who molest kids. (Maybe don’t get your kid private lessons.) In this one, a former victim of child abuse testifies against his old instructor, but it turns out he’s also become a piano teacher who abuses his students.

This episode opens with Stabler getting tossed through a window by a guy on PCP. But wait, it gets nuttier! What appears to be an investigation into child porn reveals a company has been testing pesticides on children in an apartment building, and Benson almost passes out because of it.

A rape and murder case that’s been covered up by an FBI agent leads the squad to investigate a Mexican drug cartel. Then Benson seduces the FBI agent to tap his phone, all after she was taken hostage at an airport.

I honestly couldn’t care less what this episode is about. The best part happens a minute and a half in. With a straight face Hargitay delivers the line, “Do you think there was a reason that the killer sodomized your husband with a banana?” It’s all downhill from there.

Law and Order: SVU episode 400, "Motherly Love," airs Wednesday on NBC. Stay tuned for Part 1 of our ranking.

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