‘Law & Order: SVU’ Writer Explains Benson’s ‘Emotional’ Loss After Character Death in Latest Episode

This week’s episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit featured a traumatic moment for Captain Olivia Benson. After going years without seeing her estranged half-brother Simon Marsden, he came back into her life only to meet a shocking end. The decision to bring him back came from executive producers Warren Leight and Julie Martin, who thought it tied into the main case in “Murdered at a Bad Address.”

Warning: Spoilers for “Murdered at a Bad Address” follow!

“It’s such an emotional episode and we were setting one person free and hopefully putting another serial rapist who had gotten away with it all this time,” Denis Hamill, who wrote the episode, explained on the Squadroom podcast, reports E! News. “It was Warren and Julie who thought that there needed to be some kind of an emotional storyline, a subplot, about what’s going on in Benson’s life at the same time.”

Hamil, a newcomer to the series, added, “One of the scourges of the city now and in the world is fentanyl and opioids and all that, and it was mostly Warren at that point who thought it just needed a balance, something personal happening to her, while she’s also working on this case too. I thought it was a really nice counterbalance too.”

At the start of “Murdered at a Bad Address,” Simon (Michael Weston) approached Olivia (Mariska Hargitay) on the street, claiming to be sober. Olivia, who has not seen him since his last appearance on the show seven years ago, did not believe him. However, she still agreed to meet him for lunch so Simon could meet Noah. When Simon didn’t show up at lunch, Olivia left a voicemail on his phone, telling him to never contact them again.

Later, Dr. Melina Warner (Tamara Tunie) called Olivia to the medical examiner’s office to identify Simon’s body. He overdosed on another drug, but was sober in the days before his death. Olivia was crushed, putting the blame for his death on herself.

This story was juxtaposed with the main case, in which the rest of the SVU team proved a man was wrongly convicted for a murder he spent 16 years in prison for.

“In the end, you have one guy who gets free and it’s a sort of bittersweet ending because it ends in a graveyard with him finally getting to mourn for his mother and his sister, which he couldn’t do in a jail cell because he was accused of their murders,” Hamill said on the podcast. “And then to have Benson, who was estranged from her brother, her only living relative, and then when he dies, she finds out how much she loves him too. It was a really nice kind of matching scene; it had a nice symmetry.”

The episode also marked the first appearance of Tunie’s character since the Season 19 episode “Pathological” aired in January 2018. As Tunie noted on Squadroom, there was no mention of her absence in the show.

“It’s great to be back in the morgue, it was great to be back with Mariska,” she said. “Fortunately, our characters have always had this special kind of bond, that’s why Warren thought it was important to help Benson through the process of her brother having OD’d.”

New episodes of Law & Order: SVU air Thursdays at 10 p.m. ET on NBC.

Photo credit: NBC