Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (TV Series) Lust (2002) User Reviews

A satisfying bust

[bkoganbing · 7/10 · 28 October 2013]

During his career I've seen Michael Gross play some truly nasty and immoral people. Fascinating how that his career role was as the father on a family situation comedy, you'd never think that watching this SVU episode.

Gross and his wife seem like a perfect couple, meeting in college, he a law student she a medical student and they lived happily ever after. Or at least until she got old and he got hornier with age. Using viagra probably helped.

Gross's problem is that she holds the purse strings. She came from old money and he never really earned any of his own. Now he has a taste for young women, even hookers. And she's ready to cut him off.

This guy is some piece of work. He even kills another woman to make the police think it's the worth of some random stalker in Central Park.

Very happy when Benson and Stabler put the cuffs on him.

Lust for murder

[TheLittleSongbird · 8/10 · 10 September 2020]

Really like 'Law and Order: Special Victims Unit' in its prime years, and can see why it is one of the most popular and most regularly aired 'Law and Order' shows. Will admit to preferring the early years, where there was less focus on the team's personal lives getting in the way of the case and when team members were more professional. The early seasons and the show's mid period also had cases that gripped and moved me more and the early seasons do deserve to be aired more when on television.

While there were better representations of all of that in Season 4 and throughout the whole show's run, "Lust" has more than enough to it to show how good the show's early seasons are and what 'Special Victims Unit' did so well when it was in its prime. Other episodes of the season and of the show overall may have shocked and moved me more than "Lust" did, but "Lust" is still very well done and does shock more than once without being gratuitous.

"Lust" is not the most suspenseful of 'Special Victims Unit' episodes. The perpetrator's identity is obvious early on and if the perpetrator wasn't written in too much of the way of "it could only have been them" there would have been less of a predictable feel perhaps.

However, a lot works here. The regulars are all very good and the character interaction between the team is spot on, the most pleasure coming from that between Munch and Fin. Michael Gross sends shivers down the spine as one of the season's most amoral supporting characters (almost as much as the character of Gloria in "Deception"). The script is intelligent, lean enough and doesn't take itself over seriously.

Despite the obviousness, the story is still very engaging and intrigues. It particularly picks up later on and the more one learns about the perpetrator the more sick to the stomach one is going to feel, as the truth does shock. The slick grit and the sharper and tighter visual look that the previous three seasons had is still maintained, and equally had no problems with the generally understated and not too melodramatic music. Nor with the sympathetic but crisp direction in primarily the second half.

In conclusion, very well done. 8/10

Well-written, beautifully shot.

[rsm-11506 · 8/10 · 7 October 2023]

This episode has the excellent scripting the show had in the Neal Baer/Chistopher Meloni period. But what really stands out is the cinematography. Geoffrey Erb shot several episodes from this period, but this one really stands out. Great use of colors. Most episodes of this vintage mute the color as much as they can without being black-and-white. This one embraces the palette. Add to that the fine staging by. Michael. Fields, and the typically terrific work by Mariska Hargitay, Meloni, Richard Belzer, Ice-T, and Dann Florek. And not to mention the inspired casting against type of Michael. Gross. This ain't no Family Ties episode. Overall, an above-average example of the series.