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Law & Order: Special Victims Unit: Ace (2010)
Not one of the more memorable ones
Season 10 and 11 of SVU are where the series started getting goofier and more overtly political, and this episode takes the cake for it. The pacing is poor, about a third of the story is taken up by a secret testimony from a character who just sits there and talks (very little of what he has to say is interesting or engaging), and the ending is overdramatic and saccharine. The acting from the usual cast is good as always, the soundtrack is well-written but not particularly noteworthy, and the cinematography is quite good. Other than that, it's all downhill from there.
The main villain is this walking, talking Soviet-esque stereotype who looks like an imploding Elon Musk and is about as complex and deep an antagonist as that. When he's not winking at the arresting officers and making silly comments, he's making weird faces for no apparent reason. The show also has this bizarre subplot with a witness to a crime and his name is "Flossy" (he's a hobo who lives in his own car and likes to clean his teeth in front of other people). I don't really get it, whether this was stuck into the show as some sort of humor shtick or if it was just a strange way to fill airtime. It was annoying and wholly unnecessary, although the actor who plays "Flossy" does a decent job.
Then there's the social commentary on "anchor babies" (infants of illegal immigrants born on American soil and thus granted automatic citizenship). The episode approaches the topic with an entirely one-sided progressive absolutism that comes across as sanctimonious and fails to address the very real harm done to women and children as a result of the "anchor babies" issue. One man is even called a "racist" in the episode for criticizing the issue, despite the fact that the pregnant woman in question is whiter than an albino polar bear. Picking an actress with perfect teeth, a wide smile like she just won the lottery and styled hair might not have been the best choice if the show's goal was to make people sympathetic with struggling immigrant mothers. SVU has always leaned more towards the liberal side but still always, generally speaking, managed to effectively illustrate that there are multiple legitimate sides to every political issue. Not so here, an unfortunate trend that comes to follow the entirety of the series going forward from these last couple of seasons.
This entire episode was weird, wrapped up way too cleanly and perfectly to be real, and its sociopolitical commentary is problematic at best. The absurdly implausible end reveal is the cherry on top.
Roseanne: Death and Stuff (1989)
Horrid and disturbing, not funny
This entire episode is just one lowbrow joke after another about some poor man who dies in the Connors's kitchen. Unlike "All in the Family", which touched on this topic with much more sensitivity with the episode "Archie Finds A Friend", the whole running "joke" in Roseanne is that the Connors keep on having to touch the man's body and don't want to. When their daughter behaves like a creepy little rubbernecker and attempts to touch and play with the body, things just get even worse from there. The "comedy" in this episode isn't clever morbid humor about death or dying. It feels forced and uncomfortable, and while I thought the episode might at least take a moment to show a bit of empathy for the dead man, this never happens. The one bright spot in the episode is when Darlene and the investigating policeman who happens to be ethnic Greek-American, make baklava together. Other than that, we get a few bad scenes of Darlene asking when the body will "rot" and the body's hand moving due to a bump, causing it to slap Dan in the ass. When they start giving the body a "massage", it just got to be too much. The only character to even show a shred of sympathy is Becky, who points out the tragedy of a man dying in a strange house with no identity to be known by. All in all just a very gruesome, forced and weird episode.