"The Good Girl" is another one of 'Law and Order: Special Victims Unit's' Season 20 episodes to do very little for me on first watch. While not hating the episode, the story had a lot of issues and this was another example of Olivia being hard to take (the case with many episodes since her promotion and an issue that has been happening for too often for some time now), even on first watch. As said though, some episodes of the show have fared better on rewatch.
Sadly, "The Good Girl" is not one of those. If anything, this was an episode that was worse on rewatch. While still not considering it a terrible episode or hating it, thanks to one great guest turn, "The Good Girl" could have been so much better and is not good. Found more issues with the story and Olivia is even more difficult to tolerate, one of her worst appearances of the season. As far as Season 20 goes, this is for me easily one of the worst of a very patchy season.
By all means, "The Good Girl" isn't irredeemable. Stephen Tobolowsky's guest performance is the one aspect that is truly great, it is an authoritative and unsettling performance that deserved a much better episode. The regulars are solid too.
It is as ever shot with the right amount of intimacy without feeling too up close, even with a reliance of close up camerawork. The music isn't over-scored, manipulative or used too much.
However, "The Good Girl" has a lot of shortcomings. Outside of Tobolowsky, the guest cast came over as pretty weak. Derek Cecil lacks subtlety and his character too obvious, while Mackenzie doesn't come over as particularly sympathetic. The chemistry also doesn't ignite, did question as to whether there actually was any. The pace is pretty much all over the place. It starts off too ordinary and predictable and then tries to do too much in the second half, so things get muddled. The truth is difficult to get the head round and still remember the very perplexed reaction gotten on first watch when the truth was revealed.
As the truth is very bizarre and convoluted. The dialogue is very mundane and gets very preachy at the end. Was really put off and even irked by how Olivia behaved in this episode, she comes over as very sanctimonious and her dealing with victims did veer on manipulative rather than sympathetic in some of the latter season episodes and this was one of the worst cases.
Concluding, very underwhelming. 4/10.
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