SVU has its share of episodes where the story starts out appearing to be about one thing but then morphs into having a completely different central theme, but I don't think it's ever been do so thoroughly as this. And it's a good thing too, as after about ten minutes of the story I was *really* not looking forward to spending the next forty minutes watching yet another generic "He's stalking and victimizing her, but is so smart that he might get away with it" story unfold.
Fortunately, the story turns on a dime when the stalker has a meltdown in court and the judge recognizes something from his own past in a certain turn of phrase in the defendant's rant, and the stalking-crimes story effectively goes by the wayside (though there's little doubt that the guy will be found guilty eventually) in favor of a completely different one about the kidnapping and disappearance of the judge's then three-year-old son thirty years ago.
The serial child kidnapper-rapist-murderer who took the boy had been eventually caught and imprisoned on twelve consecutive life sentences, one for each victim. Over the years he's been revealing the locations of the bodies, one at a time, in exchange for certain in-prison privileges or other slight improvements in his living conditions. Now the only child whose body is still unfound is the judge's, and the killer is dying of emphysema. After reviewing Stabler's file. rife with incidents where he's gone right up to and in many cases over the line in the interrogation room. the judge asks him as a favor to visit the killer and extract from him the location of his son's body. Meanwhile, the judge also egregiously violates the trial rules by meeting alone with the stalker-defendant in his jail cell to ask him some personal questions...
This is a different kind of story from the usual SVU fare, much more about *people* than the investigation of a crime, and frankly my only real complaint about it is that it reached the end leaving us not knowing how things were going to work out for the people whose lives had been incredibly changed both on a very bad day thirty years ago and today. Recommended.