How the latest Law & Order: SVU — Season 27 Episode 2, titled “A Waver of Consent” — ended depended entirely on how you watched it. One set up the Organized Crime episode that aired immediately after (and was already released on Peacock earlier this year). The other teed up a new arc for Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) and her squad’s newest detective, Jake Griffin (Corey Cott), assigned to her by Chief Kathryn Tynan (Noma Dumezweni).
If you watched it live on NBC on Thursday, October 2, it ended with Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) agreeing to let Griffin stay before Detective Terry Bruno (Kevin Kane) ducked into her office to tell her her former partner, Detective Elliot Stabler (Christopher Meloni), was in the hospital. That’s because Organized Crime Season 5 Episode 2 aired immediately after, and Hargitay showed up to visit him. But if you streamed it on Peacock after it aired, SVU ended with an entirely different scene.
In fact, this new-to-NBC-viewers scene is pretty much what we had expected to see after the way Griffin was all episode and the last scene with Benson. From the start, he said he knew he looked like he was a spy but promised he wasn’t. Rather, Chief Tynan wanted him to learn from the best boss in the department. But he hid a potential lead until he’d looked it up himself (a tattoo leading to a club), had the audacity to say to Benson “Let’s roll” (which she later turned around on him, kept raising his hand (which just got on Bruno’s nerves), and ignored Benson’s orders to go home and returned to the club himself after an undercover stint didn’t turn up anything they could use.
In their final scene together, Griffin did acknowledge his mistakes to Benson. Since he did show promise — he got someone to trust him enough to open up about what was going on at the club — she proposed a deal: “As long as we are all on the same team, you may have a home here.” He promised to never go behind her back.
But in the scene that ended the episode on Peacock, it looked like he was doing just that, as he showed up at Chief Tynan’s home; her detail parked outside her house told him that she was “inside waiting” for him.
So, is Griffin Tynan’s mole? Is it as simple as that? Could he be part of Tynan trying to convince Benson to take the deputy chief she offered her in the Season 27 premiere that the captain was very against? Tynan did tell Benson she wants her to take what she does with her own squad and do it all over the city. Maybe she’s trying to show Benson what she can do by having her teach Griffin.
What do you think Griffin’s doing for Tynan on Benson’s squad? Let us know in the comments section below.
Law & Order: SVU, Thursdays, 9/8c, NBC