(Image credit: Ralph Bavaro/NBC)

Spoilers ahead for the Season 26 premiere of Law & Order: SVU Season 26, called “Fractured.”

The return of Law & Order: SVU in the fall 2024 TV schedule also marked an addition to the cast, and she’s just the latest over the past few years of Benson attempting to fill Rollins‘ vacancy. The newcomer seems like a good fit so far, but I didn’t find her to be the standout of her intro episode. Carisi was really the MVP of “Fractured,” to the point that I’ll probably rewatch this episode with a Peacock subscription just to see Peter Scanavino‘s performance in the trial of the week.

Law & Order: SVU’s Newest Detective

News broke over the summer that returning actor Kevin Kane was being promoted to series regular status as Bruno for Season 26 after first joining the show in Season 24. The bigger news at the time was that Juliana Aidén Martinez of Griselda had been cast as the newest cop to join Benson’s squad, playing Detective Kate Silva.

Silva’s father was a cop in his day before being promoted to deputy commissioner, and Benson made it clear that it doesn’t reflect badly on her in the slightest. Evidently, the longtime Special Victims captain thinks a lot higher of Silva’s dad than she did of Chief McGrath prior to his unceremonious end!

Silva seems confident and competent enough after the Season 26 premiere, and Martinez appears in the opening credits alongside Mariska Hargitay, Ice-T, Peter Scanavino, Octavio Pisano, and Kevin Kane, which wasn’t the case for Aimé Donna Kelly (Captain Curry) or Jordana Spiro (Agent Sykes) by the end of Season 25 earlier this year. It seems like Silva is sticking around, but she just wasn’t the most exciting part of the premiere.

Carisi Was The MVP

The case of the week involved the brutal attack on a group of law students after they were caught on camera together, with two of them dying and the third assaulted. Benson and Co. found the culprit, but it was up to Carisi to get him to implicate himself in front of a judge and jury.

And maybe it’s just been too long since I’ve seen a new episode of SVU, but Carisi seemed in especially fine form in the courtroom in “Fractured” as the ADA dismantled the young man’s attempt to hide the truth by poking at his ego until he broke down on the stand. Admittedly, the episode ended without an explicit declaration of his own guilt or the judge handing down a sentence, but the implication was clear: Carisi had closed the case.

It’s always fun when Carisi channels his inner Tom Cruise from A Few Good Men, even if the law student he was questioning wasn’t exactly Jack Nicholson. All in all, “Fractured” definitely got the Law half of Law & Order: SVU of to a particularly strong start in Season 26.

Keep tuning in to NBC on Thursdays at 9 p.m. ET for new episodes of Law & Order: SVU Season 26. Some Rollisi is on the way this season, with Kelli Giddish set to appear multiple times for an arc that not only makes more sense for Rollins than how SVU originally wrote her out, but also opens the show up for more Rollins/Carisi moments.

You can also check out past seasons of SVU streaming via Peacock. The show is followed by new episodes of Found this season rather than Law & Order: Organized Crime like previous seasons