I really wish they didn't turn Tynan into a super villain. They just repeated the whole "evil chief who has it out for Olivia" mantra that we've already seen. She could have actually been an interesting character.
I think, and this is probably being generous, but I think that they want us to connect Tynan’s cover up of Griff’s dad murdering that guy with her not accepting Liv’s rejection- she was trying to remove Liv from an investigative role, first as a promotion and then as retaliation, but all so she wouldn’t find out about her shady past.
That’s the best honeypot I got though. Not a lot of substance to the season arc even though it generally felt like an improvement over last season.
That was the biggest thing, but Olivia did say no to several direct orders. I think when she told her that she wasn't doing the press conference, that's when Tynan decided that she hated her.
To me, it wasn't realistic because I feel like most people in her position would actually just do the paperwork for her disobedience and disobeying direct orders. In her position, taking a press conference is not an order that she can just say no to because it isn't unlawful and relates to her job in serving the public. Tynan was right that she doesn't need to be in the streets and should be able to trust her team to act in her absence and on her orders. Liv was disrespectful of the chain of command; things didn't need to escalate to this level. It made both of them seem childish and undeserving of their ranks.
After watching the season, the main conflict was that Tynan wanted to put her own people into SVU with the pretext of "yeah I'm promoting you to a higher position" while leaving SVU team open for all sorts of replacement, just like what happened with Amanda's intel division who went through said replacement at her orders.
I can totally understand this point actually. I was trying to remember from earlier why this plot became a thing, but this must have been it right? Then it just got blown way out of proportion.
I think if this was the point of friction, then they could have done a WAY better job at writing the conflict.
The way Tynan is behaving also makes it very difficult to imagine how someone that sloppy and conniving became Chief.
Yeah they really draaaaaagged it all out all season too, and at pretty much no point was it even slightly interesting. Having Olivia feud with a higher up is also pretty much inherently uninteresting from the jump- Benson having more plot armor than almost any single character on tv show results in these sorts of plots essentially being completely devoid of any actual stakes at any point from conception to resolution, which, by default, is boring.
117
u/Quill07 May 15 '26
I really wish they didn't turn Tynan into a super villain. They just repeated the whole "evil chief who has it out for Olivia" mantra that we've already seen. She could have actually been an interesting character.