September 21, 2011: The 13th season premiere episode of Law & Order Special Victims Unit aired.
The episode was the first without Christopher Meloni playing Elliot Stabler, whose character was forced to shoot and kill a teen girl who was shooting up perpetrators responsible for the rape and murder of her mother. Off-screen, the character resigned due to the trauma of the shooting and ended his 12-year career as an SVU detective, leaving his partner Detective Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) without the man who was by her side for so many years.
Fast forward to April 1st of this year, and Meloni as Stabler will return for a guest spot on SVU ahead of the debut of Law & Order: Organized Crime, which will star Meloni as Stabler.
In a brief teaser released after Thursday’s episode of SVU, Benson is at the scene of the crime when she hears Stabler call her name “Liv!” Benson turns around with a look of shock on her face and whispers her old partner’s name, as if daring to believe her eyes.
It’s a reunion that fans have long been waiting for. Indeed, Hargitay told People magazine in this week’s cover story of the reunion that the fans never got over Meloni’s departure from the series.
“In television, when somebody leaves, obviously there’s a grieving period,” Hargitay told People. “But the fans never moved on. And I think that is just so incredibly beautiful and so incredibly powerful.”
Hargitay noted she was sad about Meloni’s departure, which happened due to contract negotiations failing behind-the-scenes.
“We started this thing and built it together,” she said. “And we went through so many milestones and spent so much time together and understood so many things that nobody else could understand.
“I had to do so many mental gymnastics and sort of do a reinvention in my own mind, which of course turned out to be a gift, as any sort of growth is. But I was scared; I was sad.”
Meloni, however, noted that Hargitay was left with the familiarity of what they were. He described his departure from SVU as “inelegant.”
“At the end of the day, how it was handled was, ‘Okay, see you later.’ So I went, ‘That’s fine. We’re all big boys and girls here. See you later.’ And I was off on new adventures and doing what I wanted to do. Telling the stories I wanted to tell,” Meloni said.
“I couldn’t have been happier. But she and I, we stayed connected.”
Indeed, they did. In the intervening years, after Meloni finally started using social media regular, the stars would reunite off-camera and when posting pictures of the reunions, would caption the photos with the hashtag “Partners4Life” or “P4L” for short.
https://twitter.com/Mariska/status/716376287783346176
If the promo is any indication, the reunion between Benson and Stabler on-screen will be emotional. And their connection, the stars say, immediately came back when the cameras started rolling.
“It was Pavlovian: Ring that bell and you get right into Stabler and Benson,” Meloni said.
“There was so much shorthand between us, which all goes back to the trust we have,” Hargitay said. “He’s always made me feel like I could just jump off the ledge, the cliff, the bridge, and he would catch me, in so many ways, whether it was comedy or acting or friendship.”
The long-awaited reunion of Benson and Stabler will take place in an SVU episode set to air on April 1.
Leave a Reply