After Law And Order’s Kelli Giddish Hyped The ‘Creepiest Scene’ On the Way, I’m Flashing Back To The Only SVU Episode I Can’t Rewatch

Kelli Giddish returned to Law & Order: SVU as a series regular in Season 27, and her biggest case of the season as Amanda Rollins aired early in the 2026 TV schedule. It was an action-packed hour that opened with an attack on Carisi, and deeply unsettled the Special Victims sergeant by bringing back a murderer she’d encountered before.

Giddish opened up about an upcoming episode that gave her chills, and that says a lot coming from an actress who has been filming episodes of the NBC series for well over a decade. It reminded me that there's one episode in recent years that I can't imagine rewatching any time soon.

SVU's Chill-Inducing Upcoming Episode

With the big Rollisi episode available streaming with a Peacock subscription now, Kelli Giddish spoke with TV Insider about what’s to come as Season 27 continues. While she didn’t name which episode she’s alluding to or when it will air, the actress hinted at a case that’s going to be quite troubling even by SVU standards. She said:

Considering that Kelli Giddish started on SVU as a series regular (after a brief guest role years earlier) in Season 13, she has been around for some of the darkest arcs of the entire series. She was present for the William Lewis episodes, the Henry Mesner multi-parter that was just revisited, and many cases that were ripped from the headlines. By this point, it seems like an episode would have to be quite heavy to be chill-inducting.

While she didn’t spoil details about this particular episode with its “creepiest” scene, Giddish did only have good things to say about getting scripts for SVU:

That’s high praise for an actress who is on her fifteenth season and isn’t too far off from her 300th episode in the Law & Order franchise. The first female showrunner in the history of SVU took the reins for Season 27 after penning some iconic episodes for Benson and Stabler early on, so this has been a new era for a long-running show.

I’ve personally seen many episodes of this long-running show, some of them more than once. At the time of writing, however, there is one that sticks out to me that I have no urge to put myself through watching again, and that’s largely due to Peter Scanavino.

The Most Recent Episode I Can't Rewatch

The episode I’m referring to was the fall finale of Season 26, called “Cornered” and originally airing in late November of 2024. It featured Carisi getting roped into a hostage situation by sheer happenstance and bad timing, with the bad guys a pair of criminals just looking to rob the store. Peter Scanavino’s performance was intense enough that I recall forgetting momentarily that I was watching Law & Order: SVU and – to quote the opening narration – ”sexually-based offenses” that are “considered especially heinous” were bound to be on the way.

That said, it wasn’t only Scanavino’s performance that hit me so hard back then that it still packs a punch today. I have to give credit to guest star Paige Herschell, who played Tess, a young woman who was assaulted in a side room of the deli while Carisi was held at gunpoint just outside, listening the whole time. When Tess was released from the deli, she let out a scream of so much anguish and pain that the commercial break came as a relief.

So, it made sense that Carisi was left with PTSD after his part of the ordeal, and Peter Scanavino shared with CinemaBlend that he only watched the episode himself once. I admittedly did watch it for a second time before I spoke with the longtime SVU star, and that’s about as many times as I think I can manage it without the passage of some more time.

It leaves me wondering how the episode that Kelli Giddish described as giving her chills will compare! Only one episode is left before a mini hiatus kicks off when coverage of the 2026 Winter Olympics takes over primetime. For now, be sure to tune in to NBC on Thursday, January 29 at 9 p.m. ET for the final episode of Law & Order: SVU before late February.