Despite the fact that I am (or at least I consider myself to be) Extremely Online, sometimes stuff slips past me, and I just learned that Christopher Meloni is, apparently, returning to play his Law & Order SVU character, Elliot Stabler, in a new show. I was surprised, when I saw this news, how much I actually care. I’m a Law & Order fan, but SVU was never my preferred iteration of the franchise, and I always considered the Stabler character to be pretty corny, honestly. He was angry, Benson was thoughtful. (The dynamic itself was corny.) He flew into a rage and did something crazy, Benson brought him back to earth. Dude was a habitual line-stepper— his rage was his defining characteristic —and yet, somehow, he always got what amounted to a slap on the wrist when he’d flip out and choke another suspect. (My best friend loved to call him ‘Unstabler.’)

But I guess his rage was supposed to be cathartic for the viewer, so they couldn’t have him, like, evolve in any truly meaningful way. In some ways, SVU has always been really progressive, but it still, also, always wants to give us the easy way out. Things really turn out truly bad only because the show wants to make the profound point that Things are Difficult and Complicated, not because, you know, things actually are difficult and complicated. The whole point of the show is that, in the end, it actually is easy, that there’s an answer. We want Stabler to choke the pedophile. We don’t want to think about the pedophile’s rights or how he might be a victim, too. We don’t want to think about larger, systemic and ideological issues that mix violence and masculinity up to the point where they’re indistinguishable. We just want the rush of having that violence turned on the Bad People.

Life has gotten so complicated, and we have to think all the time. That’s the real magic of the Good Old Days, right? That you didn’t have to think. That you knew what was right and who was bad, and if you think there’s a pedophile in your neighborhood then you just get a couple of guys together and you go knock on his door with a shovel in your hand. You get it wrong sometimes, and lots of innocent people would definitely get hurt, but you shrug it off, like Sean Penn at the end of Mystic River, and you don’t think about it. Honestly, it’s a small price to pay for certainty, if you’re not the one paying it.

I suppose that’s the fantasy of Elliot Stabler, actually. That you can have those lizard-brain rage dumps and still be a good, thoughtful guy. Because Stabler is. He was always really, truly trying to protect the helpless and do the right thing. But he saw evil and he couldn’t not act. (And, for him, ‘acting,’ as often as not, meant choking a bitch.) But his impulses were always good, even when his actions weren’t, so we wanted him to get away with only nominal punishment. He had lapses, but he was thoughtful, and the show told us that he could learn and grow.

But this is a fantasy. Elliot Stabler doesn’t exist, in real life, but Donald Trump does. As a general rule, people who don’t want to think neverwant to think, and they only become more unstable when they feel like someone is trying to make them think. They put effort into defending their lack of thoughtfulness and imagination as a virtue, but this is not thinking. It’s yelling and screaming and insisting that instability and stupidity is Very Stable Genius— it’s not thoughtful.

I don’t want Elliot Stabler back. I do think a show that places his crazy ass in this historical moment could have some interesting things to say about masculinity and tolerance and a lot of important things, and I even imagine that a Law & Order show, underneath all the hackiness, would try to tackle some of those things. But I also think that those things would sail right over everyone’s heads, because it would require too much thinking. Even if they wanted to learn, it’s too much trouble to try to explain everything to them, so fuck em.