Season six of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, gets off to a powerful (and timely) start with the episode Birthright, about a disreputable fertility doctor who plans to rob an embryo bank for his own purposes. Several subsequent episodes likewise showcase respectable authority figures who are anything but: Debt finds the SVU unit exposing a crooked immigration attorney who is involved in a prostitution ring, and Obscene features two teenagers whose lives are destroyed by publicity-hungry adults. This season also offers a number of personal shakeups for several familiar characters. For starters, Det. Elliot Stabler (Christopher Meloni) is bluntly informed that his wife has left him and taken the children in Doubt. And former Assistant DA Alexandra Cabot (Stephanie March), presumed murdered by Colombian drug lords during the previous season, emerges from the Witness Protection Program to confront her enemies in Ghost -- thereby forcing Stabler and Det. Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) to perjure themselves by claiming they were unaware that Cabot was still alive. In the season's most talked-about development, former Murder, She Wrote star Angela Lansbury is cast as the stern, cold-blooded mother of a rape suspect in Night -- the first episode of a two-part story which would be concluded on another branch of the Law & Order family tree, Law & Order: Trial by Jury.

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