“Law & Order: Very Special Episodes Unit”

Well, someone at “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” must be going through a messy divorce and getting taken by his wife: Tomorrow night’s episode involves an unfaithful wife and a man (Mark Valley) who doesn’t know his son actually isn’t. Another character even gets to rail, briefly, how unfair it is that divorced men must bankroll their exes, their exes’ lovers, and the progeny created by them. As the ugly triangle is revealed, the wife has some unsavory and unpleasant things occur along the way. It forces Stabler (Christopher Meloni) to question whether his recently estranged/now extremely pregnant wife Kathy (Isabel Gillies) is carrying his child.

Actually, this is a curlicue episode where that plotline is only the second of three semi-connected stories, the last of which is the compelling one, involving the much-promo’d scene in which Kathy is direly injured in an auto accident alongside Benson (Mariska Hargitay). That leads into a particularly intense sequence as firemen and paramedics race to rescue Kathy from the crushed car and deliver the baby as she both goes into labor and flatlines.

It all begins innocently enough (by “L&O: SVU” standards, at least) with a 3-year-old lost on the streets with blood on him. Turns out his nanny, who is revealed to be a Mormon slut, has been raped and murdered in his home, and his father is clueless about his wife’s promiscuity.

These plotlines are, more or less, quickly dispatched: Benson gets the perp in the Mormon murder to confess awfully easily; the little boy, focused on assiduously in the early acts, is forgotten by the end, his narrative unresolved.

Which brings us to the cataclysmic car crash. At NBC, vehicles coming out of nowhere to plow into cars carrying main characters have become the new black: “Bionic Woman” is entirely contingent upon one, and there was one on “Chuck” last night. “SVU’s,” as melodramatic as it is, rather ingeniously complicates the relationship between Stabler and Benson, who, you may recall, got cozy while he was estranged from Kathy.

The “Law & Order” franchise has rather assiduously avoided its characters’ personal lives, but at least here, now that they’re embracing them, they’ve found a pretty compelling way to do so.

- “Law & Order:” Special Victims Unit: 10 p.m. Tuesday, NBC Channel 4.