Law & Order: SVU: When Goldberg Treated Elliot Stabler Like Brett Hart

Nice to have you back for our next look at how the worlds of professional wrestling and television collided in some very interesting ways. Our first go-around threw a ton of love & respect at “Rowdy” Roddy Piper for his contributions to FXX’s It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia as “Da’ Maniac” and speculated about what could’ve been. And then, we looked at how The Big Show” (“The Giant”) Paul Wight nearly stole NBC’s Saturday Night Live from Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson when The Rock hosted back in March 2000. Last week, we continued on the theme with a look at how Vince McMahon‘s WWE & Saturday Night’s Main Event helped SNL at a time when it was fighting to hold onto its Saturday night timeslot. But this time around, we’re going back 15 years to that moment when Bill Goldberg took out Law & Order and Happy! star Christopher Meloni… on screen, of course.

The precinct smackdown took place in 2007’s Law & Order: SVU S08E13 “Loophole” (directed by David Platt and written by Jonathan Greene), with Goldberg playing a character whose name just screams irony, Cupid. Except this “Cupid” isn’t slinging arrows looking to make love connections. No, our Cupid is drugged out of his bald skull and looking to force the precinct to have to make some serious redecorating decisions. So what nefarious role does Goldberg’s Cupid play in the episode’s storyline? Well, not much, because he’s pretty much an opening scene one-and-done. With “Loophole” focusing on a company that’s testing toxic chemicals on the tenants of an apartment building, Goldberg’s appearance was a device to set up Elliot Stabler (Meloni) not being able to work the case with Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay). And how did Cupid accomplish that? By throwing Stabler through one of the office windows, but not before Stabler tries to take him out with a fire extinguisher. Even Olivia can’t take him down for long with a taser. Finally, it’s a chair shot to the head that takes Cupid down. No, not from Bret Hart… from Finn (Ice-T). Now here’s a look back at the scene: