Written By Daniel Truly
Directed By Peter Leto
A sugar daddy is the prime suspect when the body of his younger mistress is found stuffed inside a suitcase and left near train tracks, but soon thing get more complicated when the CEO of a dating website (Eric McCormack) is also revealed to have been involved with the deceased.
This episode provides examples of:
- Actually Pretty Funny: When trying to locate a witness with an online alias "The Master Baiter" over the store's P.A, Stabler and Benson's reactions suggest this.
- Affably Evil: Everybody who knows him personally loves Vance Shepard, regarding him as a fun guy and great to be with. Subverted when it turns out that he's at worst a lousy father.
- Age-Gap Romance: Vance and Emily are declared to have been in genuine love, despite their age difference.
- Apologetic Attacker: Chantelle says she's sorry before killing her dad. Subverted, though, as she's not truly apologetic and expresses no regret afterwards.
- Armor-Piercing Question: Chantelle attempts this on Benson, suggesting (after Benson has told her covering up murder is not the way a father should show his love for his daughter) that maybe Benson's father never really loved her. Benson No-Sells it with a Shut Up, Hannibal!, agreeing that her fathernote never loved her but saying it doesn't matter, she still knows Vance's behavior was wrong.
- Artistic License – Law: No police branch would ever have allowed the Shepards to meet in the middle of the SVU offices under the circumstances that they did, because it would be too dangerous either to the Shepards or the police themselves. But if they hadn't, then we wouldn't have gotten a trademark L&O:SVU Downer Ending.
- At arraignment Shepard wants to enter the guilty plea but his lawyer tells him to shut up and enters the not guilty plea. No one even comments on it or try to clarify if that's what Shepard really wants, even when Shepard loudly objects. While it's usually a good idea to listen to your lawyer, the client has the final say and the lawyer can't just overrule the client's decision.
- Bait-and-Switch:
- Initially, Vance seems sincerely innocent and likable. So of course he turns out to be the killer. And then it's flipped when it turns out he really was innocent of killing Emily after all.
- Initially, Vance's assistant Lysette claims she lied to provide Vance with an alibi for having not killed Emily. It then turns out that whilst that was true, she was also lying to provide Vance with evidence he had killed Emily.
- Be Careful What You Say: When Vance Shepard finally confesses that it was his daughter (and not himself) who murdered his girlfriend, he notes that at the time she looked as if she might kill him too. When SVU gives him a few moments to say goodbye to her before they arrest her, she buries a pair of scissors in his neck.
- Females Are More Innocent: Subverted. Pamela is a cold-blooded sugar girl who is completely shameless about her lifestyle consisting of trading sexual favors for expensive financial gifts from her "sugar daddies". Chantelle turns out to have killed Emily in jealousy over Emily and then ruthlessly kills her father because he failed to live up to his promise to keep her from going to jail for the crime she committed.
- Foreshadowing:
- When they discretely interview Emily's fellow sugar girl Pamela, she declares that Emily was an "idiot" who fell in love with her sugar daddy - Vance Shepard. This adds veracity to Vance's own claim of being in love with her, which sets things up for The Reveal that Vance's daughter Chantelle is the killer.
- When being interrogated about his ex-wife's claims, Vance declares that his wife is "crazy", and has "anger management issues". It turns out her daughter has inherited these same failings, which lead her to kill first Emily and then her father.
- Green-Eyed Monster: Chantelle killed Emily because she was so jealous that this girl, barely older than her, got her father's love and attention, whilst his father was never around much for her.
- Hypochondria: Vance explicitly calls his ex-wife Joyce a hypochondriac, declaring that she got herself a double mastectomy solely because she'd watched a program about women with a genetic trait towards breast cancer, even though her own doctor pointed out that she had neither the gene nor a family history of breast cancer nor any sign of having it. This was the final straw and he ultimately divorced her.
- Idiot Ball: The Detectives allowing the Ax-Crazy daughter of Vance hug him inside a precinct full of potentially lethal office supplies is baffling.
- Intentionally Awkward Title: The geocacher challenger that SVU has to locate to help find Emily's killer uses the title "The Master Baiter" on their website. They turn out to be a woman, ironically.
- It's All About Me: Vance implies that Joyce was an extremely selfish and self-centered woman, which is part of why their marriage broke down — her daughter inherited this same trait, as her two murders prove. Before killing her father, she defends letting him take the blame for her murder as proving that he loves her and claims that Benson's father mustn't have loved her. Benson cuts down her argument by admitting that her father didn't love her, but she can still see that this whole scenario is wrong.
- "Not So Different" Remark: As Stabler has broken down Vance's story in interrogation, the latter says he can see in Stabler's eyes that Stabler would also do anything to protect his daughter.
- Not What It Looks Like: Or what is sounds like in the episode, where the only clue the detectives have to the identity of a witness is an online alias.Stabler: *over a store's PA* "Will the 'Master Baiter', please report to register 1? 'Master Baiter', register 1?"
A homely looking nerd starts walking towards the register.
Benson: *over the PA* "Not a masturbator, the ' Master Baiter '!" - Online Alias: The episode has a woman who goes by "The Master Baiter" online (she obscures her face and distorts her voice when she films her videos).
- Papa Wolf: Though he was often an absentee father, Vance dearly loves his daughter Chantelle, so much so that he first tried to cover up her murder of the girl he loved, and then to paint himself as the killer so she wouldn't go to jail. Stabler protests that he took it too far, but Vance simply scoffs that Stabler would do the exact same thing.
- Samus Is a Girl: Everyone refers to The Master Baiter as "he", but she's actually a woman, who uses voice and image distortion in her videos. It's unknown if she does it intentionally to hide her gender, or just to make the videos more mysterious.
- Self-Made Orphan: Chantelle cold-bloodedly murders her own father by stabbing him in the neck with a pair of scissors
