Written By Ruth Fletcher Gage and Christos N Gage
Directed By David Platt
The body of a baby girl born with a rare genetic disorder is found inside a cooler. ADA Cabot has to put aside her own feelings to prosecute the child's mother for the murder, which may have happened due to the mother's infidelity being at risk of exposure.
Tropes
- Abusive Parents: Roger Swanson is this towards his children. His wife isn’t treated much better.
- All Jews Are Ashkenazi: When it’s revealed the baby in the cooler had Tay-Sachs, Huang mentions that Tay-Sachs is prominent in the Ashkenazi-Jewish community, leading them to the child’s parents.
- Blunt "Yes": Roger Swanson asks Stabler if he's threatening him. Stabler responds, "Yeah."
- Converting for Love: Daniel was born and raised Catholic, but he converted to Judaism when he and Andrea married. This clues in the detectives and Daniel himself that he is not Sarah's father, as it is extremely improbable for Daniel to be a Tay-Sachs carrier.
- Framing the Guilty Party: Legally, Andrea is unambiguously guilty, since euthanasia is illegal, but there's a risk the jury will acquit her via jury nullification. So the ADA poisons the jury against her by suggesting she murdered her baby in order to hide her affair, even though murdering the infant doesn't hide the affair and she seems sincere in her grief, not sociopathc. The ADA afterwards complains that the jury based their decision not on the relevant issue of the case, but "because I turned her into a whore".
- Freeze-Frame Bonus: Daniel and Andrea can been seen wearing black armbands on their forearms, as is part of the custom for Shiva.
- Good Girls Avoid Abortion: Averted with Patty Swanson, who chose to terminate her pregnancy, and then played with to an extent- Patty says she "killed [her] baby" by having the abortion.
- Gory Discretion Shot:
- The episode opened with two guys finding a drowned baby Sarah in a cooler. Her body is never seen throughout the episode.
- Notably, one of the crime scene techs on the scene notes to the detectives that the discoverers mercifully closed the lid.
- Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: It’s later revealed that Sarah wasn’t Daniel’s natural child.
- Mercy Kill: Played with. Andrea gave Sarah a lethal dose on antidepressants when she learned of her Tay-Sachs diagnosis. Because Sarah was conceived out of an extramarital affair, it’s debated among members of the SVU squad whether Andrea’s actions count as this or Offing the Offspring.
- Specifically, Sarah's genetic disease had the potential to expose Andrea's affair (as Daniel was not Jewish by birth, the chance of him and Andrea having a child with Tay-Sachs was almost nothing).
- The truth remains ambiguous by the end of the episode. Notably, at the trial, it is pointed at that Andrea killed Sarah months before she would have begun suffering the effects of Tay-Sachs - but killing the infant once its genetic condition is known does not conceal the affair, and Andrea seems sincere in her grief, not sociopathic.
- Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: If Andrea really did commit murder in order to conceal her affair, the plot backfired by actually exposing to public view the affair she was trying to conceal.
- Out-of-Character Moment: In this episode, when Alex says she assumed Munch was pro-euthanasia, he says he is, 'for legal, consenting adults'. Meanwhile, in an episode during the next season ("Painless"), he seems to be vehemently against it.
- Slut-Shaming: Cabot complains that the jury convicted because of this, not the infanticide.
- Title Drop: After Dr. Warner's assessment, Benson concludes it was a mercy killing.
