Written By Dawn De Noon and Lisa Marie Petersen
Directed By Steve Shill
As this is a Recap, per policy all spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned
A Tibetan woman is found murdered with a foot missing, leading detectives to search for a killer with a foot fetish.
Tropes
- Abusive Parents: Mrs. Krug, Jerry's mother struck her son repeatedly with a frying pan that caused his behavior to shift towards uncontrollable outbursts. She is also known to abuse her younger son, but not as severely as Jerry.
- Big Brother Instinct: What convinces Jerry to testify against his mother is that with him in prison, she'll only have his younger brother to direct her aggression to.
- Citizenship Marriage: What it turns out Kunsong and her husband Preston were in; he's gay and married her to get her out of the hellish conditions in Tibet. His partner is aware of the whole situation.
- Heteronormative Crusader: Shoe fetishist Jerry Dupree kills a woman for her boots. Dr. Huang insists that fetishism is a harmless sexual variation, and a very tragic story is gradually revealed. It turns out that the murderer's mother hated her son for being sexually "abnormal". She tried to "cure" his fetishism by beating him in the head with frying pans and other hard objects, and eventually this abuse caused him permanent brain damage that made him unstable enough to kill a woman by mistake.
- Irony: As lampshaded by Cragen, Kunsong survives and escapes torture in her native Tibet, only to be brutally murdered in the US.
- It Began with a Twist of Fate: Kunsong went into Jerry Dupree's apartment by sheer happenstance because she mixed up the apartment number for a couch seller (she went to #642 instead of #462). Had she not done so, she would not have met such a grisly fate.
- Mistaken for Cheating: The detectives assume Kunsong was having an affair when they learn that she had lunch with another man the day she was killed. It turns out he was her husband's boyfriend; his meeting with Kunsong was to bury the hatchet after her citizenship marriage put a strain on the husband and boyfriend's relationship.
- Motive = Conclusive Evidence: Stabler and Benson show up at the apartment of the man who had lunch with Kunsong the day she was killed and accuse him of being her lover and her murderer, with absolutely zero evidence to support either accusation.
- Never My Fault: As she's being arrested for her crimes, Mrs Krug tries to deny any wrongdoing, claiming that her way of striking Jerry repeatedly with frying pans and other hard objects was done as a way of "fixing him" and even says that she's NOT the one who is sick.
- Red Herring: The detectives first wonder if Kunsong was murdered by one of her tormentors from Tibet, then by either her husband or who they think is her lover. They're wrong on all counts. In particular, her husband's furtive behavior is not because he's her killer, it's because their Citizenship Marriage was fake and he could easily end up in jail for that too.
- Straight Gay: Neither Kunsong's husband Preston or his boyfriend Ryan display a single stereotype, aside from Ryan's apparent fondness for tanning salons.
- Wham Line:"That won't be necessary"
- Preston, off screen, in response to Benson and Stabler demanding that Ryan come to the station with them, as Ryan opens the door to reveal him, thus revealing that they're a couple.
- What Happened to the Mouse??: Preston disappears once it's established that he's gay and wasn't his wife's killer. Given that he clearly genuinely cared about her, even if only in a platonic sense, it's odd that he wouldn't still be invested in seeing her murderer brought to justice.
