Written By Jonathan Greene
Directed By David Platt
Stabler is injured by a suspect who previously locked a teenage girl in the trunk of his rental car; the subsequent trial forces Novak to face the truth about her former fiancé.
Tropes
- Bland-Name Product: Enterprise Rent-A-Car becomes Escape Rent-A-Car.
- Continuity Nod: Olivia brings up Casey's schizophrenic ex-boyfriend when complaining about Casey's attempts to prove Saul's insanity.
- Deadpan Snarker: McCoy sarcastically congratulates Novak for her success as Saul Picard's defense attorney.
- Death Seeker: Saul Picard is so ashamed of his misdeeds that he wants to be executed for them. He considers being put in a mental hospital a Fate Worse than Death because the medication he's prescribed causes him to remember everything he did to his victims, which makes him feel worse.
- Double-Meaning Title: Stabler is temporarily blinded by the perp. Novak and Benson are each figuratively blinded by personal reasons for pursuing different approaches to the case.
- Explain, Explain... Oh, Crap!: The detectives are able to find their culprit very early — Saul Picard, a man who kidnapped and raped a young girl — but, he seems that he has an airtight alibi as the car used was a rental and he has no idea how it was used in the act as it was obviously checked in. As the detectives are talking to forensics, they mention that some of the muck found in the car came from Lake Pontchartrain, a place the man had been... and it suddenly dawns on them they had been had. Saul got a good headstart on the run as the detectives realize he had turned in the car, but must have came back and stole it when it was haphazardly left unguarded, unlocked and with the keys in the ignition.
- Freudian Excuse: Saul witnessed the gang rape of his eleven-year-old sister as a teenager and froze. The resulting trauma triggered his schizophrenia, which manifests itself as a recurring psychotic episode where he reenacts the rape.
- Greater-Scope Villain: The boys who gang raped Saul's sister triggered his mental illness and are indirectly responsible for his later attacks and the events of this episode.
- It's All My Fault: After he attempts suicide, the ending implies Saul will never stop blaming himself for the rapes.
- It's Personal: The episode has a double dose of this trope: the episode features a child rapist named Saul Picard who was suffering from schizophrenia and badly injured Elliot while suffering a psychotic break, rendering him temporarily blind. Casey ends up botching the ensuing court case to get him declared incompetent to stand trial (even though he wanted to be extradited to Louisiana, where child rape is punishable by death) and sent to a psychiatric facility, due to her experience with a mentally ill fiancé some years back that she thought she could help him and Picard. Olivia is quite pissed as a result and rats Picard out to the Feds (so they can extradite Picard to Louisiana) and rats Casey out to Jack McCoy because she, personally, wanted to see Picard convicted and executed as revenge for Elliot without getting her hands dirty. Casey and Olivia confront each other over how they've each been manipulating the handles of this case and make amends by the end of the episode but you can't help but wonder how neither of them got into serious trouble for bringing their personal vendettas to the case.
- Obliviously Evil: Saul was suffering psychotic breaks when he committed the rapes and genuinely didn't know what he was doing. He was reliving the day his sister was attacked, only in his delusion he managed to save her.
- Revenge Before Reason: A major example of this is where Olivia deliberately informs the feds of a perp's location, knowing that he would be sent back to Louisiana to be executed. All to get revenge for him headbutting Elliot into a car window, which caused him to go blind (He got better). And after Casey calls her out on it, she informs the DA that she threw the case (Which she did, but that's another issue).
- Soft Glass: Averted in that Elliot gets headbutted through a police car window with enough force to shatter it. The blow knocks him out, gives him a concussion, and temporary brain damage that puts him in a short coma, and making him temporary blind when he woke up.
- Temporary Blindness: Stabler.
