Written By Michael S Chernuchin and Julie Martin
Directed By Alex Chapple
A woman takes a man she claims is her rapist/trafficker hostage and films her "interrogation" of him via livestream on the man's cellphone. When Benson arrives at the location to try and diffuse the situation, she herself is taken hostage and finds out the woman was telling the truth: her fellow hostage is a vicious pimp and kidnapper who abducted the woman a while ago and held her captive. As the hostage siege gets more dangerous, Benson tries to put it to a stop before lives are lost.
Tropes
- Artistic License – Law Enforcement: Benson gives her gun up and allows herself to be handcuffed after Lourdes takes another cop hostage, which cops are trained not to do.
- Asshole Victim: Lourdes has been horribly raped in the past, but she is callous and violently abusive not only to her rapist but to completely innocent cops who have arrived on scene, who she takes hostage and threatens with death, and to the owner of the apartment she's holed up in, whose skull she fractures. When she burns Miguel and Benson is distressed at the sight Lourdes tells her she didn't want Benson to "miss the best part".
- Chandler's Law: Benson comes through the door, gun in hand, when the attempted coerced confession plot is beginning to bog down.
- Driven to Suicide: averted, Lourdes tries to make Miguel jump to his death but he will not.
- Engineered Public Confession: Lourdes takes Benson hostage so Benson can be a witness to the confession she is trying to extract from Miguel.
- Groin Attack: Lourdes repeatedly puts her gun to Miguel's crotch in order to make him confess to raping and sexually enslaving her.
- Hostage Situation: Yet another episode in which an SVU detective is taken hostage.
- Jump Scare: Lourdes goes out on the balcony, out of sight, after suggesting she has nothing left to live for and we hear a shot - but she comes back in and it turns out she considered but rejected killing herself and the sound was unrelated - the cops discover it was a starter pistol and its location helps them find the apartment.
- Potty Emergency: Miguel, tied up, tells Lourdes he needs to pee. After she burns him with a cigarette he loses control.
- Rape as Backstory: Lourdes' rape occurs well before the episode begins.
- Sadistic Choice: Miguel tried to make Lourdes choose which of her sex slave friends would be murdered. When she could not choose he killed both of them.
- Sex Slave: Lourdes was one of these.
- "We're Live" Realization: for most of the episode the detectives (and the audience) are watching Lourdes try to extract a private confession from Miguel, unaware that a webcam is broadcasting their activity (though he is aware). When she discovers the webcam she freaks out, then has Benson act as witness so as to make the confession she is engineering a public one.
- Your Princess Is in Another Castle!: the cops track down the location of the webcam, burst in - and it is empty. Turns out the location is spoofed and they still have no idea where the real hostage situation is going on.
