Written By Dawn De Noon and Lisa Marie Petersen
As this is a Recap page, per policy all SPOILERS are unmarked. You Have Been Warned.
Directed by Ted Kotcheff
A wealthy lawyer, Randolph Morrow (Andrew McCarthy) is suspected of keeping a Romanian woman, linked to her aunt's murder, captive for years. The members of the SVU are interviewed to see if they remain fit for duty. Audra McDonald, Susan Floyd, and Lance Reddick also guest star.
Tropes
- Ambiguous Situation: Morrow, his wife, and their nanny/girlfriend/Sex Slave, Ilena keep the relationship hidden because 1) Ilena is in the country illegally, and also because her conservative aunt and other relatives would not approve of her living in a polyamorous relationship even if consensual; OR 2) because they have kidnapped Ilena and held her against her will until Stockholm Syndrome set in.
- Morrow claims the relationship is Safe, Sane, and Consensual, polyamory and Casual Kink but that might just be Metaphorically True or even Blatant Lies.
- The only outright verification of Morrow being a monster comes from the wife, and only AFTER she admits to murdering Elena's aunt without her husband's knowledge or consent. That does not happen until the detectives pressure her to blame it on her husband as a "Get out of Jail Free" Card.
- As for Ilena, the audience does not hear from her directly. What she told a fruit vendornote that led him to tell the police suggests she was not a willing participant. She's clearly been starved long-term, which is not usually part of a consensual BDSM situation. It's still ambiguous, though, how it played out: was the entire thing forced on Ilena, or did it start with consensual BDSM and then Morrow just pushed it beyond that? (Not that it entirely matters — it's abuse either way.)
- Bondage Is Bad: Justified, as Morrow is into extreme forms of torture.
- Brains and Bondage: Morrow is a high-flying lawyer and a brutal sadist. He also seems to particularly enjoy torturing promising women, as his wife is a vet and Ilena was supposed to go to NYU.
- Cliffhanger: The episode (and season) ends just as Captain Cragen asks Dr. Jackson who among his detectives failed the evaluation.
- Cruel Twist Ending: The squad was able to reprimand the Morrows for their crimes, only for The Reveal in the last minutes of the episode that one of the detectives needs to be removed from The Squad due to failing the psych eval.
- Dark Secret: Both Elliot and Cragen reveal theirs to the psychiatrist; the former on secretly wanting to kill the suspects they catch, the latter for being tempted to fall Off the Wagon numerous times. In Elliot's case, this will take a bite at his reputation in future episodes.
- Dating Catwoman: Jeffries reveals to the psychiatrist that she dated a previous suspect.
- Deadpan Snarker: Munch is in top form during his psych eval.Audrey: Do you always deflect personal questions with jokes?
Munch: Do you always deflect jokes with personal questions? - Ethnic Menial Labor: Ilena works as a nanny and domestic servant for the Morrows. And a Sex Slave. Most of the other Romanians we see are doing some form of menial labor, too.
- Everybody Knows That: One of the most widely known (and deeply horrifying) facts about the Colleen Stan case is that she was kept in a box under her kidnappers' bed. So it's not really a shock when Ilena is found under there at the climax, after Morrow has tormented the detectives with Your Princess Is in Another Castle!.
- Let Me Get This Straight...: Immediately after the opening credits, Cragen sums up the case from The Teaser in this fashion. It's really just Lampshading how absurdly vague the witness report is.Cragen: Let me see if I got this straight — some girl is being sexually abused by some guy somewhere in Manhattan?
Stabler: Something like that. - More Deadly Than the Male: Subverted. It's Morrow's wife who kills Ilena's aunt, but only because she had been totally broken by her husband.
- Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: Twice.
- The detectives call Randolph out on this. He broke his wife so that she killed Ilena's aunt, but he also broke her so badly that she was extremely easy to interrogate and get a confession from.
- There was nothing to hold the Morrows on what they'd done to Ilena, as she denied it and they had no reason to suspect it went any further. Until Mrs. Morrow killed Ilena's aunt, and then the detectives were back on the case.
- Ripped from the Headlines: Based on the Colleen Stan kidnapping case.
- Romanticized Abuse: The episode revels in the details on how a young Romanian woman has been imprisoned, brainwashed and used as sex toy by an American couple. Lots of neatly presented details about the horrors she endured makes for a strange mix of fetish and nausea fuel. Surprisingly, the detectives let the wife off the hook in exchange for selling out her husband, in spite of the fact that she murdered the girl's aunt without even informing her husband about it afterwards, though one could argue that there was some heavy implication that the wife was also the subject of abuse and brainwashing.
- Season Finale: The first ever.
- Sour Outside, Sad Inside: The psychiatrist calls out Munch on how he uses sarcasm to vent out his hang ups.
- Stockholm Syndrome: Discussed, but the extent to which it's set in is ambiguous. Is Ilena keeping quiet when the SVU detectives question her out of fear for her life or is she genuinely broken by the Morrows?
- The Unreveal: It's unknown who among the detectives failed the evaluation, as the episode ends with a Cliffhanger. It is, however, resolved in the subsequent episode.
