Written By Dawn De Noon
Directed by Aaron Lipstadt
The case of a kidnapped 18-year-old girl is complicated when detectives receive a dubious offer of help from a supposed psychic who claims to have seen the girl in his visions.
Tropes:
- Babies Make Everything Better: Both averted and deconstructed. Carlene attempted this trope, thinking that if she and Henry had a baby, he would stop raping young girls. But since Henry refuses to have sex with his own wife, Carlene resorts to murdering a pregnant woman and cutting the baby out of her. Not surprisingly, this did nothing to change Henry's behavior, and only forced them to flee their native Canada.
- Baby Be Mine: Since Sebastian wouldn't sleep with Carlene due to her not being a virgin when they got married, she can't invoke Babies Make Everything Better the normal way. Instead, she murdered a pregnant woman and cut the baby out of her.
- Beware the Silly Ones: Carlene initially comes off as a dim Stepford Smiler, but it turns out she's murdered all of Henry's rape victims, as well as the biological mother of her baby.
- Cold Reading: Done to the cops by Sebastian/Henry Pallaver.
- Comically Missing the Point: A very dark example at the end: Carlene asks with complete sincerity if their "son" Henry Jr. will be allowed to visit her if she goes to prison. That she could even think that there's an "if"—aside from being an accomplice to her husband Sebastian, she murdered the boy's real mother and that there's no way in hell the woman's grieving widower—the boy's real father—would allow that comes as a total shock to her, with her whining, "But I'm the only mother he knows!"
- Description Cut: After Stabler kicks in the door (illegally) to Sebastian's apartment, Fin hurriedly takes out his phone and says "You better hope Novak can bootstrap us a warrant" it cuts to Casey's office:Casey: Has he lost his mind!?! You tell them to get out of there, now.
- Domestic Abuse: More the emotional kind, but Henry has clearly emotionally manipulated his wife into compliance with his crimes. He later tries to strangle her after she confesses everything to the police.
- I Lied: Henry is typically shameless with this tropeCarlene: Henry, please, you said if I did all those things for you, you'd never leave me, you promised me!
Henry: I lied! - It's All My Fault: Thanks to Henry's manipulation and emotional abuse, Carlene tearfully declares this regarding his abhorrent behavior, genuinely believing as he says, that he wouldn't have needed to rape virgins had she been one.
- Living Lie Detector: Sebastian Ballentine is a serial killer, who uses his skills to pretend to be a psychic and play games with his victims' families. Incidentally, the system he supposedly uses is real. It was developed by the guy who inspired Lie to Me. Though he cheats too. He correctly "guesses" that Olivia's lying to him and she doesn't have a husband, but later we learn that he knew it because he searched for her (and Elliot) on the internet beforehand.
- Love Martyr: Sebastian has browbeaten Carlene into compliance with his crimes. Even as he calls her a whore and blames her for his being caught, she still weeps and wails about how much she loves him and doesn't understand why he doesn't reciprocate after she did everything he told her to.
- Nature Adores a Virgin: Horribly. Sebastian/Henry is obsessed with having sex with virgins, to the point that he can't perform if his partner isn't one.
- Never My Fault: Sebastian/Henry blames Carlene for his need to rape virgins because she lied about being one before they were married. Stabler sees right through the excuse, not that it matters to Sebastian/Henry.
- Patched Together from the Headlines: The episode's an adaptation of the Karla Homolka/Paul Bernardo case
as well as the case of Serial Killer Michel Fourniret and his wife Monique (the detail about them meeting via a prison pen pal program and his insistence that she procure virgins for him because she wasn't one, as well as the way they kidnapped their victims) before its Twist Ending reveals that it was also ripped from the headlines of the Bobbie Jo Stinnett murder, who was murdered and had her baby cut out. The baby survived. - Phony Psychic: Sebastian/Henry isn't psychic, he's the killer.
- Police Psychic: Sebastian steps in to offer the detectives at SVU a hand with their latest case of a missing teenager by offering visions of her location. His powers are called into doubt by the unit, and it is eventually revealed that he is not only a fraud, he is actually the episode's perpetrator, as his routine is ruined by his wife and her attempts to perform tasks for him while he is teasing the detectives. Part of his thrills come from offering his "services" to the police, knowing full well that they will fail to catch him.
- Post-Rape Taunt: The entire episode turns out to be the trope, after The Reveal that Sebastian was the rapist and murderer all along. He tells the detectives that he pretended to be a psychic just to watch in amusement the efforts to catch him, and he talks about the one victim he raped and murdered as "the best sex I ever had".
- Running Gag: Munch and Fin once again have to go dumpster diving.
- Sexless Marriage: Sebastian/Henry and Carlene had an especially extreme one: they had literally never had sex because Sebastian/Henry was only attracted to virgins. Carlene had pretended she was a virgin, thinking she could fool him, but she couldn't.
- Sherlock Can Read: Dr. Huang explains how Sebastian could be making so many correct statements about the detectives by using this trope. While that's part of it, they later discover he's subscribed to a service that searches public records, and he's used it to look up details about the detectives like Olivia being unmarried, which is how he knew she was lying about her "husband."
- Shout-Out: Huang basically outlines the premise of Lie to Me, including namedropping Lightman's real-life counterpart, Paul Ekman.
- Skewed Priorities: Stabler is more bemused by the fact that Carlene has never had sex with her husband than by the fact that she butchered a pregnant woman and stole her baby. Or maybe it's a case of genre savviness that he thinks the one is more surprising than the other.
- Slut-Shaming: Henry cruelly does this to Carlene, referring to her as "used goods" and a "whore" and refusing to have sex with her, all because she had the audacity to not be a virgin when they met.
- Smug Snake: Henry is so unflappable that even at the end of the episode he's smirking at Stabler about how he's "beginning to grow on" Stabler.
- The Sociopath: Sebastian Ballentine/Henry Palaver. He kidnaps and rapes any girl he thinks is a virgin and manipulates his wife into murdering them. He then plays around with the SVU, despite risking getting himself caught. Even after he is caught, he seems more amused than afraid.
- Technical Virgin: Carlene abstained from sex for the time before Sebastian was released from prison and they could consummate their marriage—"I was a virgin for those two years. . . just not before".
