Summary: In a heartbreaking opening scene, a young boy is found dead on a carousel. SVU’s detectives discover that the boy was beaten up in a sort of juvenile Fight Club, where dads force their sons to maul each other, and bet on them like a dog fight. Elliott tries to get one of the boys to talk, but the kid’s mother, herself a victim of domestic abuse, won’t let the kid give evidence against his stepfather. Then the police are called to the family’s house and find Stepdad with a bullet in his skull, pregnant Mom beaten to a bloody pulp, and the boy with a gun in his trembling hand. The heartless DA insists on bringing murder charges against the boy, because the downward angle of the gunshot suggests Stepdad was kneeling and thus not an immediate threat when he was shot. But the prosecution falls apart when Mom takes the stand and claims she killed her husband. In the end, the detectives can’t determine whether Mom or the boy fired the shot. Both walk.
Verdict: B+
What they got wrong: Does anyone else feel like they’re watching an Apple commercial instead of a police drama sometimes? Like when Elliot viewed surveillance video on his iPad? Please. In my office, I have a dusty TV/VCR combo (which I bought myself because the office VCR is a silicone-sucking shredding machine). My VCR is the right medium for most of the surveillance tapes we get. Some surveillance video comes on CD, and I watch that on my desktop computer. iPads? In my dreams. Same goes for the iPods that both detectives wield, and that floor-to-ceiling plasma screen the SVU police gather around to instantly access mug shots, DNA results, census data, and moving GPS cell-phone dots. Most police stations will get that equipment around the time they’ll get their flying cars.
Also, although there is a disturbing trend of little kids pummeling each other in lightweight versions of Fight Club, I haven’t heard of any ring where dads force their sons to fight so they can bet on the outcome.
What they got right: This was an impressively realistic portrayal of the dynamics of family violence (this dynamic plays a pivotal role in my book, Law of Attraction). The pregnant mom, snarling at Det. Stabler, refuses to testify against the man who regularly beats her (and who’s also the father of her unborn baby). She even refuses to cooperate when she knows the man is brutally beating her son. I’ve had so many cases where the mother protects her boyfriend instead of the child he’s abusing, sometimes even perjuring herself to free the man who maimed her child.
The scene where the boy shoots Stepdad also struck a personal chord with me because it was similar to a case I once handled. In my case, an 18-year-old boy had grown up watching his stepfather periodically beat his mother. Mom never pressed charges. One day, while the parents argued in their car, Stepdad punched Mom in the face. The boy, who was sitting in the backseat, pulled out a knife and stabbed Stepdad in the neck, severing the man’s spine and putting him in a permanent paraplegic and vegetative state. There was hot disagreement among the prosecutors about whether to bring charges against the boy. Tragically, the boy himself died shortly afterwards.
All views expressed on this blog are mine alone and do not necessarily represent the views of the U.S. Department of Justice.