Recap: Wow. I think SVU’s excellent writers stepped out for a coffee break, and while they were gone, the guys who wrote Saw IV snuck in and wrote the manuscript for tonight’s show.
In the opening scene, we find the tattooed corpse of a lithe young woman behind a dumpster. She’s been raped in every possible way. Her face has been sanded down to the bone by a power sander, her teeth have all been extracted, and her fingers amputated to conceal her identity. (Ugh. I had to put aside my popcorn.) Our detectives soon find that she was Lena, a beautiful Russian mail-order bride. Her distraught American fiancee paid supposed kidnappers an $80,000 ransom to save her life. The fiancee is devastated that she was killed although he coughed up his life savings.
But Lena is actually alive! With the help of facial recognition technology, the detectives find recent pictures of her online. They discover that a Russian crime boss called The Butcher works this scam: he gets a rich man to fall in love with Lena, convinces the sucker that she’s been kidnapped, then demands all his money. After the money is collected, The Butcher then murders and tattoos a different prostitute in order to convince the sucker that Lena is really dead. Similarly mutilated corpses have appeared in dumpsters around the world.
Captain Cragen goes undercover and has a “date” with Lena. In the process of talking with her, Cragen gets teary-eyed as he describes his late wife, their attempts to have children, and his drive to help save needy children. Cragen falls in love with Lena, at least a little bit. I thought this was the best part of the show. The acting in these scenes was great, and I liked backstory for our devoted Captain.
Cragen soon arrests Lena, and she spends the next few scenes toying with the Captain’s heart like a kitten with a ball of yarn. But when Detective Amanda kills The Butcher (nice shot!), Lena snatches a gun off of a uniformed policeman, shoots him dead, and tries to run away. Although Cragen’s eyes are haunted, he catches her and hauls her off to prison.
Verdict: C-
What they got wrong: The prostitute killings made absolutely no sense. Sure, there could be a scam where you get someone to fall in love with you, pretend to be kidnapped, and then take their ransom money. Unlikely but possible. But then why kill and tattoo another woman to make it look like you actually died? At that point, you have the guy’s money. You’re not getting any more money by supplying a mutilated corpse. All you’re doing is upping your crime from fraud – where you might serve probation – to first-degree murder with aggravating circumstances, where you’re going to jail for the rest of your life. And why rape the corpses of these dead prostitutes? Just to make the guy who was scammed even more upset and likely to help the police? I’ve never heard of this scam happening in real life. This was more Texas Chainsaw Massacre than a real sex crimes investigation.
What they got right: The Russian mail-order bride business is so rife with fraud that the State Department has a name for it: “Boris-and-Natasha scams.” A lonely bachelor in Scranton meets doe-eyed Natasha online, falls in love, and sends her money for airline tickets to visit him. In fact, Natasha is a bearded guy named Boris, who’s no longer available for online chats after he pockets the cash. The typical haul is between $2,000 and $5,000. (No mutilated corpses are necessary.)
Facial recognition technology is being used more and more by law-enforcement authorities. A friend of mine (actually my high-school prom date), Steve Russell, created a private facial-recognition company called 3VR, which is being used in many airports and hotels to provide security.
Other companies have found more recreational uses for the technology. Facebook can recognize your friends’ faces and tag photos of them automatically. There’s a company offering facial-detection programs for the patrons of local bars, so you can remotely check out the male-to-female ratio before deciding whether to head over there. And one matchmaking company even claims it can find your soulmate by pairing you with someone who has facial features similar to your own.
I really liked this episode. About as close to logic and realism as the tenets of Scientology, but very entertaining. And Ice T had some of the coolest, funniest lines since this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gd2NBZ_apg0 .
And to get back to last week’s episode, Wiki says this: “Andre Braugher will be portraying Bayard Ellis on a recurring basis, Ellis is a high-powered defense attorney for the underprivileged who becomes a civil rights champion, he may get close with Detective Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay).”
Sounds a little different from my guess, but something’s going on there.
Hey TokoBali. First off, I loved that Ice-T clip. Thanks for posting it. And I’m looking forward to seeing more of Ellis this season — although he’s there to try to woo Olivia away from SVU…
Agreed, after a series of good-to-great episodes, I thought this was a stink bomb. I suspect the problem was trying to essentially write backwards – someone came up with the idea of building an episode around Cragen, then they ended up creating a story line that didn’t really make any sense to get to that endpoint. I think they did the same thing with the ME, Warner, a couple seasons ago, and I recall that episode being pretty good, but this one, not so much…
That would make sense. I’ve heard that the writers are trying to go with more of a ensemble approach, giving the other actors more face time, now that Elliott’s gone.
I thought this was a fine episode, nothing special but enjoyable all the same. A bad episode of SVU IMO is still better than a lot of what’s on TV today.
Of course, the only reason to rape and kill the prostitute was so the writers could justify bringing in the SVU detectives, otherwise its a simple fraud/scam. Though they could have said something about them using the technique to keep the working girls in line or something like that.
Anyway, I did enjoy them showcasing Cragen. Well-acted and interesting stuff. I particularly liked Finn and the others teasing him, giving him undercover advise. And to your point, the emotion he projected with just his expressions were quite convincing. It’s those little moments that make the characters feel so real on this show, I think.
As for your examples of recreational uses of facial recognition tech., let me just say — disturbing.
David DeLee
Fatal Destiny – a Grace deHaviland novel
Yes! I loved the part where Nick and Finn were messing with Cragen.
Oh, and maybe a bit off topic here, but, if you’re not already watching, I recommend checking out PRIME SUSPECT. Interesting show with some of the most realistic banter between squad room cops I’ve seen since HILL STREET BLUES.
David DeLee
Fatal Destiny – a Grace deHaviland novel
Great review and insight!
Thanks, Lulu!
This is late, I know, but I’m just getting around to catching up on SVU. Was the DA’s concern about the detective wearing a wire accurate (something along the lines of “Are you sure you want to do that, what if she says something exculpatory?”, if I’m remember correctly)? Do prosecutors advise cops not to gather certain evidence if there’s a chance it’ll help the defense?
Very interesting. If the subject thinks his companion might be wired, he might make a false exculpatory statement for the purposes of the wire. Self-serving as such a statement might be, the defendant can then make a big deal about it at trial. Prosecutors are often concerned about this.
For example, my husband (also a prosecutor) had a public corruption case where the cooperator was wearing a wire when he met the target, a prominent local politician, for dinner. The target was suspicious and silently mouthed to the cooperator, “Are you wired?” The cooperator froze with nerves, then subtly nodded yes. The rest of the dinner, captured on tape, was full of the cooperator asking the questions and bringing up the old criminal activity as he had been coached to do, and the target falsely denying that anything untoward had happened. Happily for the prosecution, a prior cooperator got conflicting true admissions on a previous tape during the criminal activity.
So the concern is that false exculpatory statements made on a wire (when the person supposedly thinks he’s talking to a confidant) might be more convincing to a jury than false exculpatory statements made during interrogation?
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