Law & Order SVU – Recap & Review – Pop & Possessed

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Law & Order SVU
Pop & Possessed

Original Air Date: Jan 5, 2010

Caitlin- Associate Staff Writer
caitlin@thetwocentscorp.com

Law & Order SVU returns from its break with two episodes in a row. Miraculously, both are reasonably easy to follow and free of absurd plot twists. I’ll keep my fingers crossed for this trend to continue through the rest of the season.

The first case focuses on a group of men that fights young boys for fun- like it’s not bad enough to do it with dogs? The second is about a girl who was once used in child pornography being attacked again by another pedophile.

In the first episode, a young boy is found dead on a carousel with his torso badly bruised. There’s no sign of who he is, and Olivia has to go talk to a witness, so when Elliot tracks the boy to a cab he’d ridden in earlier, he takes Fin with him. The driver turns out to be Joe, the boy’s uncle. The boy’s name is Ethan, and when his mother is notified, she says her son was beat up by another boy at school. That boy’s mother is defiant, and her son claims Ethan hit him first- because his uncle taught him to fight. They track Joe to a park, where they find him and other men arranging fights between boys.

One boy, Nicky, says his stepfather encouraged him to fight. His mother, Sandra, played by Drea De Matteo, defends him. Joe was seen paying the stepfather off, though Hank claims it was just to pay off a car loan. Joe, stricken at learning he’ll be charged in Ethan’s death, says Hank was largely responsible for the rules of the fights. Not too surprising, since he has charges for beating up his wife. Unfortunately, even though Joe reports that Hank pushed his much bigger son onto Ethan, he can’t be arrested. Elliot slips Nicky a card with his number on it as the family leaves, Sandra defending her husband all the way.

Though Cragen tells Elliot to stay away from Nicky, he (of course) finds the boy at school and learns Hank punched him over the card. When he tries to confront Hank, however, he is accused of having beaten up the other man, who is indeed bleeding. Elliot defends himself, but Sandra claims she saw the attack happen, too. Nicky stands up to both adults with the truth (Hank made Sandra punch him), but Sandra doesn’t want him to say anything because Hank is keeping them financially afloat. Elliot talks to Nicky alone and learns that he didn’t want to fight Ethan, but did so when Hank kept pushing him, saying he’d get beaten up if he didn’t hit harder.

Sandra, seeing this, finally admits that after Nicky’s real dad ran off, she watched the abuse happen because she felt she couldn’t leave him. She sticks to this, claiming Hank is a good man who just hates his job. She’s carrying his baby, and not only refuses to press charges, but says she’ll pay his bail money in court. Regardless, a car is sent outside her house to protect her and Nicky. Unfortunately, it’s soon pulled away, and before Elliot and Cragen can do anything, shots are fired. Nicky has killed his stepfather, who started beating Sandra up after she let him in. Given Sandra’s condition, self-defense charges should be easy, but Nicky tries to tell Elliot he’s proud of what he did. Elliot immediately stops him. Soon, though, an investigator says the shooting wasn’t defense, but likely done execution-style.

In the hospital, Sandra finally admits to being abused. ADA Hardwick says Elliot has to arrest Nicky, but he refuses. Olivia returns and encourages him to “fight fire with fire” Apparently this means hiring a lawyer for Nicky. Unfortunately, when Hardwick has Elliot on the stand, he is forced to admit that Nicky confessed to him. Then Sandra yells that she was the one who actually killed Hank. Both she and her son desperately try to take the blame for each other. The investigator determines that either one of them could have done it, and thus neither can be charged. Even then, they both say they were the shooter. We’ll never know the truth.

The second episode opens on a young man named Patrick, frantically trying to get into his girlfriend’s apartment. When a neighbor gives him a key, we see he’s had good reason. Larissa’s in a chair, tied up and unconscious. Before he can help her, he’s attacked, too- by a masked naked man. In the hospital, Elliot and Olivia are told that Larissa’s attacker shaved her from the neck down. They learn from Patrick that she didn’t let herself get close to people after growing up in the foster system. When they ask about underwear she was wearing- underwear that said “Brandy”- Patrick only knows that she hated that name. A tip soon leads to a man who attacked other young girls, calling all of them Brandy too.

They talk to these girls, one of whom reveals she found a threatening letter under his pillow from a group called The Coventry, who uses the symbols of pedophiles. The man who attacked these girls made videos of his doing so, but disguised his voice. Turns out he was trying to make all these girls match Larissa, who is the real Brandy. At our masked attacker’s house, a computer shows him sending pictures to himself from the hospital Larissa is still in. A nurse reports that an “orderly” took her away for testing. An intense search ensues, and Larissa and the perp are found in another room of the hospital. He attacked her again.

Awake, Larissa is understandably pissed off. She tells Olivia she was put in porn movies when a child, but the man who’s been arrested now wasn’t the same guy. Our new attacker was apparently just a fan of her films, and told her it was the “happiest day of his life” as he raped her. He denies the charges, saying the sex was consensual. He does, however, say he killed an old man named Underwood. At his home, Underwood is bleeding badly, but not dead. He is Larissa’s original accused attacker. Despite her reports, though, there was never enough information to arrest him. Now Underwood’s a lawyer for people who are “unjustly accused”.

When confronted with photos of Larissa that have his DNA on them, Underwood simply maintains he masturbated on them. Ew. Hardwick says they have to let him go- they second attacker was beaten to death in prison, and thus they have no evidence to go by. Elliot follows Underwood out of the station, just in time for him to run into Larissa. Elliot gets the guy out of there, and then gets thrown up on by Larissa. She apologizes for this and asks how they can catch Underwood. Huang says they’ll have to force her to remember what happened to her. One thing she recalls is burying a wristband given to her by Daniel, a boy also captured by Underwood, who helped her escape.

The wristband’s evidence is followed and the detectives find Daniel. They find him, though, in a building with Coventry’s logo and with two children. He runs away with one of these kids, dangling him over a ledge until Elliot talks him down. Once Daniel is at the station, Olivia tells him they want to get justice for him, but he doesn’t listen and it seems he’s been making his own movies now. For a moment, it looks like this won’t be important, because books Underwood wrote as basically a how-to guide to raping Brandy/Larissa are found in his apartment. But as a lawyer, he gets these thrown out of court. Larissa offers to take a stab at persuading Daniel herself.

Larissa tries talking to Daniel, but he just asks her why she never came back for him, and now talks about how he “loves all his kids” just as Underwood did. There’s no convincing him and the detectives give up. Predictably, they then get a phone call which leads them to Underwood’s house just in time for Larissa to shoot him to death. This time, though, Hardwick has no interest in pursuing the case. Underwood had another little girl in his bathtub and Larissa’s actions qualify as protecting her. Man, I’ve missed happy endings on this show.