Law & Order SVU – Recap & Review – Dirty

photo: nbc

Law & Order SVU
Dirty

Original Air Date: Jan 19, 2010

Caitlin- Associate Staff Writer
caitlin@thetwocentscorp.com

There have been a handful of dirty cops on SVU before, and the detectives have dealt with IAB poking into their lives. Still, they’ve typically stayed away from these actual investigations. Until now.

The first scene of the episode is a bit misleading. Without giving too much away, I’ll say out first glimpse of the main guest star of the episode was clearly designed to leave viewers guessing for the rest of the hour.

We open in a police station- but not SVU’s station. Here, a female detective named Saliyah, or “Sunny”. She’s asking around about another woman named Paige, who seems to have mysteriously disappeared with her car but without her purse. Sunny eventually finds Paige’s car and then sees Paige herself- on top of a building before she screams and topples to her death. Olivia arrives on the scene to learn Paige was cut and stabbed before being killed. The car’s indentifying markers were removed by Sunny, trying to protect Paige’s identity as an ADA.

Paige, who had already been through breast cancer and the death of her parents, and Sunny says she was being targeted by a Latin king, Angel, and that she had been abused by her boyfriend. She died after leaving the station because of a mysterious call. Sunny thinks it must have come from Angel, but Olivia tells Cragen she’s sure it was the boyfriend. He still says to talk to Angel. She does so with Sunny, who is very angry when he denies having anything to do with Paige’s death. To make matters worse, M.E. Warner points out that Paige had no defensive marks on her body and that it looks like she was cutting and possibly even sodomizing herself. The death could be a suicide.

Paige and Sunny’s boss, in whose office Paige got her call, becomes secretive when Olivia mentions this possibility. Eventually he reveals that Paige was being investigated for taking drug money, and that Sunny may have been working with her. While the media jumps on the idea Paige killed herself, it’s revealed she was abruptly able to pay off a lot of debts she had. Sunny, meanwhile, has refused to take a lie detector test. Then the detectives track down the phone the call was made from. It was purchased from a store just before the call was made, and when they go investigate, they learn that Sunny already took the security tapes.

Sunny’s fellow detectives, Riggs and Walden, tell Olivia that she’s clean. Riggs remains calm when asked who Paige was having a relationship with and says the two women were fighting. Walden, however, seems to want to say something more. When she learns what Sunny did, Olivia goes to arrest her against the wishes of the FBI. Sunny says she took the tapes to find out who killed Paige. The phone was sold to a girl and Sunny tries to say neither she or Paige took the drug money. Olivia accuses her of killing Paige, which she denies. She says the lie detector test was “a slap in the face”.

Next they go after the girl who bought the phone. She’s with a man who holds a gun to Olivia’s head, but is quickly taken down by Fin and then several other cops, including Fin. The man is a snitch named Damon who Riggs was taking to court. Sunny yells at Riggs that Damon killed Paige. He and the girl, Lakisha, say they found out Paige was dating Riggs. Their story about meeting up with Paige is a lie, but there’s no evidence they killed her. They may, however, have been sitting in a car outside the building. Sure enough, blood evidence shows Paige’s car being driven by Damon. They go to arrest him and Lakisha, but find them both shot to death in his come.

At this, Sunny accuses Riggs of killing them as well as Paige. He stalks away. Damon’s neighbor turns in a Bible that was shot through his wall, and his 10-year old son describes the shooter, who he saw. The crime scene is riddled with bullets, and a penknife belonging to Paige is found in Lakisha’s bag. The son’s description of the killer matches Angel, but someone had to know where Damon and Lakisha were staying and tell him. That would seem to be Riggs. In interrogation, he denies both this and slapping Paige around. Paige was constantly self-abusive. Someone else told Angel where to send a killer.

Olivia and the FBI agent working the case confront Angel and told him that his girlfriend turned herself and him in after he told her who to have kill Damon and Lakisha. But she’s pregnant with his child, and he agrees to let her go free in exchange for saying who on the inside he was working with. It’s Sunny. She did take the cash after all. Paige knew and going to turn her in, so she sold her friend out to Damon. She smashes through a wall a dog finds evidence behind and tells Olivia she did everything because her chances of success were ruined. Olivia, she says, could wind up just like her.

Okay, so there was no abrupt changing from one case to another in the middle of this episode, but I still had to watch the second half through just to understand everything that had happened. After all, when was the last time we saw from the point of view of a perpetrator without knowing so outright? And besides the possibility he could have been Paige’s killer, Riggs was right- why wasn’t this an IAB investigation? It was a well-written episode, but I’d still like to get back to, you know, sex crimes when we come back in two weeks.