Solitary (Season 11, Episode 3)
Premise: A woman’s disappearance points SVU to an ex-con Stabler sent to prison two decades ago, and the fallout puts long-term solitary confinement on trial.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 11, Episode 3
- Starring
- Det. Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), Det. Elliot Stabler (Christopher Meloni), Sgt. John Munch (Richard Belzer), Det. Odafin “Fin” Tutuola (Ice-T), Capt. Donald Cragen (Dann Florek), Exec. ADA Sonya Paxton (Christine Lahti), Judge Lena Petrovsky (Joanna Merlin)
- Guest stars
- Stephen Rea as Callum Donovan, Deborah Ann Woll as Lily Milton, Bobby Campo as Parker Hubbard, Jessica Walter as Petra Gilmartin, Bernadette Quigley as Betty Jean
- Director
- Helen Shaver
- Writers
- Amanda Green
Summary
“Solitary” opens when Parker Hubbard comes home late to find his girlfriend, Lily Milton, 23, gone, a mirror smashed and a blood trail leading down the fire escape. Parker blames the downstairs neighbor, who he says has been peeping at them. The neighbor is Callum Donovan, a bank robber Stabler caught in 1989 while walking a beat in uniform, an arrest that won Stabler a promotion and sent Donovan away for 19 years. Donovan, who climbs the fire escape to sit on the roof, has feuded with the couple over cigarette smoke, and Parker says he once threatened Lily with a knife, which Donovan says was only on his belt. His lawyer, Petra Gilmartin, gets him released when Paxton calls the evidence thin, and Parker attacks him in the squad room.
Donovan spent the evening drinking and left an old flame, Betty Jean, angrily around 8 p.m. Then a dredger crew finds Lily alive but nearly frozen in the water off Staten Island, as Parker posts updates online. Lily’s memory is patchy, but she thinks the intruder was the neighbor. A copy-shop clerk then reports seeing Lily near midnight, after Donovan was in custody, arguing with a young man. Lily had been emailing Billy Chang, a former medical student with a record for selling crystal meth. Confronted, she admits she wrecked the apartment hunting for her drug stash, cut her head on the mirror, slipped out the window, then went along with Parker’s abduction story before jumping into the river.
Stabler climbs to the roof to apologize, and Donovan throws him off it. Stabler survives. Police find Donovan at a group home where his mother, who has Alzheimer’s, mistakes him for her first love; he plays along to say goodbye, then dares Benson to shoot him, and she tells him Stabler had come to apologize. Stabler later manhandles Donovan, and he and Paxton trade bitter words. At trial Gilmartin argues that 14 years in solitary, imposed after Donovan knifed Aryan Brotherhood members who attacked him, left him psychotic and haunted by a voice. Stabler has a corrections officer lock him in an isolation cell for three days, comes out thinking it was a week, and asks Paxton to drop the charges or offer a deal; she refuses.
Spoiler, the ending: The jury convicts Donovan of attempted murder, and he begs to be executed rather than sent back to isolation. Stabler turns down Paxton’s offer of a celebratory drink. Later Donovan bashes his head against his cell wall, and a guard tells Stabler that the warden, pressed by Paxton, is moving him to the medical unit and then into the general population, out of solitary.
Why it stands out
- Stephen Rea guest stars as Callum Donovan, with Jessica Walter as his lawyer, Petra Gilmartin, and Deborah Ann Woll as Lily.
- The episode adds to Stabler’s history: his 1989 collar of Donovan, made as a young patrol officer, earned him an early promotion.
- In a squad-room debate on solitary confinement, Benson recalls that the worst part of her undercover stint in prison, in Season 9’s “Undercover,” was never being alone.