Totem (Season 12, Episode 20)
Premise: A psychiatrist filling in for Huang convinces Benson and Stabler that a ten-year-old’s rape and murder was committed by a woman, and the trail leads to a family of abused daughters.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 12, Episode 20
- Starring
- Det. Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), Det. Elliot Stabler (Christopher Meloni), Det. Odafin “Fin” Tutuola (Ice-T), ME Dr. Melinda Warner (Tamara Tunie)
- Guest stars
- Jeremy Irons as Dr. Cap Jackson, Elizabeth Mitchell as June Frye, Lisa Banes as Elaine Frye Cavanaugh, Agatha Nowicki as Katie Cavanaugh, Heidi Armbruster as Susan Foster
- Director
- Jonathan Kaplan
- Writers
- Jonathan Greene
Summary
“Totem” begins when two girls playing an online pirate game find a duffel bag outside a church holding the body of Marnie Foster, 10, who vanished on her way home from school the day before. Warner finds she was drugged with milk and zolpidem, raped with a smooth object and smothered with a pillow, with no DNA left behind. She was wrapped in silk sheets with a lavender pillow and a doll, a Perfect Penny not made since 1989. Psychiatrist Dr. Cap Jackson, filling in while Huang is at a conference, joins the case. Local sex offenders have alibis. Marnie’s mother, Susan, was at a hotel with her lover, Chester Hadler, who once groped his previous girlfriend’s 13-year-old daughter.
Jackson argues that the killer is a woman who was abused herself and gave Marnie the doll as a totem of her own lost innocence. At the funeral, Marnie’s piano teacher, June Frye, 37, runs off. June had cancelled Marnie’s lesson that day, but the message never reached the girl. Jackson charms his way into June’s brownstone, untouched since 1979, where the detectives spot doll hair, matching pillows and a smell of bleach, and find a suitcase from the same set as the duffel with a wooden spoon inside. June collapses at the piano after swallowing zolpidem, and Jackson revives her. In the interview room Jackson tells her she does not need a lawyer and is pulled out, then wins her back after she waives one. He mentions his late daughter, Ann. June says her father abused her after giving her the doll, and confesses to drugging and smothering Marnie.
But June’s prayer for the others she failed to protect, and a former student who saw her that Monday with an older woman using a cane, lead to her mother, Elaine Frye Cavanaugh, whom June has called dead. Elaine boasts of disciplining June. The detectives accuse her of killing Marnie, but her younger daughter, Katie, drove her to a bridge tournament that day. When Katie panics, the detectives find that she and her mother share the apartment’s only bed.
Spoiler, the ending: When the detectives bring Katie to her, June apologizes for leaving her half-sister alone with their mother. Katie then confesses that she let herself into June’s house, found Marnie on the porch and, when the girl refused to undress and tried to leave, drugged and assaulted her with a wooden spoon like the one her mother used; June came home to find what she had done and moved the body. Katie will go to a psychiatric facility, June must testify about the abuse both sisters suffered, and Elaine faces jail for abusing Katie. Jackson offers to help June forgive herself.
Why it stands out
- The episode marks the first time the series centers on a woman suspected of sexually assaulting and killing a child.
- Jeremy Irons returns as Dr. Cap Jackson, the sex therapist from earlier this season’s “Mask,” now consulting in Huang’s absence.
- Elizabeth Mitchell guest stars as piano teacher June Frye.