Father Dearest (Season 13, Episode 20)
Premise: A missing teenager’s search for her sperm-donor father exposes a man who poses as the donor to seduce the donor’s daughters as revenge on him.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 13, Episode 20
- Starring
- Det. Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), Sgt. John Munch (Richard Belzer), Det. Odafin “Fin” Tutuola (Ice-T), Det. Nick Amaro (Danny Pino), Det. Amanda Rollins (Kelli Giddish), Dr. George Huang (BD Wong)
- Guest stars
- James Van Der Beek as Sean Albert, Eric Close as Colin Barnes, Sonya Walger as Anne Barnes, Shannon Maree Walsh as Cate Avery, Ryann Shane as Ashley Riggs
- Director
- Rosemary Rodriguez
- Writers
- Story: Warren Leight; Story & teleplay: John P. Roche
Summary
“Father Dearest” opens with a 911 call from three-year-old Sam Avery, who cannot wake his mother and says his big sister has gone. Benson finds Grace Avery unconscious with a head wound; Sam heard her arguing with his sister about a bad man. Grace’s husband, Geoff, reports their daughter Cate, 16, missing. A librarian reveals that Cate has been reading about children of sperm donors, and Dr. George Huang, visiting from his new post in Oklahoma City, explains that such children often search for their donors. Grace privately admits that both her children came from Donor 141, unknown to Geoff, and that Cate had found the donor and planned to meet him.
Fin and Rollins track Cate through her debit card to a Lincoln Center coffee bar, but she will not name the man she spent the night with. Other girls praise Donor 141 online. In Baltimore, Ashley Riggs tells Fin and Amaro she met her donor father, a surgeon calling himself Calvin Baker, on a school trip, and her baby was born nine months later. Posing as a couple at the sperm bank, Benson and Rollins get the donor profile, which points to lung surgeon Colin Barnes. Barnes denies any contact, though a hotel room was charged to a card in his name, and no girl picks him from a lineup. DNA shows he fathered Cate, Ashley and Melissa Stack but not Ashley’s son, and he was in Italy on the date of Ashley’s meeting. The girls describe dinners, dancing to “My One and Only Love” and, in Cate’s case, sex with the man they took for their father.
Barnes’s daughter Taylor learns of his donations and storms out. His wife, Anne, names Philip Kelly, a surgeon Barnes fired, who recalls a stranger listening to Taylor at his party. When Taylor vanishes, the song turns up in an email from “Cyrano,” and Anne recognizes it as a favorite of her college boyfriend Sean Albert (called Albers in the episode), whom Barnes reported for taking the MCAT for someone else. Arrested after summoning Anne by text, Sean says he posed as the donor to give the daughters the father Barnes never was. He offers to reveal Taylor’s whereabouts if Anne dances with him while Barnes watches, then tells her he killed Taylor.
Spoiler, the ending: Doubting that murder fits Sean’s pattern, the detectives widen their hotel search to the East Side and find Taylor alive in a room he paid for. During the dance Sean had called Taylor his and Anne’s daughter, and he has told Taylor the same. She refuses to believe the detectives, calls Sean her real father and shouts for him. The episode ends there, with no charges shown.
Why it stands out
- BD Wong returns as Dr. George Huang for the first time since leaving the main cast after Season 12 to star in NBC’s Awake.
- James Van Der Beek guest-stars as Sean, with Eric Close and Sonya Walger as Colin and Anne Barnes.
- The song used throughout is the John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman recording of “My One and Only Love.”