Beast's Obsession (Season 15, Episode 20)
Premise: Serial rapist William Lewis escapes from custody, kidnaps a 12-year-old girl and holds her life over Benson until she admits she lied about beating him.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 15, Episode 20
- Starring
- Sgt. Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), Det. Odafin “Fin” Tutuola (Ice-T), Det. Nick Amaro (Danny Pino), Det. Amanda Rollins (Kelli Giddish), Lt. Declan Murphy (Donal Logue)
- Guest stars
- Pablo Schreiber as William Lewis, Lily Pilblad as Amelia Cole, Natalie Racoosin as Lauren Cole, Renée Elise Goldsberry as Martha Marron, Alex Hernandez as Carlos “O.G.” Hernandez
- Director
- Steve Shill
- Writers
- Warren Leight & Julie Martin
Summary
“Beast’s Obsession” opens with the squad learning that William Lewis has escaped. An overdose got him moved from Rikers to the Bellevue prison ward, where he was pronounced dead, revived on the gurney, then talked a corrections officer into uncuffing him and broke the officer’s neck. A nurse was raped and left hanging in a closet, and Lewis has already called Benson from her phone to say he misses her. Lt. Declan Murphy arrives with orders to take command of SVU, since Benson is Lewis’s target, and assigns her a round-the-clock protective detail.
The drug came in cupcakes from Bronwyn Freed, a woman who visited Lewis daily. Dr. Janice Cole, who approved his transfer, is found dead at home; her daughter Lauren, tied up in a closet, has been raped and burned with a cigarette, and Lewis has taken her 12-year-old sister, Amelia. Lauren tells Benson that Lewis will kill Amelia unless Benson tells the truth. Benson privately admits to Murphy that she lied at Lewis’s trial: he was handcuffed, not lunging at her, when she beat him with a metal bar.
Lewis stays a step ahead. He switches to an SUV taken from a deaf young man found shot in the river, leaves a phone in Amelia’s backpack on the Roosevelt Island tram to taunt Rollins, and calls Benson from the home of his former defense attorney. Over Murphy’s warning that giving a sociopath what he wants will not save the girl, Benson goes on television, confesses to perjury and excessive force, and asks Barba to have Lewis’s conviction reviewed. Six hours pass with no word.
Sent back to her hotel, Benson slips away from her detail during a bathroom stop, commandeers a town car and meets Lewis alone. He takes her gun and phone but leaves her radio on, drives her handcuffed to a derelict building in Red Hook and taunts her about her trauma and her cop boyfriend. Upstairs Amelia is tied up. Benson offers herself in the girl’s place, but Lewis instead forces a game of Russian roulette with one bullet in his revolver, announcing it over her radio as the squad closes in.
Spoiler, the ending: Lewis presses Benson to fire at her own head and threatens to shoot her if she won’t. As a helicopter nears and the empty chambers run out, Lewis tells Amelia to look away and tells Benson this will be the last thing she sees before she dies. Instead of firing at her, he turns the gun on himself and shoots himself in the head; the story continues in “Post-Mortem Blues.”
Why it stands out
- Pablo Schreiber makes a special guest appearance as William Lewis, whose escape was set up at the end of “Psycho/Therapist.”
- Lt. Declan Murphy, introduced three episodes earlier in “Gambler’s Fallacy,” replaces Benson as commander of the squad.
- Renée Elise Goldsberry returns as Lewis’s former defense attorney, the role she played at his trial in “Psycho/Therapist.”