Great Expectations (Season 18, Episode 11)
Premise: A 13-year-old hockey player is sexually assaulted with a stick after a loss, and the case leads to his best friend and the father who drives him.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 18, Episode 11
- Starring
- Lt. Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), Det. Odafin “Fin” Tutuola (Ice-T), Det. Amanda Rollins (Kelli Giddish), Det. Dominick “Sonny” Carisi Jr. (Peter Scanavino)
- Guest stars
- Brent Sexton as Jim Turner, Lincoln Melcher as Kyle Turner, Amy Spanger as Helen Turner, Ben Cook as Adam Turner, Christopher Paul Richards as Jack Wilson
- Director
- Martha Mitchell
- Writers
- Story: Brianna Yellen & Robert Brooks Cohen & Céline Robinson; Written by: Kevin Fox & Brendan Feeney
Summary
“Great Expectations” opens at a game of the New York City Whitecaps, an elite youth hockey program, where 13-year-old Jack Wilson misses a last-second shot and his team loses. In the parking lot his mother finds him bleeding, and doctors find internal tearing from a blunt object, probably a hockey stick. Jack says he fell on the ice, and his father, Frank, a former Whitecap, calls it a prank gone too far. Jack’s best friend, star player Kyle Turner, visits with his father, Jim, and tells Benson and Carisi the locker room was quiet. Coach Gordon Sheen says every player signs a code-of-conduct contract but names two rough players known as the Bash Brothers, Timmy Brown and Will Harris.
Rink footage shows the pair leaving just before Jack. Confronted, Timmy blurts out that the two held Jack down while Kyle used the stick. Kyle’s mother, Helen, allows an interview, but Jim arrives and ends it, and the lab finds no blood on Kyle’s sticks. Jack, told the others have talked, confirms that Kyle attacked him. When detectives come to arrest Kyle, he is at the hospital with a wrist injury that Jim blames on practice; Dr. Stephen Hale finds a spiral fracture and older untreated breaks. Kyle, Helen and Kyle’s older brother, Adam, deny any abuse, and Jim calls his parenting tough but never physical. Kyle is arrested, and family court releases him to his parents.
Under pressure from above to try Kyle as an adult, Rollins and Carisi clash over whether Helen is a victim too. Then Jack dies of an infection. His parents blame Jim for turning Kyle into a bully, and a parent’s phone video shows Jim lecturing Kyle right after the game, but Kyle insists his father said nothing about Jack. Charged as an adult with first-degree manslaughter, he is again released to his parents. Adam, who urges Kyle to tell the truth, is then beaten by Jim, and the attack is caught on video.
Spoiler, the ending: Helen describes years of excusing Jim, and Kyle admits his father told him to use the stick so Jack would learn not to fail again. Carisi tells Kyle that as a boy he never named a bully who later killed a man, and Kyle agrees to testify for a transfer back to family court and a lesser charge. He then helps find his father, who admits giving the order and talks of training Kyle’s little brother, Mark, the same way before he is arrested. Kyle apologizes to his father, and the squad expects him to serve a few years in juvenile detention rather than state prison.
Why it stands out
- Aired on February 15, 2017, as the series’ 400th episode, after being moved from its first scheduled date of November 9, 2016, and then from January 4, 2017.
- Brent Sexton guest stars as Jim Turner, with Lincoln Melcher and Ben Cook as his sons Kyle and Adam.