Countdown (Season 2, Episode 15)
Premise: When an eight-year-old escapes a predator who holds girls for three days before killing them, the squad races the clock to find him before his newest captive’s time runs out.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 2, Episode 15
- Starring
- Det. Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), Det. Elliot Stabler (Christopher Meloni), Det. John Munch (Richard Belzer), Det. Odafin “Fin” Tutuola (Ice-T), Capt. Donald Cragen (Dann Florek), ADA Alexandra Cabot (Stephanie March)
- Guest stars
- Andrea Bowen as Sophie Douglas, Jonathan Fried as Clayton Mills, Debbon Ayer as Mrs. Douglas, Ray Iannicelli as Saul Garner, Jeffrey DeMunn as Senior ADA Charlie Phillips
- Director
- Steve Shill
- Writers
- Story: Dawn DeNoon & Lisa Marie Petersen & Robert F. Campbell & Jonathan Greene; Written by: Dawn DeNoon & Lisa Marie Petersen
Summary
“Countdown” begins when eight-year-old Sophie Douglas slips free of the handcuff holding her inside a white van and escapes, three days after she was taken. She has been drugged and raped. Sophie tells Benson the man had “scary teeth,” lured her with talk of puppies and kept her through a “Party Day,” a “Picture Day” of dressing up in costumes and a “Special Day” that began with a bath. Her mother cuts the interview short. Munch and Fin pick up Oliver Tunney, a party clown with a record, but witnesses place him at a Connecticut fair.
That night the same man snatches eight-year-old Kirsten Guzek from her mother’s car outside a market. Expecting him to follow the same three-day schedule, the squad works through the night. A judge orders Mrs. Douglas to bring Sophie back, and a gentler second interview turns up a glittery banner with her name, balloons filled from a machine and a diet of nothing but cupcakes, fruit punch and candy corn. A party-store clerk recognizes the teeth and says the man buys candy corn there. The same stomach contents appear in the autopsies of three girls taken in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Long Island since 1998, each strangled three days after vanishing and left in water.
A call from the pay phone near Kirsten’s abduction leads to pawnbroker Saul Garner, who denies knowing anything. A DNA cold hit ties Sophie’s attacker to the murder of ten-year-old Bonnie Weathers in Howard Beach five years earlier, and the Queens detectives who worked it name a neighbor with bad teeth, Clayton Mills. Mills assists a school photographer. At the room he rents, the squad finds his landlady, Mrs. Rapoport, beaten to death and no sign of Kirsten. Garner then admits Mills called him to sell the landlady’s valuables, and Munch and Fin use him as bait at a meeting in Brooklyn, where Mills is arrested and Kirsten is found alive. Amid the case, Stabler misses most of his twins’ eighth birthday.
Spoiler, the ending: Through his lawyer, Mills offers to name another victim, his first, whose body has never been found, if the death penalty is dropped. Senior ADA Charlie Phillips refuses. Asked for her view, Mrs. Douglas says she wants Mills dead but urges the prosecutors to help the family still waiting for answers. The episode ends as a woman named Mrs. Lehr is approached; whether Mills gets his deal is not shown.
Why it stands out
- Andrea Bowen plays Sophie Douglas, the one victim who escapes the killer and helps the detectives find him.
- Stabler’s family appears at the squad room: wife Kathy (Isabel Gillies) and twins Elizabeth and Dickie (Patricia Cook and Jeffrey Scaperrotta), whose eighth birthday falls during the case.
- Jim Gaffigan appears as Oliver Tunney, a party clown the squad briefly suspects.