Plastic (Season 20, Episode 11)
Premise: A young woman’s rape complaint against a celebrity plastic surgeon and his girlfriend leads SVU to a teenager who disappeared 14 years earlier and a body hidden in a wall.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 20, Episode 11
- Starring
- Lt. Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), Sgt. Odafin “Fin” Tutuola (Ice-T), Det. Amanda Rollins (Kelli Giddish), Det. Dominick “Sonny” Carisi Jr. (Peter Scanavino)
- Guest stars
- Mark Feuerstein as Dr. Heath Barron, Alyssa Sutherland as Sadie Parker, Willa Fitzgerald as Ava Parcell, Kevin O'Rourke as Hal Taylor, Caroline Lagerfelt as Tamara Kimbel
- Director
- Fred Berner
- Writers
- Lawrence Kaplow & Brianna Yellen
Summary
“Plastic” begins after a loft party: by morning Ava Parcell, 30, is wandering the street ringing doorbells and saying she was raped. Her tox screen shows ecstasy, clonazepam and alcohol, though she says she never takes drugs. She recalls dancing with a man named Lee, getting dizzy and waking in an unfamiliar bed with her ankles bound while a man and a woman took turns assaulting her. Her boss Trina, the host, vouches for Lee Black, whose DNA does not match, and remembers a couple who brought a pricey bottle of Italian red. The wine shop’s sales records point to Dr. Heath Barron, a plastic surgeon with a reality-TV following, and his girlfriend, Sadie Parker, who runs a designer cupcake business. Ava recognizes them both.
Barron and Sadie tell Benson the threesome was Ava’s idea: she offered the ecstasy and asked to be tied up. A search of their home turns up thumb drives holding a decade of sex videos labeled with women’s first names, one showing Ava plainly unconscious. The couple are arrested, but Jenny Abrams, Nita Markinson and Melissa Nochack, women from other videos, all call their encounters consensual. Released without bail, Barron and Sadie go on a talk show to brand Ava a liar, and Ava, hounded online, asks to drop the case.
An encrypted file on Barron’s computer shows a girl of about 14 being sexually abused. Facial recognition identifies her as Ceci Taylor, who disappeared from Brooklyn 14 years earlier, a year before Barron finished medical school upstate. Her father, Hal, a widower, says she always believed she was not pretty enough. Louise Halperin, a classmate who turned Barron down, leads detectives to the lake house he rented from Tamara Kimbel, where Fin and Carisi recognize the basement from the video and find a body sealed behind newer wall panels and coated in lye. DNA shows the remains are not Ceci’s.
Questioned at the squad, Sadie insists Barron is a healer, not a killer, until her interrogator realizes she is Ceci, remade by Barron’s surgery. She describes Moira, met at a Brooklyn bowling alley, whose friend drove Ceci to the lake house instead of home; after Moira vanished, Barron re-paneled the wall. In another room, Barron insists he makes women’s fantasies real but does not kill girls, and he is told he is headed to Rikers.
Spoiler, the ending: Ceci admits that she and Barron gave Ava a large amount of drugs, and she agrees to testify against him in exchange for a deal with Stone. The missing-children center finds two missing women named Moira from that period. Ceci tearfully apologizes to her father, Hal, as they embrace. No trial is shown.
Why it stands out
- Mark Feuerstein and Alyssa Sutherland play the celebrity surgeon Heath Barron and his girlfriend, Sadie Parker.
- Philip Winchester is credited as ADA Peter Stone but does not appear; Stone is only spoken to by phone and mentioned.