Diss (Season 20, Episode 22)
Premise: When a pop star is beaten in her home, suspicion falls on her rapper husband, Fin’s childhood friend, and the trail leads back to an old Harlem killing.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 20, Episode 22
- Starring
- Lt. Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), Sgt. Odafin “Fin” Tutuola (Ice-T), Det. Amanda Rollins (Kelli Giddish), Det. Dominick “Sonny” Carisi Jr. (Peter Scanavino), ADA Peter Stone (Philip Winchester)
- Guest stars
- Orlando Jones as Justin “Snake Eye” Anderson, Amber Stevens West as Dallas Monroe, Snoop Dogg as Banks, L. Scott Caldwell as Jo Anderson, Deandre Sevon as Andreas Harper
- Director
- Alex Chapple
- Writers
- Michael Chernuchin & Allison Intrieri
Summary
“Diss” opens on a music video shoot starring singer Dallas Monroe. That night Wallace, who works for the family, brings her young daughter, Lexi, home and finds Dallas badly beaten in their townhouse, her own gun beneath her. Her husband, rap star Justin “Snake Eye” Anderson, known as Snake, is onstage at the Apollo, where he hails Fin as a childhood friend; their mothers were best friends. A neighbor heard the couple fighting, police have answered two domestic calls at the house, and a photographer, Amir Khoury, says Snake punched him and paid him off. Video from a rage room shows Snake beating a dummy while threatening Dallas, and he is arrested.
In the interview room Snake and Fin trade insults until Fin grabs him, and Benson, pressed by Stone, takes Fin off the case. Snake’s mother, Jo, who took Fin in for six months after his own mother was shot dead outside a bodega, demands his loyalty. Dallas wakes from a medically induced coma and says a masked man broke in after Snake left; the nursing home’s record of her video call with her mother and Snake’s arrival time at the Apollo clear him, and he is released. Her rape kit is negative. Dallas points to Snake’s diss war with rapper RB Banks, whose newest track threatens Snake’s wife. After the case hits the front page, Snake turns up at Banks’s studio, where Banks seems to boast about the attack, but he has an alibi: a woman who is not his wife.
Jo admits she paid $250,000 of Snake’s money, through his business manager, Bill Maples, to Victoria “Vickie” Lewis, who says the money bought her silence about a fling with Snake. Ballistics then tie the gun found under Dallas to the 18-year-old unsolved killing of a gangster, Malik Harper; a retired detective recalls Malik’s pregnant girlfriend. Two of Dallas’s social media posts show the same Mongoose bike in the background, and it belongs to Andreas Harper, the supposed delivery rider who hung around the crime scene. Vickie is his mother. Fin, still off the case, tells Andreas he watched his own mother die, and Andreas, who blames Snake for his father’s death, cries out that Dallas should have died so that Snake would feel the pain.
Spoiler, the ending: Fin then visits Snake at home and tells him that the man who killed his mother was found shot dead decades later and that he never looked hard for the killer. They discuss whether a killing in self-defense would make a difference, and Fin warns Snake that the past always catches up before he leaves. No one is charged with Malik Harper’s murder on screen.
Why it stands out
- Snoop Dogg guest-stars as Banks, Snake’s rival in the diss war; Ice-T revealed the casting on Twitter with a behind-the-scenes photo.
- Orlando Jones, Amber Stevens West and L. Scott Caldwell also guest-star, as Snake, Dallas and Snake’s mother, Jo.
- Fin reveals that his mother was shot dead in Harlem when he was a boy and that Jo Anderson kept him out of the foster care system.