Controlled Burn (Season 24, Episode 6)
Premise: A woman who insists she cannot have been raped wakes up in the hospital after a secret party, and the investigation exposes a powerful businesswoman filming her guests.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 24, Episode 6
- Starring
- Capt. Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), Sgt. Odafin “Fin” Tutuola (Ice-T), Det. Amanda Rollins (Kelli Giddish), Det. Grace Muncy (Molly Burnett), ADA Dominick “Sonny” Carisi Jr. (Peter Scanavino)
- Guest stars
- Brooke Bloom as Maggie D’Angelo, Lola Glaudini as Lena Hess, Jordan Belfi as Spencer Lewis, Dave Shalansky as Ethan Schmidt, Damani Varnado as Antoine Wilson
- Director
- Oscar René Lozoya II
- Writers
- Story: Julie Martin & Kathy Dobie; Story & teleplay: David Graziano & Nolan Dunbar
Summary
“Controlled Burn” opens with Rollins, filling in for Carisi at his old law school, lecturing future criminologists on sexual compulsion, which she compares to a controlled burn. That night Spencer Lewis, an executive whose firm is being bought for $2 billion by Lena Hess’s company, Tectonic, brings his analyst, Maggie D’Angelo, to what he calls a work party at a West Village brownstone, since men need a woman to get in. A stranger in a crow mask sends her a drink. At dawn a homeless man, Antoine Wilson, carries her to the hospital, where Fin and Rollins learn she was choked and drugged with scopolamine and had underwear stuck in her throat. Maggie insists nothing could have happened, since cervical cancer left her unable to have sex, and refuses a rape kit; Wilson says a giant crow was chasing her.
Street video does show a man in a crow mask, but the brownstone, a $15 million listing, is empty and cleaned. Maggie remembers the man’s gentle voice and a compliment about her Modigliani neck, and DNA from the assault is not Spencer’s. Threatened with a tax audit that could stall his sale, Spencer gets the squad into the next party, at a Gramercy Park townhouse, which they raid, finding a hidden camera system and 20 hard drives. Both houses belong to Tectonic. Hess tells Benson and Fin the cameras are for security. The West Village footage shows the masked man choking Maggie unconscious seven times.
Shown footage of himself, Spencer recalls that the man plays timpani with the New York Orchestra, which leads to Ethan Schmidt’s arrest; a crow mask and scopolamine turn up at his home. Maggie picks out his voice in a voice lineup. Hoping for treatment, Ethan says Hess hosted the parties and supplied the drugs. Arrested, Hess tells Benson that if men vanished, so would war and rape, and the search yields dozens more drives. Charged with a criminal sexual act, unlawful surveillance and grand larceny, she is released under house arrest with an ankle monitor.
Spoiler, the ending: Ethan takes a plea deal, so Maggie will not have to testify; she plans surgery for her scar tissue and asks to see the video of her attack. Then Hess’s monitor turns up in the back of a car that drove her to Teterboro Airport. She calls Benson, teasing that she is headed for Brussels or Dubai and reminding her that SVU holds her footage. Benson warns her not to play with fire and tells the squad it was a wrong number.
Why it stands out
- Rollins’s guest lecture points toward her exit: three episodes later, in “And a Trauma in a Pear Tree,” she takes a teaching job at Fordham University in her final episode as a series regular.
- Brooke Bloom, Lola Glaudini, Jordan Belfi and Dave Shalansky guest star as Maggie, Hess, Spencer and Ethan.