Carousel (Season 25, Episode 6)
Premise: Three college friends compete to seduce foreign women at New York hostels, and SVU must learn which of them raped a tourist from Singapore before she flies home.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 25, Episode 6
- Starring
- Capt. Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), Det. Joe Velasco (Octavio Pisano), Det. Terry Bruno (Kevin Kane), Capt. Renee Curry (Aimé Donna Kelly)
- Guest stars
- Anastasia Lin as Leah Tan, Jesse Aaronson as Hayden Foote, Alex Fox as Frederick Hwang, Jake Murphy as Dustin Renfrow, Olivia Vadnais as Nikol Rakovsky
- Director
- Michael Smith
- Writers
- Story: Gabriel Vallejo; Written by: Brendan Feeney & Michael Carnes
Summary
“Carousel” opens in a Manhattan hostel, where college students Hayden Foote and Frederick Hwang set their sights on Leah Tan, 23, a tourist from Singapore, and Maura Ramos of Argentina, while their friend Dustin Renfrow stays behind claiming food poisoning. After a night of drinking in Midtown, the two leave Leah in an unlicensed cab to catch a bus. Next morning FBI Special Agent Shannah Sykes embeds with SVU and joins Benson and Curry at the hospital. Maura found Leah unconscious in the hostel shower; Leah recalls nothing after the bar. The driver says he carried her into the hostel passed out, and cameras show the two men boarding a budget bus to Cambridge. With no DNA in the kit and Leah booking a flight home, Velasco and Bruno drive to the Cambridge Institute of Technology, where the pair admit fooling around with her but deny rape.
Leah then admits she led Hayden into the bar’s bathroom for a sex act she could never try at home, where her father is a church deacon, but stopped. Her exam shows forced intercourse later that night. Curry sees predatory teamwork; Sykes sees rivalry. In Dustin’s room the detectives find a world map stuck with colored pins. The students explain the game Hayden invented: having given up on women at school, they pick up foreign travelers at hostels and score a point for each new country, and using force breaks the rules. Singapore has two pins. Questioned and played off one another, all three ask for lawyers.
A ViCAP search turns up Nikol Rakovsky, a Bulgarian on a gap year who reported to her consulate that she was raped on New Year’s Eve. Flown back to New York, she tells Benson and Sykes that one of three Americans from her hostel followed her to her room and raped her; she picks out Hayden. A week later a genetic testing company called her about a cystic fibrosis marker, though she never sent a sample. That leads to a student in the school’s genetics lab who verifies the friends’ points by testing swabs they take after sex, and who phoned to warn her. His newest sample from Singapore came from Dustin.
Spoiler, the ending: Dustin is arrested for raping Leah; the squad believes he slipped into her hostel bunk after the cab dropped her off. Frederick is not charged, and when Hayden hears about Nikol, the lab student and Frederick’s cooperation, his lawyer cuts the interview short. Leah hears that Dustin is expected to plead guilty and asks only to go home. The school expels all three students, and Benson admits to Curry and Sykes that she never planned on 25 years at SVU.
Why it stands out
- Sykes, the FBI agent played by Jordana Spiro who first worked with Benson in the previous episode, “Zone Rouge,” formally joins the squad as an embedded agent.
- Benson reflects on her 25 years at SVU in the show’s 25th season.