Resilience (Season 4, Episode 10)
Premise: A 15-year-old girl’s suicide attempt after a rape leads detectives into her family’s home, where her father’s obsession with having more children hides a murder.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 4, Episode 10
- 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), Dr. George Huang (BD Wong), ME Dr. Melinda Warner (Tamara Tunie)
- Guest stars
- Titus Welliver as Tom Landricks, Rachael Bella as Jackie Landricks, Cynthia Ettinger as Angie Landricks, Drew McVety as James Randall, Billy Lush as Karl Sirett
- Director
- Joyce Chopra
- Writers
- Patrick Harbinson
Summary
“Resilience” opens on a subway platform, where 15-year-old Jackie Landricks is pulled back from an oncoming express train. Bruised and missing her underwear, she tells Stabler and Benson she was grabbed on her way home from school, blindfolded, tied to a bed and raped, and that her attacker had a pierced penis. Station cameras show a fired bike messenger, Karl Sirett, 19, trailing her, and she picks out his photo. Detectives see his piercing when they take him to the restroom during questioning, but public defender Gina Bernardo says he was held without cause, and a judge refuses to order his DNA.
Warner links Jackie’s restraint marks to Chelsea Doe, an unidentified woman pulled from the river two years earlier without her head or fingers. The rape kit holds semen from two men, one of them on a cholesterol drug taken by James Randall, an ad man who rents a room from the Landricks family. A teacher reveals Jackie began sleeping with Karl at 14, and Jackie admits she named him just to blame someone. DNA identifies the two men as Randall and Charles Eno, a former butcher who lives nearby; both say they had sex only with Jackie’s mother, Angie, and Randall says her husband, Tom, paid him and liked to watch.
Huang calls Tom a sexually obsessive narcissist. The children are taken from the home, where Angie runs a day care, and her two youngest boys prove to be fathered by other men because Tom wanted more children; complications in her last delivery left her unable to have more. At a treatment center Jackie regresses into childlike play, and over dolls she tells Stabler that her father pinned her down and used a syringe to try to get her pregnant while her mother watched. Tom’s lawyer offers a plea to promoting prostitution, which Cabot rejects, but on the stand Jackie says a policeman told her what to say.
With Tom set to regain his family and Jackie pregnant, the squad returns to the Chelsea Doe case. Karen Stensling, 28, gave the Landricks address two and a half years earlier and then vanished; her grandmother was told she had moved to Europe. Karen’s bracelet turns up with Jackie’s six-year-old sister, Sally, who took it from Jackie, who found it under Karen’s old bed in what is now Randall’s room. Radar finds Karen’s skull and fingers beneath the basement concrete, and Tom admits he killed her when she backed out of having a baby for him and threatened to tell.
Spoiler, the ending: As her father’s trial goes on, Jackie says she has decided not to keep the baby and will no longer do what he would have wanted.
Why it stands out
- Titus Welliver plays Tom Landricks, with Rachael Bella as his daughter, Jackie.
- Illeana Douglas returns as public defender Gina Bernardo one episode after her debut in “Juvenile.”