Pandora (Season 4, Episode 15)
Premise: The murder of a woman who posed online as a child to catch predators sends Stabler after a kidnapped teenager in Prague and a child-pornography network in New York.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 4, Episode 15
- Starring
- Det. Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), Det. Elliot Stabler (Christopher Meloni), Det. John Munch (Richard Belzer), Capt. Donald Cragen (Dann Florek)
- Guest stars
- William McNamara as Sam Bishop, Pam Grier as Claudia Williams, Lothaire Bluteau as Erich Tassig, Alexis Dziena as Mia Van Wagner, Stephen Gevedon as Nicholas Taylor
- Director
- Alex Zakrzewski
- Writers
- Tara Butters & Michele Fazekas
Summary
“Pandora” opens on a dark road, where a stranded couple hear thumping from a parked car and find Meredith McGrath stabbed, beaten and raped, her lips glued shut. Her attacker took her keys and license, and her husband, Roger, is soon found dead at their home, where the computer’s hard drive has been torn out. Meredith dies at the hospital. With Benson tied up on another case, Stabler works with Homicide Det. Sam Bishop, who finds CDs of child pornography in the McGraths’ desk.
TARU’s Ruben Morales finds more images of two girls on Meredith’s laptop, sent by a user called Nick2Shy, who had planted a program that recorded her keystrokes. Her chats show she posed as a 13-year-old to draw out predators and passed her files to Assistant U.S. Attorney Claudia Williams, who says Meredith, acting on her own, helped convict five pedophiles. The FBI identifies one girl as Mia Van Wagner, 14, of Queens, missing for two weeks and written off as a runaway. Her friend Samantha Gilligan, shown a photo by Bishop over Stabler’s objection, hands over e-mails from an online boyfriend, traced to Erich Tassig, a German living in Prague. Mia’s calls lead to Midtown copy-shop manager Ron Crowley, who admits getting her a passport as his daughter for $5,000 from the man in Prague.
Stabler flies to Prague, where Europol officer Kate Logan and Customs attaché Mike Pearson report that Czech police raided Tassig’s flat too soon, after Samantha warned him, and that he and Mia have vanished. Logan describes the child sex trade in Czech border towns. A street vendor’s tip leads Stabler to Mia, and he grabs her while Tassig escapes, drawing Logan’s criticism. Told her pictures are online, Mia reveals where Tassig works. In custody he claims she lied about her age, since the local age of consent is 15, and says he only traps buyers; under pressure he points to a site featuring a young girl called Amy, sold through a password company.
Back home, Customs traces payments to Private-Code, a Westchester firm selling passwords to hundreds of thousands of subscribers of child-abuse sites, and a raid follows. Its records identify Nick2Shy as Nicholas Taylor. Stabler and Bishop find Amy at Taylor’s home and arrest him, and his fingerprints match both murder scenes. Taylor says only that Meredith betrayed him and that he loves his daughter.
Spoiler, the ending: Taylor tells the detectives there are hundreds of thousands like him and that they will not go away. Mia is back home in Queens, unhappy about it. Over drinks, Bishop asks why Stabler does this work, and Stabler says the only way to be good at it is to hate it.
Why it stands out
- Pam Grier, star of Coffy, Foxy Brown and Jackie Brown, returns in her recurring role as Assistant U.S. Attorney Claudia Williams.
- Lothaire Bluteau, a Genie Award winner for the title role in Jesus of Montreal, plays Erich Tassig.