Waste (Season 4, Episode 8)
Premise: A woman in a long-term coma is found to be pregnant, and the search for her rapist uncovers a doctor’s secret stem cell experiment paid for by a dying billionaire.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 4, Episode 8
- 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), Defense Attorney Trevor Langan (Peter Hermann)
- Guest stars
- Bruce Davison as Dr. Graham Mandell, Philip Bosco as Davis Langley, JoBeth Williams as Mrs. Rawley, Lisa Pelikan as Dr. Elizabeth Garrison, Steve Key as Wesley Dilbert
- Director
- Donna Deitch
- Writers
- Dawn DeNoon & Lisa Marie Petersen
Summary
“Waste” opens at a hospital where a doctor reports a rape: routine tests show that Stephanie Rawley, in a persistent vegetative state since a car crash about a year earlier, is six weeks pregnant. She had been sent there from Mountcastle Rehab with pneumonia. Her parents blame her former fiancé, David Anderson, who is under a restraining order after relaying her wish not to be kept alive this way. He says she was hit by a truck while driving to collect him from his bachelor party, and he later admits secretly visiting and sleeping beside her, but he agrees to a paternity test.
Cabot rules out testing every worker at Mountcastle, so staff are asked to volunteer DNA. Then Stephanie is quietly moved back there, where her neurologist, Dr. Graham Mandell, and Dr. Elizabeth Garrison are about to end the pregnancy with her father’s signed consent. Detectives halt the procedure, her mother insists on keeping the pregnancy for religious reasons, and her father lashes out at a detective who asks him for a sample. Wesley Dilbert, a recent hire who refuses to give DNA, turns out to have choked a prostitute who would not lie in an ice bath and to have been taped with a corpse at his last job, a funeral home. He is charged with a misdemeanor and freed on $5,000 bail.
A forensic gynecologist recruited by Huang isolates fetal cells from Stephanie’s blood. The results clear Dilbert and point to a father with type B blood, and Mandell is the only type-B volunteer with access. Huang then finds scarring from a recent abortion in another of Mandell’s comatose patients, Audrey Logan, whose ovarian cyst Garrison removed. Garrison explains that federal limits on stem cell research cut off Mandell’s funding, so software billionaire Davis Langley, who has Parkinson’s disease, paid for the work; the women were inseminated to grow embryos whose stem cells would match Langley. A grand jury indicts both doctors but not Langley.
At trial, Mrs. Rawley says her daughter, an organ donor who worked with special-needs children, could never have agreed. Mandell defends his science on the stand, and Langley, earlier said to be too sick to testify, appears for the defense to say the plan was his idea, in effect admitting his role.
Spoiler, the ending: The jury convicts the doctors only of battery, and Mandell may not serve any jail time. Langley then files for custody of Stephanie’s baby as its biological father, which would give him the umbilical cord blood and its matching stem cells.
Why it stands out
- Bruce Davison plays Dr. Graham Mandell, with Philip Bosco as Davis Langley and JoBeth Williams as Stephanie’s mother.
- Rainn Wilson appears as Mr. Baltzer, a nervous rehab worker, and Chandra Wilson plays Nurse Jenkins.