Control (Season 5, Episode 9)
Premise: A man found castrated in a subway station proves to be a serial kidnapper who kept women as “brides” in a hidden dungeon, and one of his victims is a woman Benson once failed to believe.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 5, Episode 9
- 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 Casey Novak (Diane Neal), Dr. George Huang (BD Wong), Judge Lena Petrovsky (Joanna Merlin)
- Guest stars
- Jacqueline Bisset as Juliet Barclay, Samantha Mathis as Hilary Barclay, Austin Pendleton as Horace Gorman, David Thornton as Lionel Granger, Mickey Hargitay as Grandfather
- Ripped from the headlines
- Drawn from the case of John Jamelske, who from 1988 until his arrest in 2003 kidnapped girls and women and held them captive in a concrete bunker beneath his yard in Fayetteville, New York.
- Director
- Ted Kotcheff
- Writers
- Story: Dick Wolf; Teleplay: Neal Baer
Summary
“Control” begins in a subway station, where a grandfather and his granddaughter watch a bleeding man collapse. The victim, wealthy retiree Horace Gorman, has been castrated, and he recalls only a blow to the head and a raving homeless man. Blood drops lead into the tunnels beneath Grand Central, where a homeless woman, Dot, points to a man known as Samuel, who calls himself Samael. His hideout holds Gorman’s missing organs, and he says an archangel in a white hood brought them as an offering. Dr. George Huang doubts that Samael, who cannot bear light, ever went onto the platform, and a transit camera shows a hooded figure following Gorman.
Gorman leaves the hospital against advice. His apartment holds wedding photos of several women in the same gown and dog collar, and Benson recognizes one: Hilary Barclay, who reported four years earlier that a man had held her in a dungeon and forced her to marry him. Benson, seeing her drunk, had not believed her. Hilary’s estranged mother, former model Juliet Barclay, leads them to her, and Hilary recalls hearing chanting. Gorman paid to restore a Lower East Side synagogue, and off its basement, in tunnels from the Underground Railroad, detectives find his dungeon, his diaries and a starving woman.
A teenage runaway, Neva, describes a shabby hotel near the river and a helipad. Benson, who left Hilary at her mother’s, checks hotels alone and is found with Gorman freshly stabbed to death. Samael identifies Hilary as his angel, but when the detectives come for her, Juliet confesses to everything. A judge throws out the confession because of how the arrest was made, and defense lawyer Lionel Granger tells the jury that Benson could be the killer. Benson admits on the stand that she closed Hilary’s case but denies killing Gorman.
Gold traces on Gorman’s breastbone point to an antique Syrian knife, found in Juliet’s shop with his blood on it. When Novak confronts Hilary with it in court, Hilary confesses to both attacks. Judge Lena Petrovsky refuses a mistrial, Novak drops the case against Juliet, and Hilary is arrested.
Spoiler, the ending: Juliet’s lawyer then shares coffee-shop video showing Hilary elsewhere when Gorman was killed. Hilary admits she castrated him but says her mother killed him and she lied to save her, and double jeopardy bars a second trial for Juliet. Novak tells Hilary that nothing gave either of them the right, and Hilary answers that Gorman will never torture another woman.
Why it stands out
- It is the series’ 100th episode.
- Mickey Hargitay, Mariska Hargitay’s father, guest-stars as the grandfather on the subway escalator who witnesses the aftermath of the attack.
- Jacqueline Bisset and Samantha Mathis play mother and daughter Juliet and Hilary Barclay, with Austin Pendleton as Horace Gorman.