Rage (Season 6, Episode 17)
Premise: Stabler has one day of interrogation to break the man he could not convict of a child’s murder 14 years earlier, after another girl is killed the same way.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 6, Episode 17
- 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)
- Guest stars
- Matthew Modine as Gordon Rickett, Michele Santopietro as Linda Cusick, Anne Pitoniak as Mrs. Larson
- Director
- Juan J. Campanella
- Writers
- Michele Fazekas & Tara Butters
Summary
“Rage” unfolds mostly in the squad’s interview room, where Gordon Rickett is held over the murder of 12-year-old Kerry Lynn Palmer, whose body was pulled from the Hudson River a week earlier. Fourteen years before, Stabler arrested Rickett for the rape and murder of 11-year-old Dana MacNamara, and a jury acquitted him; Kerry Lynn was killed and mutilated the same way. With no forensic evidence, no weapon and no crime scene, the squad has 24 hours before he walks. Rickett waives a lawyer, mocks Stabler’s temper and shows a scar he blames on Stabler sending him through a plate glass window long ago.
The squad works on him in shifts. Rickett claims he handles hazardous materials, though he collects garbage, insists he has no car and no girlfriend, and says he left California because an aunt died. When Stabler first loses his temper, Cragen asks whether Stabler or Rickett was really in control. Fin confronts him with a former girlfriend, Sandra Brophy, who says he tried to rape her 14-year-old daughter, and with police questioning over missing girls in Carson, Nevada, and Tempe, Arizona. Later Stabler uses Rickett’s pretrial psychiatric evaluation against him, then loses control and screams at him until he is pulled out of the room. Hours later Stabler calmly tells Rickett that he hates children and is ruled by the rage he hides, and Rickett answers that Stabler is controlled by everyone around him. When time runs out, Rickett is released.
Going back over the interrogation, Stabler sorts Rickett’s lies into vanity lies and guilty ones and fixes on the unexplained story about the aunt. Phone records lead to his girlfriend, Linda Cusick, whose boss at a salon two blocks from Kerry Lynn’s home reports having had a car stolen and burned on Staten Island. Near the burned car is a nursing home where Mrs. Larson, an old family friend Rickett calls his aunt, lives paralyzed but very much alive; Rickett has taken over her finances and her empty house.
Spoiler, the ending: At the house the detectives find an old car in the garage and a bunker-like basement holding blood and clothing Kerry Lynn wore the day she vanished, and then Rickett himself, gripping a frightened girl. As Rickett goads Stabler to shoot him, Benson fires first, and Rickett is arrested for Kerry Lynn’s murder and the kidnapping; the girl was not raped. CSU finds both recent and years-old blood in the basement. Benson tells Stabler she fired because he would have killed Rickett in anger, which is what Rickett wanted, and Stabler goes home alone.
Why it stands out
- Matthew Modine guest-stars as Gordon Rickett.
- Most of the episode plays out inside the interview room during the 24 hours the squad can hold Rickett without charging him.