Pure (Season 6, Episode 18)
Premise: A man claiming psychic visions inserts himself into the search for a kidnapped bike messenger, and Stabler is sure he knows more than he should.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 6, Episode 18
- 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)
- Guest stars
- Martin Short as Sebastian Ballentine / Henry Palaver, Mary Mara as Carlene Ballentine, Marianne Hagan as Mrs. Sellers, Taylor Spreitler as Chloe Sellers, Charlayne Woodard as Sister Peg
- Director
- Aaron Lipstadt
- Writers
- Dawn DeNoon
Summary
“Pure” opens as Chloe Sellers gets ready for a dance and an anonymous caller boasts on the family answering machine about raping her older sister, Kaley, an 18-year-old bike messenger who never came home; a second call confirms she is being held. Kaley’s employer, the law firm Henshall & Langan, offers a $10,000 reward at a press conference with her mother, and the office manager, Mindy Mayhern, tracks Kaley’s GPS-equipped phone to a garbage truck, which holds only the phone. Sebastian Ballentine then walks into the squad room claiming a psychic vision of Kaley, and soon he is giving readings to Mrs. Sellers at home, where Stabler throws him out.
TARU recovers a photo taken on Kaley’s phone that morning and older pictures of her ex-boyfriend Jake Ostrander, who tells the detectives she was auctioning her virginity online to pay for college. A persistent bidder who keeps getting outbid, collector Harlan Beaumont, is being questioned when Kaley is found strangled in a Hell’s Kitchen basement beneath a water pipe, much as Ballentine had described, though he spent the whole night waiting in an interview room. Ballentine reads Stabler, and Huang explains it as cold reading and facial coding; when Benson feeds him false reactions, his guesses fall apart. His wife, Carlene, arrives with their baby, Henry J., vouches for him, and he is released.
Sister Peg, who brought a prostitute with a tip to the precinct and met Ballentine there, then vanishes from her shelter, where Kaley’s clothes are left behind. Stabler breaks into the Ballentines’ empty home, and patrol finds the couple washing out their van at a car wash in the middle of the night. Novak then gets a warrant from a judge who signs without reading it. Ballentine’s computer holds searches on Benson and Stabler and is registered to Henry Palaver, a sex offender who served five years in a Montreal prison for abducting a 14-year-old; he and Ballentine are the same man. Carlene, who married him in prison, admits helping him attack about a dozen girls in Canada and killing Kaley herself to keep him free, and he says he hunts virgins because she was not one.
Spoiler, the ending: Sister Peg is found alive with a head wound; Carlene lured her with the baby and hit her with a tire iron. The detectives then learn that Henry J. was taken from a pregnant Montreal woman, Dannette Lancour, who was killed six months earlier, and he is returned to her widower. Ballentine turns on Carlene and disowns her, and as Canada seeks his extradition, he is told the squad will fight to keep him in New York.
Why it stands out
- Martin Short guest-stars as the self-described psychic and is credited under both of the character’s names, Sebastian Ballentine and Henry Palaver.
- Huang cites psychologist Paul Ekman’s Facial Action Coding System, which he says is taught at the FBI and CIA, to explain how Ballentine reads faces.