Blast (Season 7, Episode 13)
Premise: A girl with undiagnosed leukemia is kidnapped for ransom, and the search leads back to her own family.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 7, Episode 13
- 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), ME Dr. Melinda Warner (Tamara Tunie)
- Guest stars
- Shawn Reaves as Daniel Hunter, Tom Verica as Jake Hunter, Kaitlin Hopkins as Pamela Hunter, Gabrielle Brennan as Carly Hunter, Joe Lisi as Craig Lennon
- Director
- Peter Leto
- Writers
- Amanda Green
Summary
“Blast” begins as eight-year-old Carly Hunter is grabbed on her way home from school by a man in a Halloween mask, while Mrs. Fennessy, who walks the girls part of the way, looks on. The stolen van turns up with a homeless man sheltering inside and blood in the back. Parole officer Craig Lennon points to sex offender Joel Mayder, once seen near Carly’s school; Mayder flees to his roof, and his laptop journal shows he is still searching for a victim. Warner finds that the blood came from a nosebleed and that Carly has leukemia and needs treatment soon.
A caller with a disguised voice demands $300,000 from Carly’s parents, bank manager Jake Hunter and his wife Pamela, and warns them not to involve police. Warner, at the apartment to explain the illness, convinces the watching caller she is a doctor, and the squad slips in disguised as deliverymen to tap the phones. A fax orders the doctor to make the drop alone; Warner tells Stabler the Air Force paid for her medical school and that she served two tours at Ramstein during Desert Storm. At the piers the masked kidnapper shows Carly, but a security guard interrupts and he drives off with her. Rock salt from his tire tracks, and a hidden printer code TARU reads on the ransom note, point to a closed rock salt yard on West 58th Street by the Hudson, where Stabler finds Carly drugged with cold medicine and chilled. She is stabilized in the hospital.
Carly remembers her captor making her “chocofizzies,” a drink her older brother named, and Pamela realizes the kidnapper is Daniel, 23, a cocaine addict the family cut off five years earlier. At the bank, Jake admits Daniel recently asked him for money because he owed dangerous people. Daniel then robs the branch with a submachine gun, takes Stabler’s weapon and, in what Stabler calls an accident, shoots his father. Cragen negotiates by phone, and Stabler persuades Daniel to free the other hostages while Warner stays to keep Jake alive, relieving his collapsing lung with a makeshift tube.
Spoiler, the ending: As Daniel apologizes to his father and moves to face the waiting tactical team, Warner shoots him in the leg so he can be taken alive. Pamela says she does not know what to say to her son, and Warner leaves to pick up her daughter from school.
Why it stands out
- Tamara Tunie, newly added to the opening credits this season, gets a lead role as Warner, who makes the ransom drop and reveals a past as an Air Force doctor.
- TARU traces the ransom note through a microscopic tracking code that, the episode explains, high-end color printers add to every page.