Ripped (Season 7, Episode 4)
Premise: When a teenage pitcher attacks his best friend, Stabler’s loyalty to the boy’s father, his old partner, collides with the case, and steroids prove to be at the heart of it.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 7, Episode 4
- 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), Dr. Rebecca Hendrix (Mary Stuart Masterson)
- Guest stars
- Noah Emmerich as Officer Pete Breslin, Paul Wesley as Luke Breslin, Julia Weldon as Pamela Sawyer, Peter McRobbie as Judge Walter Bradley
- Ripped from the headlines
- Partly based on the death of Taylor Hooton, a Texas high school baseball player whose 2003 suicide his family blamed on anabolic steroids.
- Director
- Rick Wallace
- Writers
- Jonathan Greene
Summary
“Ripped” opens at a high school where Pamela Sawyer has been beaten and her clothes torn in an empty classroom. Her blood is on the practice jersey of the baseball team’s star pitcher, Luke Breslin, who punches Stabler and then says he remembers nothing. Luke is the son of Officer Pete Breslin, Stabler’s old radio car partner. Pamela tells Benson that Luke, her best friend since second grade, kissed her, then ripped her shirt and hit her when she pushed him away, but she will not press charges. Stabler tells her parents a trial may not be worth it, and Benson accuses him of protecting the boy. Stabler refuses Pete’s plea for a break, but when Cragen hears what he told the Sawyers, he sends Stabler home on vacation. Novak moves ahead without Pamela’s cooperation.
Huang sees rapid speech and swings between high energy and deep lows, and suspects bipolar disorder. Pamela says Pete is never satisfied with Luke and paid for him to join a gym after an operation. At the gym, Luke once punched a member, and his locker holds three kinds of anabolic steroids. Steroid rage and the depression of withdrawal, it emerges, can look like bipolar disorder. Benson tells Stabler, but warns him not to tell Pete. At the arraignment Luke is charged with assault and drug possession, and Pete learns about the steroids in open court. In a courthouse restroom Pete beats his son, calling him a failure; Stabler pulls him off and keeps hitting Pete until officers intervene.
Shaken, Stabler goes to Dr. Rebecca Hendrix. He says his wife left with the children a year ago and talks about his late father, a police officer who was fired and lost his pension after refusing to testify before the Knapp Commission, and who once stomped on his school project and beat him with a belt for crying, calling him weak and a failure. The next day Stabler finds Pete shot in the head at home. The bullet missed his brain, but his heart reacts badly to the epinephrine he is given, and the doctor suspects steroids. Pete admits using them to stay sharp on the job and claims he shot himself, but Luke’s fingerprint is on the gun’s trigger.
Spoiler, the ending: After a 911 call about a gun, Stabler goes in unarmed and finds Luke with Pamela. Luke says his father berated him over the steroids, that he had stolen them from Pete’s room, and that he shot Pete in anger and believes he killed him. Stabler tells him that withdrawal is driving his despair and that Pete is alive and sorry; Luke later apologizes at his father’s bedside. No further charges are shown.
Why it stands out
- Mary Stuart Masterson returns from the previous season as Dr. Rebecca Hendrix, helping Stabler face his past in a scene executive producer Neal Baer called emotionally devastating.
- Christopher Meloni’s first Emmy nomination, for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series in 2006, was reportedly for this episode.