Undercover (Season 9, Episode 15)
Premise: A teenage girl’s rape points to a guard at the women’s prison where her mother is held, and Benson goes in undercover as an inmate to unmask him.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 9, Episode 15
- Starring
- Det. Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), Det. Elliot Stabler (Christopher Meloni), Sgt. John Munch (Richard Belzer), Det. Odafin “Fin” Tutuola (Ice-T), Det. Chester Lake (Adam Beach), Capt. Donald Cragen (Dann Florek), Dr. George Huang (BD Wong), ME Dr. Melinda Warner (Tamara Tunie)
- Guest stars
- Shareeka Epps as Ashley Tyler, Johnny Messner as Lowell Harris, Todd Stashwick as Matthew Parker, Hassan Johnson as Rick Tyler, Daria Hardeman as Risa Tyler
- Director
- David Platt
- Writers
- Mark Goffman
Summary
“Undercover” begins when police find a gardener waving a machete near 16-year-old Ashley Tyler, who has been raped and beaten in a community garden. In the ambulance Ashley lashes out at Benson, and she refuses to let the hospital release her rape kit. Her foster parents, Jill and Henry Botas, have had her only a few months. Her mother, Risa, is serving 12 years at Sealview, a women’s prison, on a drug charge, and a child welfare caseworker says Ashley was taken from her uncle, Rick Tyler, after the caseworker found the two in bed when Ashley was ten. At Rick’s apartment the detectives find Ashley tending his marijuana plants. Rick says the drugs Risa was caught with were his, and that a Sealview guard forced Risa to keep him supplied with drugs from Rick; when Risa stopped the supply, the guard raped Ashley as a warning. Ashley, who never saw his face, agrees to release the kit, but a man flashing a state corrections badge collects it from the hospital first.
Stabler visits Sealview posing as Risa’s lawyer, but she is sent to solitary over contraband found in her cell, and the warden refuses to cooperate. Ashley describes guards abusing her mother during strip searches. Benson volunteers to go into Sealview as an inmate; Cragen at first refuses, then seeks the corrections commissioner’s approval, and Huang builds her a cover as an addict. Fin goes in as a corrections officer. Risa is soon found hanged, and Warner sees signs that she was strangled and the scene staged, but the local medical examiner will not reopen the case. Officer Matthew Parker, with a history of complaints and stints at six women’s prisons, becomes a suspect. Then Ashley is hospitalized with drug-resistant tuberculosis, the CDC finds cases at Sealview, and the prison is locked down with Benson inside.
Spoiler, the ending: During the lockdown Capt. Lowell Harris pulls Benson out of the mess hall after a disturbance, takes her to a basement out of camera range and tries to rape her. Fin, led there by an inmate, stops him, and Harris is arrested. His union lawyer, Russell Hunter, gets him released after tests show neither Harris nor Parker has TB; Ashley caught it at a group home. Then Ashley recalls a large mole on her attacker’s genitals, the same mark Benson saw in the basement, and Harris is arrested at Sealview for raping Ashley. Asked by Stabler whether Harris raped her, Benson says it is the closest she has ever come.
Why it stands out
- Shareeka Epps makes her first television appearance as Ashley Tyler.
- The episode was filmed in a real prison.
- It aired on April 15, 2008, nearly three months after the previous episode, “Inconceivable.”