Pledge (Season 19, Episode 10)
Premise: A 12-year-old and his family’s housekeeper are killed in the boy’s home, and a magazine fact-checker’s fixation on the boy’s mother turns out to stem from a college sorority party three decades earlier.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 19, Episode 10
- Detectives
- Det. Cyrus Lupo (Jeremy Sisto), Det. Kevin Bernard (Anthony Anderson)
- ADAs/DA
- Exec. ADA Michael Cutter (Linus Roache), ADA Connie Rubirosa (Alana de la Garza), DA Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston)
- Guest stars
- Matt Malloy as Ned Lasky, Erin Dilly as Joyce Foley, Brooke Bloom as Molly Lasky, Lara Harris as Susan Grayson, Timothée Chalamet as Eric Foley
- Director
- Alex Chapple
- Writers
- Richard Sweren & Gina Gionfriddo
Summary
The Investigation
“Pledge” begins with the killing of Eric Foley, 12, and the family housekeeper, Grazinya, who was there only because another employer had asked her to switch days. A delivery worker saw a white man in a fedora leave with a brown briefcase, and the killer cut off a lock of the boy’s hair. His parents, Harold and Joyce Foley, are neurologists studying pain at Hudson University, and Joyce had been dodging Ned Lasky of Contemporary Science, who suspected the couple of burying a failed drug trial.
Joyce then receives a condolence card holding Eric’s hair, mailed from Amherst, Massachusetts, and Lasky clutches her hand at the funeral. His editor says he is a fact-checker on his first story who worked from home that day and studied chemistry at U. Mass Amherst. The family car has 400 unexplained miles, and his daughter Molly, told of a $100,000 reward, recalls a Massachusetts gas receipt and a brown briefcase in the trunk. Lasky is arrested with directions to Vermont college towns and a fake press card.
The Trial
Lasky files a pro se motion alleging a conspiracy and demanding the college records of Rubirosa and the judge, while Molly, facing eviction by her mother, balks at cooperating without the reward. A second condolence card, to the mother of a Duke student killed abroad, quotes the motto of Kappa Delta Alpha, Joyce’s sorority at Dartmouth. Lasky has been vandalizing the sorority’s online encyclopedia entry, his old roommate recalls a torn blazer and an abrupt exit from college, and his parents describe repeated calls to Illinois colleges asking for a girl named Susan. Joyce then remembers that as chapter president she ejected a boy in a blue blazer from a mixer at a sorority sister’s request.
At a hearing on the defense motion to dismiss, Molly describes being drilled from childhood to pledge the sorority and then belittled by her father as too plain, but the defense attacks her interest in the reward and Joyce’s one-minute memory from thirty years ago. With the judge unconvinced, Cutter calls Susan Grayson, a Kappa Delta Alpha alumna from Dartmouth who says she would happily have dated a working-class boy and married one. Lasky erupts at Joyce, shouting that he showed her what losing a loved one feels like.
Spoiler, the ending: The judge denies the motion. Cutter informs Lasky that Grayson is not his Susan, who was killed by her husband eight years ago, and offers thirty years to life; no plea or verdict is shown.
Why it stands out
- Timothée Chalamet plays the murdered boy, Eric Foley, in one of his first television roles.
- McCoy, the son of a Chicago policeman, recalls getting nowhere with the wealthy girls of Lake Shore Drive.
- Cutter wins the hearing with a sorority alumna who is not the Susan the defendant spent decades seeking, without ever claiming she is.