Rapture (Season 19, Episode 14)
Premise: The murder of the man behind a website that emails unbelievers after the rapture leads to stolen gold, a Christian charity that sends Jews to Israel, and a suspect who takes shelter in Iran’s diplomatic mission.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 19, Episode 14
- 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
- John Sharian as George Darvey, Jason Butler Harner as Reverend Nathan Reeves, Joshua Burrow as Evan Corliss, Tom Galantich as Joe Chappell, Veanne Cox as Ms. Barsett
- Director
- Fred Berner
- Writers
- Ed Zuckerman & Luke Schelhaas
Summary
The Investigation
“Rapture” begins when a man receives an email from his uncle, Larry Novak, announcing the end of the world and confessing that he killed his long-absent wife. Her body is in Novak’s freezer, and Novak, very much alive, is arrested lamenting that he was left behind. His message went out early from a paid website that holds believers’ farewell notes to unsaved relatives and sends them once two of its three Christian operators stop logging in. One of them, webmaster Sam Burwell, is found shot in the head in his apartment.
Burwell had argued at an end-times convention with a man named Corliss and had just given $100,000 to Sacred Exodus, Reverend Nathan Reeves’s charity, which brings Jews from the former Soviet Union to Israel to fulfill prophecy. A late subscriber, Steve Corliss, had stored an email telling his brother, Evan, about 200 gold coins hidden in his desk, and Burwell took them. Evan, an ex-convict, admits roughing Burwell up to get 12 coins back and demanding the rest, which had gone to the charity. Sacred Exodus’s logistics man, George Darvey, a former Marine who did work for Blackwater, says Burwell visited him. The Uzbek consulate reveals that the $1,000-a-head emigration tax Darvey bills the charity does not exist, and Darvey flew in with a 9mm pistol.
The Trial
Spotted by police, Darvey flees by cab into the Iranian mission and claims a Zionist frame-up. A State Department official insists the mission cannot be entered, though the gun he left in the cab nearly matches the murder weapon. Lupo, who once did intelligence work, has an NYPD Intelligence contact broadcast a fake Israeli message about an agent code-named Loudmouth; when an embassy car takes Darvey to the airport, the detectives hand the Iranians a file naming him as that Mossad agent, and he climbs out into custody.
Iran then accuses Israeli agents of murder in New York, upsetting McCoy, who is running for DA against Joe Chappell. At trial, Reeves testifies that the bogus taxes may have been bribes, which undercuts Darvey’s motive, and Cutter suggests he is lying to hasten the Second Coming. Threatening to shut the charity down, Cutter and Rubirosa visit Reeves, and she answers his prophecies with the passage in Matthew saying no one knows the day or hour.
Spoiler, the ending: Reeves reveals that Burwell planned to seek a refund from the Uzbek embassy, that he passed this on to Darvey, and that Darvey said it could not be allowed to happen. The jury convicts Darvey in less than a day, and McCoy asks Rubirosa to help him prepare for a panel on religion and the law with Chappell.
Why it stands out
- To pull a murder suspect out of a diplomatic mission that police may not enter, the detectives trick the Iranians into believing he is an Israeli spy.
- McCoy’s race for DA spills into the case when his opponent, Joe Chappell, uses the prosecution to attack him and Cutter at a candidates’ debate.