Parasite (Season 25, Episode 8)
Premise: A 74-year-old toy magnate is bludgeoned in his hotel suite the night before his wedding, and his 22-year-old bride goes on trial as the prosecution leans on her sexual past.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 25, Episode 8
- Detectives
- Det. Vincent Riley (Reid Scott), Det. Theo Walker (David Ajala)
- ADAs/DA
- Exec. ADA Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy), ADA Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi), DA Nicholas Baxter (Tony Goldwyn)
- Guest stars
- Anabella Raye as Chloe Thompson, Eric William Morris as Derek Nestor, Margaret Anne Florence as Amanda Nestor, Necar Zadegan as defense attorney Bonnie Kimura, Allen Fawcett as Bob Gladstone
- Director
- Michael Pressman
- Writers
- Jennifer Vanderbes & Jolie Huang
Summary
The Investigation
“Parasite” opens at the rehearsal dinner of toy magnate Bob Gladstone, 74, and his 22-year-old fiancée, Chloe Thompson, whose romance has drawn public ridicule. The next morning Chloe finds him dead in his presidential suite, his skull broken by a heavy object. A bronze sculpture is missing, the hotel’s cameras were off at his request, and a guest saw a waiter leave the room after an argument.
The waiter, Emile Zellicheni, took the job to reach Gladstone after a lawsuit over his wife’s paralyzing fall in a Gladstone store was thrown out. He says Gladstone heard him out and promised help, and phone and video records support him. An old will leaves everything to the children unless Gladstone is married. His son, Paul, an aid worker who refused the family money, was taking leftovers to a food pantry, and his daughter, Amanda Nestor, who had asked a lawyer about elder abuse, says she spent the night in her room with her husband and sick child.
A relationship therapist who counseled Gladstone points to Amanda’s husband, Derek Nestor, who says he showed Gladstone a private investigator’s file on Chloe’s escort and sugar-baby profiles and bankruptcy, and that Gladstone planned to confront her. Chloe’s prints from a sealed juvenile arrest turn up near the body, and records reveal the couple secretly married in Las Vegas months earlier, so she already stood to inherit. Detectives find the sculpture in her closet and arrest her.
The Trial
Defense attorney Bonnie Kimura calls the prosecution sexist and notes that Chloe had a torn rotator cuff. Over objection, the judge lets Price show the jury the investigator’s images as evidence of motive. Kimura has Nestor read Gladstone’s review calling him untrustworthy and inept and points out that his family inherits only if Chloe is convicted. Chloe testifies that she told Gladstone about her past early on and he accepted it, that her key card shows she never left her room, and that her lipstick ended up on him when she tried to revive him.
Amanda then tells Price she saw Chloe in the hallway around 11 p.m. But a recording of her call to her child’s doctor that night captures Derek returning to the room and Amanda asking what is on his shirt. Derek proves to be deep in debt and bitter about Chloe, yet Amanda refuses to turn on him.
Spoiler, the ending: Maroun argues that the case against Chloe rests on contempt for her past, and the office drops the charges and turns to Derek and Amanda. Released, Chloe asks whether anyone ever considered that she might be telling the truth, and walks out. No one has been charged with Gladstone’s murder when the episode ends.
Why it stands out
- The prosecution abandons its own case in the middle of the trial after concluding that it leaned on judgments about the defendant’s sexual past.
- The title comes from Derek Nestor’s description of Chloe, a word later turned back on Nestor himself once his debts come to light.