Snowflakes (Part 1) (Season 25, Episode 9)
Premise: The killing of a Ukrainian woman beside Lt. Brady leads her and SVU’s Capt. Benson to a ring that traffics women from Ukraine to carry babies for sale, and on to a far more dangerous buyer.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 25, Episode 9
- Detectives
- Det. Vincent Riley (Reid Scott), Det. Theo Walker (David Ajala), Capt. Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), Sgt. Odafin “Fin” Tutuola (Ice-T), Det. Terry Bruno (Kevin Kane)
- ADAs/DA
- Exec. ADA Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy), ADA Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi), DA Nicholas Baxter (Tony Goldwyn)
- Guest stars
- Anastasiia Zahrai as Nadiya Tecun, Tina Ivlev as Polina Kravets, Colleen Foy as Sara Tandon, Shannon Lucio as Carri Valenti, Jess Prichard as Derek Hobbs
- Ripped from the headlines
- The storyline appears to draw on Ukraine’s commercial surrogacy industry, which kept operating after Russia’s February 2022 invasion.
- Director
- Jean de Segonzac
- Writers
- Scott Gold
Summary
The Investigation
“Snowflakes (Part 1)” opens as a frightened Ukrainian woman named Nadiya walks into a Manhattan emergency room with injuries a nurse takes for sexual assault, then flees when told her brother has arrived. When police find her a few blocks away, a masked gunman in a passing SUV shoots her in the head, inches from Lt. Jessica Brady, who later says Nadiya pushed her out of the way.
Brady works the case with Capt. Olivia Benson of the Special Victims Unit. The autopsy shows Nadiya had just lost a pregnancy and was hurt by crudely used forceps, and the fetus was unrelated to her. Sgt. Fin Tutuola traces her prayer card to her priest in Ukraine and her full name, Nadiya Tecun, and airport video leads to a driver who took her from JFK to an abandoned power plant, where detectives find locked rooms set up as a makeshift maternity ward. Her friend Polina Kravets explains that a recruiter named Misha had embryos implanted in women near Kyiv, who paid for the promise that births in the U.S. would make them citizens; once here, they were locked up and their babies taken.
Permits to fly frozen embryos, known as snowflakes, identify Misha Orlov, but he is found shot dead at home. His messages lead to Carri and Jason Valenti, who adopted a son through a Christian charity he fronted; under a protective order, they name the charity, Hope Lifts. Its filings point to lawyer Derek Hobbs, who, pressed in front of his daughter, names Sergey Volkov and Sara Tandon. Volkov matches the man who posed as Nadiya’s brother.
The Trial
Police raid a Staten Island warehouse holding hundreds of frozen embryos and, after an exchange of gunfire, take Tandon in. Records there lead to the Hudson Fertility Group, which gave patients’ surplus embryos to charities promising to place them with devout couples; the clinic knew the head of Hope Lifts as Diana Hill, who turns out to be Tandon. She asks for a lawyer, and prosecutors warn that their case covers the charity fraud but not yet the trafficking or the two murders, so she could be free within a few years.
Encrypted messages show an unknown party telling Volkov and Tandon “We’ll take them all,” and Tandon offering a delivery on December 2. The trail leads to a property flying a hate symbol, where a white supremacist group has stockpiled weapons and explosives.
Spoiler, the ending: As the squads search a workshop full of bomb-making gear, a device starts beeping and everyone runs, but the blast catches Det. Terry Bruno. The episode ends mid-case, with Bruno hurt, the buyers unidentified and the story left to continue in the second half of the crossover.
Why it stands out
- The episode begins a two-part crossover with Law & Order: Special Victims Unit that concludes in that show’s Season 27, Episode 9.
- Mariska Hargitay (Capt. Olivia Benson), Ice-T (Sgt. Fin Tutuola) and Kevin Kane (Det. Terry Bruno) appear from SVU, with Benson working the case alongside Brady.
- The title refers to the nickname for frozen embryos stored in liquid nitrogen before implantation.