Law and Order: SVU - Stranger (Episode 1011)

Still smokin' hot after 10 yearsThis episode reminded me why I love SVU.  When this show takes its time, builds a story, develops its characters and leaves out distracting cheesy-ass gimmicks… it’s good.  Like, squee-like-a-twelve-year-old-braces-wearing-Jonas-Brothers-fangirl good.  And you remember why it’s been on for ten seasons (here’s hoping we’ll get a few more - contracts are up for negotiation , and Leno’s got his chin eye on the 10:00 slot).  As the ep begins, a family goes about its evening routine.  A little boy plays with his mother and aunt as Grandma and Grandpa Wii it up.  Hee!  I love the fact that even old folks can (and do) get their Guitar Hero on.  The doorbell rings, and Grams thinks it’s the pizza delivery guy.  But there’s a pale, fragile young woman standing in the doorway, instead.  “It’s me,” she says to the older woman, who’s clearly confused.  “You don’t remember me?”  The oldest daughter, Erica, comes to the door and gawps at the girl and her four-leaf clover wrist tattoo.  And then: “My God,” Erica gasps.  “It’s Heather!”  She grabs the girl into a hug.  Here come our heroes, both of whom look particularly delicious this evening, IMO.  They’re all set to hear about the 9485760643 horrible things you just know must have happened to this girl.  Heather Hollander disappeared four years ago, when she was fourteen.  But pudgetastic Heather didn’t run away to avoid fat camp like everyone thought.  Nope.  Instead she was imprisoned as a sex slave.  And away we go!  

Heather (whose years as a perpetual victim were more effective than Slimfast) has holed up in her bedroom, which her family kept exactly as she left it.  And she ain’t coming out, not even for Olivia’s special patented Cajole the Victim voice.  Heather’s bitchy sister Nikki, the “screwup middle child,” is about as happy as Blagojevich in front of an investigative committee to see her baby sis.  Apparently everybody blamed her for Heather’s disappearance, ‘cuz Heather ran away after Nikki called her “Heifer.”  Snerk!  Oops, sorry, that wasn’t supposed to be funny.  This is serious, people.  Ahem.  Heifer Heather opens up just long enough to retort that she never blamed Nikki, and Liv and Elliot seize the opportunity to scoot hastily into the bedroom.  Heather says that she was abducted by a man who made her call him “Daddy” and locked her in a concrete bunker to repeatedly sexually assault her.  He always padlocked the door, but finally got drunk and forgot, and she took the opportunity to get the eff out.  Heather ran through a strange neighborhood until she found a location she recognized.    

Elliot and Olivia collect Heather’s clothes to search for DNA samples and take her to the hospital.  Ready?  Let’s tackle the most cringe-inducing part of this show… watching the victim describe her ordeal.  Heather’s abductor, who will hereupon be referred to as El Creepo, pulled the old chloroform-hankie trick and when she woke up she was naked in the bunker.  Heather screamed for help, but nobody could hear.  She fought off El Creepo the first time he tried to get his pervert on, but he told her to “be nice” or he’d let her starve.  The bunker had no windows or plumbing hookups, just a clawfoot tub and an old lawn chair with a bucket for a toilet.  Dude, that is beyond foul.  Elliot and Olivia are worried El Creepo will snatch another girl, and they want Heather’s help to find him.  They take her back to the park she recognized when she fled, and try to retrace her steps.  But the light, noise, and movement of NYC freak her out, so they have to take her home.  Heather apologizes for her inability to help, and suddenly a douchey tabloid reporter (sporting a toupee that resembles a dead opossum) and a papparazzo show up.  Liv ushers her inside and Elliot, sporting his best menacing sneer and piercing gaze, advances on the pap with cool, brutal authority until the guy nervously trips over his own feet and breaks his camera.  HAWT.  

Cragen gets the bill for the pap’s busted camera, and Elliot is entirely nonplussed – he can’t help it if the guy was clumsy.  Hee!  Anyway, the douchey newshounds managed to get a photo of Heather and have klassily published it on the front page.  Heather’s oldest sister, Erica, is livid.  She seems to have been the most proactive of her family in searching for Heather, even starting a website to ask for tips.  Unlike ho-bag sister Nikki, who’s freaked already-fragile Heather out by vindictively showing her the front-page pic.  Since Heather isn’t in any shape to help them search, our heroes follow up other leads.  A priest has phoned in a tip, claiming to have seen Heather at mass with an older man.  But wait – Heather said she hadn’t been out of the basement in four years.  Somethin’ ain’t right here, and the plot keeps thickening.  When Olivia questions her, Heather denies leaving the house, but she might as well have “Liar liar pants on fire” tattooed across her forehead.  So why the big fat fib?  Huang in all of his argyle glory says that Heather was programmed to follow orders, and her captor tested his power and control by taking her out in public.  She’s safe now, but she has Stockholm Syndrome.  

Just then Olivia gets a call – Heather’s being hospitalized after a suicide attempt.  After she’s stabilized and placed in the hospital’s Britney Spears Psych Wing, Heather admits to Olivia that she thinks she’ll never belong anywhere ever again.  Olivia thinks it’ll take time, counseling, and bringing El Creepo to justice.  Meanwhile, interesting shit’s going down out in the hall: a doctor tells Elliot that Heather’s parents both have type A blood, but she has type B – impossible if she’s their biological child.  Check it out: Heather isn’t Heather!  When an old photo is overlaid with a new one, the facial features are similar, but don’t match up.  And that clover tattoo that Erica recognized?  It’s off, too – the stem points in the wrong direction.  “Heather” is an imposter!  Doooooood.  I honestly didn’t see that coming, but I love it!  As a test, Olivia takes Heather’s clarinet to the hospital and asks the girl to play.  When she won’t, Liv asks where she got the tattoo, and “Heather” is all, “Um tattoo parlor?”  Wrong!  Olivia’s cajoling voice suddenly goes hard as leftover Christmas fruitcake as she says the real Heather got her tat from a boyf.  And when she went missing, they pulled DNA from her toothbrush.  How much you wanna bet it won’t match?  One word: busssssted!  The imposter immediately starts to cry, and admits that she doesn’t know the real Heather.  She saw a photo on the internet and they “had the same hair.”  It’s at this point that I take a good look at “Heather’s” hair and realize that it’s v.v. obviously a wig.  Those things never fall quite the same way as real hair.  Oh well.  It’s 78905467 times better than any wig they’ve ever used on Lost.  That show’s wig fitter needs to get shitcanned, pronto.  “I needed a family, and they needed a daughter,” the imposter sobs.  “It didn’t hurt anyone!”  

Right, honey, tell that to the Hollander family.  While dogfaced bitch-skank Nikki claims she knew that Heather “came back wrong” (what is this, Buffy the Vampire Slayer?) the rest of the family is shocked and appalled.  How’d this stranger know the details of Heather’s life?  Well, according to our heroes, she studied the bedroom and searched the internet to gain insight into Heather’s life.  Erica doesn’t buy it – she thinks the impostor must know where Heather really is, and insists she be arrested for identity theft.  Fake Heather, a.k.a. Jane Doe, pleads not guilty and refuses to give her real name.  When her stint in the Britney Spears Ward is over, she’ll be transferred to jail.  The hearing ends with Erica in full on hissy tantrum mode, screaming at Jane Doe to tell them where Heather is.  To shut her up, Liv takes her back to the precinct and demonstrates how Jane Doe got hold of Heather’s info: Erica herself had posted 9865780 photos and stories on the missing persons website.  Lest you think nobody’s reading your blog.  Think again.  

Elliot and Olivia locate the tattoo parlor where Jane Doe got her clover, and find that one Carl Vasko put the ink on his credit card.  They pay Carl a visit, and the moment he sees Jane Doe’s photo, he makes a break for it.  Ha!  It’s awesome when they do that, because it always means the creep’s guilty and that our heroes will have an excuse to take him down like a bag of moldy turnips.  Sure enough: as he lunges out the back door Carl’s face collides satisfyingly with Fin’s fist.  Ka-smizzack!  As Fin hauls him away, Elliot and Olivia head down to the basement.  Here it is… the scene of the crime.  The metal door, the cement bunker, the clawfoot tub and mattress and nasty lawn chair/bucket shitter, exactly as Jane Doe described.  Snap!  She may have been lying about her identity, but she sure as hell was telling the truth about the abuse.  Especially, as it turns out, the part about her rapist making her call him “Daddy.”  Shudder.

Doc Warner matches the blood on Fin’s sleeve (from the punch) to semen on the clothes Jane Doe was wearing when she escaped.  Sure enough – they match.  El Creepo = Carl Vasko.  Wanna know something else interesting?  They’ve ID’d Jane Doe through her DNA.  Her name’s Kristin Veuslich, and she was abducted in Ohio years ago by her father… Carl Veuslich Vasko.  Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me.  This ass is her dad, too?  I think I’ll rewind the TiVo and watch him get sucker punched a few more times.  El and Liv head into the interrogation room and start circling the guy like sharks in a tank.  Carl claims to be a good citizen, unlike his ex-wife… who was a “ball-busting bitch.”  Elliot’s shirtsleeves are rolled up over his forearms and he does that thing where he leans back with a cocky macho ‘tude and says, “I know that type.”  He glances over at Olivia, and in a split second she cottons onto his tactic.  It’s classic good cop/bad cop – the oldest trick in the book.  And jackass Vasko falls for it like a lemming off a cliff.  Throughout the rest of the interrogation Olivia screeches at Vasko like a PMSing banshee on crack and Elliot sympathizes with every single perverted, misogynistic thing he says.  And me?  My lil’ heart swells with fangirl love for how well they play off each other, and how freakin’ amazing they are when they’re working in sync.  It’s like they can read each others’ minds, man.  The interview ends with Olivia calling Vasko a piece of filth, Elliot telling her to get out because she’s clearly “on the rag,” and Liv slamming out of the room after hollering dramatically that she’s going to sue him for sexual harassment.  Quadruple HEE!

Olivia’s so high on thrilled about their brilliant partnerly performance that she’s practically breathless as she leaves Elliot to move in for the kill with Vasko, and she heads over to get Kristin out of jail.  Kristin says she tried suicide because she believed there was no good left in the world.  She escaped by gaining her father’s trust slowly, and he increased her freedoms (including allowing internet surfing and the tattoo for “luck”) until she could make a break for it.  Olivia wonders why she went to the Hollanders’ instead of tracking down her own mother in Ohio, and Kristin sobs that her mom died three years ago - she wanted a family again.  Olivia tells Kristin the truth... that her father lied.  Mom’s alive, and she’s never stopped looking for Kristin.  Whereupon we get a tearful reunion between Kristin and her mother, with Olivia looking on happily.  Sniff.  I always get a little teary-eyed over reunions.  

Elliot’s back at his desk, smirking because he (of course) totally played Carl like a game of Chinese checkers and got him to confess.  The dude’s going away for pretty much ever.  But there’s one last problem: Kristin told her mother she needed to speak to the Hollanders, and she hasn’t come back.  Liv and Elliot beeline for the Hollander home, where Momma Hollander shadily claims she hasn’t seen Kristin.  But Erica’s there, and she’s all, “WTF?”  She saw Kristin leaving the house… with ho-bag sister Nikki.  Upon further prodding, Momma Hollander admits that Kristin stopped by to nark on Nikki.  Apparently, while everyone still thought Kristin was Heather, Nikki said some rather self-incriminating things.  Like, “I know you’re not my sister, and you’d better leave before I do to you what I did to her.”  Erica is not even one tiny bit surprised.  Heather’s dead, ‘cuz Nikki killed her four years ago… and what’s worse is that Mom knew.  A furious Olivia tells Mom that if Nikki harms one little hair on Kristin’s wig head, she’ll go to jail as an accessory.  So where’d they go?  Why, to the same place Nikki killed Heather, of course.  

Said location is on the top of a building.  Nikki’s already convinced Kristin to climb halfway up a metal ladder on the side of a smokestack, likely with the intention of pushing her into said smokestack.  Elliot, Olivia and Erica arrive, and Kristin’s freaked out but Nikki’s got a fistful of her jacket and is still trying to convince her to come “check out the view.”  Elliot and Olivia urge Kristin to climb down instead, and she eventually does, pulling out of Nikki’s grasp.  But Nikki keeps going up.  She shouts that she didn’t mean to kill Heather – it just happened.  For a moment it looks like she’s going to fling herself down the smokestack, until Erica begs her to come down – she doesn’t want to lose a second sister.  Finally, Nikki climbs down and Elliot grabs her.  As he escorts her past doe-eyed innocent Kristin, Nikki gets in one final jab, accompanied by some serious stinkeye.  “The police gave up looking for Heather a long time ago.  Why did you pick us?”  I think a better question would be this: why didn’t anyone else notice Nikki’s homicidal tendencies?  She’s clearly a complete and total nut job.  Here’s to hoping she ends up in the High Security section of the Britney Spears Ward.