law & order: special victims unit
mother (3/25)

The ‘Law & Order’ spin-off following New York’s elite special victims unit continues its fifth season. In tonight’s episode, a psychiatrist known for using unconventional methods is found sexually assaulted and unconscious in a crack house, but the investigators struggle to get her to cooperate with the investigation.

After top forensic psychiatrist Dr Greta Heints is found assaulted and bound in a crack house, she regains consciousness but seems unwilling to assist Detectives Benson and Stabler in finding her assailant. Greta’s husband tells the detectives that she received a call on her private patient line on the night of the attack and then went out, but he is unable to offer any more clues.

Detectives Munch and Fin investigate Greta’s case list and come across a patient called Benny Edgar Ralsay, also known as the ‘duct tape rapist’. Ralsay wears an electronic ankle bracelet used to monitor his activity while on probation, and claims that he was at home on the night of the attack. However, detectives discover that he has a habit of avoiding surveillance by putting the bracelet on his cat.

Ralsay claims to have nothing but total respect for Greta, despite her unconventional and controversial methods. The psychiatrist, it emerges, believes in regressing her patients to their early childhood in an attempt to ‘re-parent’ them –offering them the things they were not given by their own parents, via transference.

Ralsay still maintains his innocence but, when Greta’s office is vandalised, the detectives pick him up. However, prints at the scene of the breakin lead them to Robert Logan, another of Greta’s patients. But when they track Logan down, they find him in hospital after a failed suicide attempt.

Logan tells Dr Huang that he and Greta were actually lovers, and that all they did during their sessions was make love. He goes on to assert that they regularly acted out one of her fantasies, which involved him overpowering her and tying her up. Could this explain why Greta was found at the crack house in such a state, and was unwilling to help the detectives?

Logan also claims that his suicide attempt was a result of Greta’s recent decision to transfer him to a different psychiatrist. However, he regularly suffers from psychiatric fugues, so the detectives are keen to look further into the case –could he have carried out the attack on Greta while he was in a fugue state? Munch questions one of Logan’s good friends who says he had some serious problems, and cut off ties with almost everyone he knew when he started seeing Greta.

The detectives then track down Logan’s sister, Christina, who works in a methadone clinic. She is clearly unhappy with the way Greta treated her brother, and plays the investigators a tape showing Greta extolling the sexual fantasies she projected onto Logan.

The bizarre set of circumstances looks set to baffle the detectives until they touch upon the subject of Logan’s mother, who apparently died of cancer when Logan was a boy. However, Christina has one more sinister secret to reveal that will turn the case on its head...