law & order: special victims unit
tragedy (1/25)

The ‘Law and Order’ spin-off following a police unit dedicated to solving sexually motivated crimes returns to Five for its fifth season. In the season premiere, the detectives are in a race against time to find a pregnant woman who disappears from her car.

The show centres around detectives Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) and Elliot Stabler (Christopher Meloni, ‘Oz’, ‘Harold and Kumar Get the Munchies’) as they investigate the worst of New York’s criminals. Benson and Stabler are joined by weathered veteran Detective Munch (comedian Richard Belzer, who has appeared as the same character in shows including ‘Homicide: Life on the Street’, ‘Law and Order’ and ‘The XFiles’) and his no-nonsense partner Detective Odafin ‘Fin’ Tutuola (rapper-turned-actor Ice-T), an ex-narcotics officer. Presiding over the detectives is their world-weary captain, Donald Cragen (Dann Florek, who played the same role in the first three seasons of ‘Law and Order’). ADA Alexandra Cabot (Stephanie March) takes the cases to court.

When the police receive a 911 call from a woman who is being attacked in her car, Benson and Stabler initially believe it could be the work of the carjack rapist who has carried out similar assaults. The police establish that the call came from Annika Bergeron, who is eight months into a high-risk pregnancy. Annika’s doctor warns the police that she has a dangerous condition and must have a caesarean section or she could die.

With pressure mounting to find the missing woman, the cops turn their attention to Daniel Lester, Annika’s ex-boyfriend and the father of her child. Daniel works for a company called Granville Developers and is engaged to his boss’s daughter, Melinda Granville (Kellie Martin, ‘ER’). When Melinda’s mother Rose (Shirley Knight, ‘Desperate Housewives’, ‘As Good As it Gets’) learns of the situation, she generously puts forward a $100,000 reward for information about Annika.

The reward yields a promising lead when Fin receives a call from a man claiming to know about the case. The police arrange for Daniel to meet the informant, but the exchange goes badly wrong when the man tries to flee with the money. Daniel hits the man and knocks him into traffic, where he is killed instantly.

The police identify the victim as Greg Jezic, a man with a history of violence and hired thuggery to his name. Jezic’s bank records show payments from an account in the Cayman Islands, while his phone log reveals that he received a call from Sam Marlett, an inmate at Sing Sing Prison. This call becomes significant when the cops learn that Marlett’s last visitor was none other than Daniel Lester. This, coupled with the discovery of a brochure for a bank in the Caymans on Daniel’s person, gives the police enough cause to arrest him. Once in custody, Daniel breaks down and confesses to the crime.

However, the detectives still believe that Annika is alive, and a receipt from Jezic’s pocket leads them to a beach cottage in a Long Island resort. The cops burst inside to find Annika strapped to a bed, in the throes of labour. Despite her condition, Annika is able to tell the police that Melinda Granville had visited her, and that Jezic told her a woman had hired him to kidnap her. Stabler steps in to deliver Annika’s baby, but can do nothing to stop her dying in childbirth. The shell-shocked detectives are left with a puzzle to unravel. It now seems that Melinda is behind the kidnapping – so why has Daniel confessed to the crime?