Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Carousel" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired February 29, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The next show up on Dick Wolf’s oeuvre was a Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode, “Carousel,” that starts out with a scene in a youth hostel, in which two young men, students at the ultra-prestigious Cambridge Institute of Technology (CIT) – obviously read the real-life MIT –are shown cruising two young women. The young men are Hayden Foote (Jesse Anderson) and Frederick Hwang (Alex Fox), and the women they’re cruising are Leah Tan (Anastasia Lyn) and Maura Ramos (Mara Topic). The four go out to a sleazy bar in the neighborhood recommended by the hostel concierge, and the two men both drug Leah’s drink while they couldn’t be less interested in Maura either for legitimate or criminal purposes. It turns out that the guys are into a sick game in which they collect points for bedding women from as many different countries as possible; they “score” the game with push-pins on a map of the world. There are two other people involved in the game: Dustin Renfrow (Jake Murphy), the third and nerdiest of the contestants who begs off the current outing because he claims to have food poisoning; and Keegan Delpino (Alex Bartner), who works in the school’s DNA lab and confirms that the contestants have indeed fucked someone of the nationality they claim through collecting illegally obtained DNA samples the young men give him. Leah reports a rape to the Special Victims Unit, while desperately pleading that her parents back home in Singapore can’t learn that she’s been raped because they’ll condemn her for not being a virgin until her wedding night. Leah also admits that while she didn’t willingly have intercourse, she did give Hayden a blow job because “I’d always wanted to know what it felt like to kiss a man … down there.”

But she also says she didn’t actually complete the act, and that still leaves the mystery of who did penetrate her and when, since her rape kit turned out positive, though there’s none of his semen for DNA testing either because she showered afterwards to get rid of any traces of him or her rapist used a condom. Ultimately the SVU detectives travel to Cambridge and confront Keegan, who more or less willingly gives up the DNA sample he was given to verify who had sex with Leah, and it turns out to be Dustin Renfrow, who was so desperate to get some points on the board that he was willing to violate not only the laws against rape but the rules of the game, which were that the sex had to be more or less consensual. (I write “more or less” because it seemed perfectly acceptable to feed their prospective targets drinks drugged with substances like Rohypnol that would eliminate their ability and/or their inclination to resist.) Ultimately the cops are able to bust the kids after they turn up another woman, a Bulgarian, whom they victimized and who luckily is still in the U.S. and, indeed, still in New York City. There’s a fascinating epilogue in which Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) is reminiscing about how she’s been with the SVU squad for 25 years and she didn’t think it would become the centerpiece of his career – and it occurred to me that this may be how Mariska Hargitay feels about this role. She once told People magazine that the reason she took the role of Benson on SVU in the first place was because it was the only part she was offered that wasn’t a dumb blonde in the mold of Hargitay’s real-life mother, Jayne Mansfield – and now that she’s had a much longer career than Mansfield’s and made a lot more money, it’s clear that the character of Benson has defined her life and her career in a way she probably couldn’t have predicted back in 1999 when the show started its run.