Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Master Key" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired January 23, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, January 23) I watched a particularly chilling Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode called “Master Key,” in which a 16-year-old white boy named Anthony Reed (Ricky Garcia, who’s actually 25, as I suspected) disappears from the group home he’s living in, which is run by a Black woman with all the sensitivity of a concentration-camp commandant. Anthony’s roommate Eric, an African-American, watched him get into a gold mini-van driven, it turns out, by Colin Clark (Ben Fine). The police visit Clark’s home and speak to his wife Leslie (Jo Twiss), who predictably has no idea that her husband is out pursuing extra-relational activities with teenage boys. Then they trace Clark to a by-the-hour motel and find him dead and Anthony sitting up straight in an adjoining room, looking almost catatonic. Anthony insists that Clark tried to rape him and he grabbed Clark’s gun and shot him dead in self-defense, but the police and prosecutor Dominick Carisi, Jr. (Peter Scanavino) don’t believe him. For one thing, there’s a huge amount of blood on the floor of the motel room as well as blood on the bed, and the blood on the floor convinces the investigators that Anthony can’t have shot Clark while he was on the bed. Nor do they think Anthony could have moved the body from the floor to the bed on his own. They also find a partial print on the gun that doesn’t match either Anthony’s or Clark’s, though the print is so partial they can’t identify whose it is.

The police have also investigated Anthony’s background; he got into the foster-care system when his father was murdered while Anthony was 10 and his mother died of a fentanyl overdose a year later. Among the people they interview along the way are Anthony’s case worker with the Department of Child Protective Services, Michael Strickland (Zach Appleman), who from the moment we lay eyes on him seems too good to be true as he declares to the cops that he’s a dedicated public servant who takes his job seriously and would never harm a kid. As it turns out, he’s the primary villain of the piece: not a pedophile himself but someone who’s been pimping out his charges, both male and female, including Anthony. Clark was one of Anthony’s johns, and Strickland himself was the third person at the scene of his killing. Apparently Anthony was the real shooter, but when he couldn’t go through with killing Clark, Strickland grabbed his gun hand and essentially forced him to do it. The cops discovered a series of text messages supposedly between Anthony and Clark declaring their intention to run away to California and be together, but it turns out they were forged by Strickland. The police also uncover Strickland’s “dark Web” page advertising his victims to potential johns. This SVU episode was full of plot twists they’ve explored before, but it’s redeemed by Ricky Garcia’s powerful performance as Anthony. He really makes you believe in his character as a young man so traumatized by a child “protective” system that has screwed him over, literally as well as figuratively, at every turn. Anthony’s disinclination to cooperate with the authorities becomes vivid and totally understandable in Garcia’s amazing acting. He’s a young actor we really need to see more of (and he’s quite a bit hotter-looking on his imdb.com photo than he is in this episode!).