Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Undertow" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired March 13, 2025)

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

The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode from Thursday, March 13 was in its own ways even more powerful than the Law and Order that preceded it. It was called “Undertow” and told the rather pathetic (in both senses) story of a woman named Stacey Moran (Marilyn Caserta), a 30-year-old schoolteacher whose husband of five years, Tony Fusco (Mark Gorham), takes her to a swanky New York hotel called the Atelier for an expensive money-no-object dinner for their anniversary and then gets drunk (breaking his six months of sobriety) and makes a crude sexual assault on her in bed, which she responds to by leaving their hotel room and going downstairs to the lobby bar. While there she hooks up with a young man named Ryan Perry (played by a young actor of almost unearthly beauty named Billy Keogh), who’s sitting alone at the bar because his father is elsewhere in the hotel getting married to his third wife, Emily Perry (Clea Alsip). Together they head for the hotel pool and she takes a swig from a flask of vodka that, unbeknownst to her, is laced with the drug MDMA, also known as “Molly” or “ecstasy.” They end up in the hot tub and they have sex together. Then the next morning Emily Perry goes through the pockets of the rented tuxedo her stepson wore to her wedding (it’s established that Ryan’s mother died when he was still a toddler and his father had been married and divorced one other time since) and found a red pair of women’s lace panties. When Ryan admits that they’re from a woman he hooked up with at the hotel where his dad’s wedding took place, Emily immediately reports it to the Special Victims Unit because Ryan was just 16 years old and a high-school sophomore, so any sex he had with an adult counts as statutory rape. Stacey is arrested and indicted for third-degree rape. Prosecutor Dominick Carisi, Jr. (Peter Scanavino) offers her a plea deal that will allow her to avoid prison time, but one thing he can’t offer her is keeping her name off the sex offenders registry, which will cost her her job as a schoolteacher. The case comes to a quite intriguing trial, as it turns out Ryan texted two of his school friends that he was “bored” with girls his own age and he was determined to seduce one of the 30-something bridesmaids at his dad’s wedding just to prove that he could. (Billy Keogh was already setting my Lust-O-Meter off the charts right then, and I was asking myself what I would do if someone that drop-dead gorgeous made a pass at me.) Between Stacey’s claim that she was incapacitated at the time and a photo of the two of them taken by one of the other wedding guests that made it look like she was enjoying it, the jury on the show is unable to reach a unanimous verdict and the judge declares a mistrial. I suspect the writer, Brendan Feeney, was also unable to decide for himself how the case should resolve and what was the most just outcome.