In the last episode, a child is abducted when his mother has friends over for a drug induced party. In this episode, titled ‘Decline and Fall’, a billionaire store owner is accused of raping a young woman at one of his parties. Bob Gunton guests stars as Lawrence who is a multibillionaire philanthropist who thinks that he is above the law. It comes at a time a few days before someone of similar means was accused of doing the same thing. Difference is that this man gets arrested.
The show starts with a young man, Eric, who gets confidence to talk to a woman, named Sarah, from his grandfather, Lawrence. Everything seems to be ok until the next day when Sarah goes to SVU claiming that she was raped.
Turns out she is half right.
She had conscensual sex with Eric but that led to them discovering that the other man, Lawrence gave her drugs in order to have sex. Quaadludes to be exact. A very old drug that was used before rohypnol became the drug of choice. That alone has detectives knowing that Lawrence is the man since no young man would use that.
As the trial comes to a head, Lawrence tries to play that he is not in the right mind and that he can’t be held responsible for his actions. First person to pull that one huh? Barba knows that it’s bull until it starts to work. It needs some maneuvering and pulling out some skeletons before we are able to get Eric to see Lawrence for what he is. Turns out that the reason why Lawrence Jr (Eric’s father) and his mother got divorced is because Lawrence gave his mother some of that Quaadludes in order to get her to ‘open’ up.
In the next episode, which will be on February 8th, we are at a TV milestone as SVU hits it’s 400th episode. In this one we have a mother who is having an affair with her son’s best friend and it doesn’t look like it’s going to have a happy ending.
What did you think of the show?