| "Great Expectations" | ||
|---|---|---|
| ← | SVU, Episode 18.11 | → |
| Production number: 18008 First aired (US): 15 February 2017 First aired (UK): 19 March 2017 First aired (CAN): 15 February 2017 First aired (AUS): 15 April 2017 | ||
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| Written By Kevin Fox & Brendan Feeney Directed By Martha Mitchell | ||
SVU investigates the players of a youth hockey league after a locker room hazing incident.
Summary[]
Summary
Plot[]
A youth hockey league team is competing, and when the team that lost goes back to the locker room, they take out their frustrations on Jack Wilson, a player who missed a key shot. After leaving the game, Jack collapses in the parking garage. At a hospital, they find that he was sodomized with a hockey stick.
After looking at the video surveillance from the rink, they find that Timmy Brown and Will Harris, the two players on the team who are known to be troublemakers, and are also known as the “Bash Brothers,” left the locker room right before Jack did. The SVU brings them in, and Will denies everything, but Timmy tells them that Kyle Turner, Jack’s best friend, went nuts on Jack in the locker room because of the missed shot.
Timmy claims that he and Will stayed to make sure Jack was ok, but he also says that he and Will held Jack down while Kyle assaulted him. They go to Kyle’s to pick him up, but according to his older brother Adam, Kyle is at the hospital after hurting his arm at practice. He might've broken his wrist, but after talking to the doctor, it looks like Kyle was also assaulted. There is a spiral fracture in his wrist, and other older spiral fractures that went untreated.
Kyle and his mother Helen both seem to be too scared to tell anyone what Kyle's abusive father Jim is doing to him. The detectives do the only thing they can do -- arrest Kyle for aggravated sexual assault. Benson and Carisi go to talk to Jack and his family, but when they get there, they learn that Jack passed away 20 minutes before they got there. He had an infection because of his injury. Benson and Carisi try to get Kyle to tell them the truth that an enraged Jim told him to attack Jack for missing the shot, but he won’t, even after they show him footage of him and his dad talking that Benson and Carisi say that they will eventually get the audio enhanced to hear what they are saying to each other. Adam is angry that Kyle won’t tell them the truth. Benson and Fin want Adam to help them convince Kyle to come clean and tell them what happened.
Later that night, they get a call from Helen, that Adam was just beat up by Jim, and when they get to the house, Adam is laying on the floor, bleeding, and having a hard time breathing. It seems that he has a couple of broken ribs too. Adam tells Carisi and Rollins that they needed a way to talk Kyle into telling them the real story -- there it is, and he points to his phone, which is on a nearby buffet table. He recorded the whole thing. He tells Kyle not to protect Jim anymore. Benson, Carisi, and Fin watch the video, and Rollins is talking to Helen, who is still protecting Jim. After showing Kyle the video of Adam and Jim, he admits that Jim, who was enraged about the missed shot, ordered him to attack Jack. They're able to convince Kyle to testify against Jim in exchange for a reduced sentence.
Cast[]
Main cast[]
- Mariska Hargitay as Lieutenant Olivia Benson
- Kelli Giddish as Detective Amanda Rollins
- Ice-T as Detective Odafin Tutuola
- Peter Scanavino as Detective Dominick Carisi, Jr.
- Raúl Esparza as A.D.A. Rafael Barba (credit only)
Recurring cast[]
Guest cast[]
- Lincoln Melcher as Kyle Turner
- Brent Sexton as Jim Turner
- Amy Spanger as Helen Turner
- Erika Rolfsrud as Linda Wilson
- Brian Hutchison as Frank Wilson
- Ben Cook as Adam Turner
- Gia Crovatin as Assistant Corporation Counsel Samantha Chapman
- Christopher Paul Richards as Jack Wilson
- Josh Banks as Peter White
- Taylor Miller as Attorney Ryan Egan
- Drew Beasley as Timmy Brown
- Elijah Richardson as Will Harris
- Josh Banks as Peter Brown
- Tanesha Gary as Donna Harris
- Brad Fraizer as Coach Gordon Sheen
- Athena Colón as Nurse Sofia Perez
- Maxwell Kenneth Owens as Mark Turner
References[]
Quotes[]
- [When Olivia arrives at the hospital]
- Benson: Hey. What do we got?
- Carisi: The victim's name is Jack Wilson. He's 13. He plays for the New York City Whitecaps.
- Benson: Which is...?
- Carisi: The best youth hockey program in the state. Now, Jack's teammates had a game this morning, but they lost after he missed a last-second shot. Now, his mother noticed he was bleeding in the parking lot afterwards, drove him over here.
- Benson: You talk to the doctor?
- Carisi: Yeah. He said there was tearing in his rectum caused by a blunt instrument. Like a... hockey stick. Sounds like a hazing.
- Benson: No, that sounds like sexual assault.
- Tutuola: Any troublemakers on your team?
- Coach Gordon Sheen: Have you ever traveled on a bus four and a half hours full of thirteen year olds? They're all troublemakers.
- Tutuola: I mean repeat offenders. Kids that like to do stupid things.
- Coach Sheen: [reluctant to say anything] Um...
- Tutuola: Look, coach, I know you don't want to give up any of your players, but, uh, you got to cooperate.
- Coach Sheen: Come on. [he sighs] Fine. Timmy Brown and Will Harris. They're wild. The boys call them the Bash Brothers 'cause the tend to get a little rough. But... but they've never done anything like what happened to Jack. It... they wouldn't last in this program. It's in violation of their contract.
- Tutuola: Their what?
- Coach Sheen: Their contract. It lays out our code of ethics. Every player signs one. So it couldn't have been a Whitecap.
- [about Jack's hockey teammates]
- Benson: Hey, where are we with these Bang Brothers?
- Tutuola: The Bash Brothers. Like McGwire and Canseco.
- Carisi: No, like Reed and Portman. [seeing Fin and Benson's blank looks] "Mighty Ducks 2"? Never mind. Anyway, these guys have never been in trouble with the law. They've got no juvenile records.
- Benson: Okay. You checked the, uh... their contracts?
- Tutuola: All signed and notarized. A lot of rules for an eighth grader.
- Benson: Kyle, listen to me. We wanna help you and there's a real chance that you could go to prison for what you did to Jack.
- Kyle Turner: But... I thought only adults could go to prison.
- Benson: Nope. Sometimes kids go, too.
- [about Kyle Turner]
- Rollins: I know he's our perp, but... the kid's a victim, too. There's no doubt that father's doing a number on him, and the mother, too.
- Carisi: The mother?
- Rollins: Yeah. What, she just sits there and watches it all happen, stands by silently? That's abuse.
- Carisi: I get what you're saying, but it's... it's not that simple.
- Rollins: Yeah, it is. Somebody lays a hand on Jesse, I'm gonna have something to say about, I guarantee it.
- Helen Turner: Kyle will be fine. Everything is going to be okay.
- Benson: Mrs. Turner, everything will not be okay. That ship sailed once Jack stopped breathing.
- [Adam has been severely beaten by his father]
- Adam Turner: You needed a way to get Kyle to talk. This is it. I got it on video. (to his brother) Don't protect him anymore. He doesn't deserve it.
- Carisi: You know something, Kyle, when I first saw Jack laid up in that hospital, I was pretty upset. I was angry at who did it. Because right away, Jack reminded me of... me. You see, I was the scrawny kid way back when. The guys in the neighborhood, they used to pick on me every day. The worst was this... this kid, Bobby Bianchi. One day when we were at school, he grabbed me by the hair he... he shoved my face through a plate glass window.
- Kyle Turner: Must've hurt.
- Carisi: I was bleeding, I was all cut up, the principal asked what happened, I could've put an end to it, right there. All I had to do was say Bobby's name. But I didn't. Because I didn't want Bobby to get into trouble.
- Kyle Turner: He got away with it?
- Carisi: That's right. Nobody ever knew what happened. You know where Bobby is now? He's in Sing-Sing for stabbing some poor sap to death during a bar fight. And I always think what if I would've said something? What if I just would've said something, maybe that guy would still be alive. I missed my shot, Kyle. And not a day goes by that I don't regret it. But this is your shot, right now.
- Benson: And if not for you, Kyle, do it for your little brother. Because what happens when he gets older and you're not around to look after him? Hmm? You ever think about that? Look, if you're willing to talk to the judge, we can get this case sent back to family court and you will get a reduced charge. Which means do less time.
- Kyle Turner: Okay. I'll do it.
- Finn: Nice story, man. I didn't know you were so quick on your feet.
- Carisi: You gotta do what you gotta do, right?
- Finn: That's right.
- Rollins: You didn't make that up though, did you? That really happened to you, didn't it?
(Carisi just walks away)
- Rollins: A few years in juvie is a lot better than 10 in state prisons, I guess.
- Benson: Small victories, I guess.
- Rollins: And Liv, we got that father out of the house.
- Benson: 13 years too late.
Background Information and Notes[]
- The episode title is derived from the novel of the same name by British author Charles Dickens.
- Originally, the episode was scheduled to air on November 9, 2016, but it was pushed back due to the 2016 MLB World Series.
- Despite airing as the 400th episode of the series, this is not actually the 400th episode. Due to the shelving of the unaired episode "Unstoppable", this aired as the 400th episode, but "Motherly Love" is the 400th episode of the series to be produced.
- Another episode in the Law & Order franchise that deals with youth hockey is the Law & Order episode "Thin Ice".
- Two of the players for the Whitecaps are nicknamed the Bash Brothers, which Fin thinks is a reference to the nickname of baseball players Mark McGwire and Jose Canseco when they played together for the Oakland Athletics. However, Carisi points out that it is more likely a reference to the duo of Fulton Reed and Dean Portman from the youth hockey film D2: The Mighty Ducks.
- Fulton Reed was played by actor Elden Henson who had guest-starred on SVU in the episode "Brotherhood". Dean Portman was played by Aaron Lohr who guest-starred on Law & Order and Law & Order: Trial by Jury.
- D2 also starred Kathryn Erbe, who played Detective Alexandra Eames on Law & Order: Criminal Intent and the SVU episodes "Acceptable Loss" and "Poisoned Motive".
- This episode received high praise from most parents of boys, particularly on Facebook, where parents praised the writers for doing an episode as well as sharing awareness about locker room bullying, with parents sharing their stories of their own sons being bullied in the boys locker room at school, at a gym or at a team sports club by other boys their age.
- Goof: There was an error in the time stamps of the video surveillance footage outside the locker room. When Rollins shows the video to one of the boys and his mother, the video first shows a date of 2/4/2017, then changes in the next shot to 12/8/2016.
Episode scene cards[]
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
|---|---|---|---|
|
Hudson Sports Complex |
Mercy Hospital |
Mercy Hospital |
Family Court |
| Previous episode: "Motherly Love" |
"Great Expectations" Law & Order: Special Victims Unit Season 18 |
Next episode: "No Surrender" |