A car accident leads to the discovery that a little girl (Jennette McCurdy) has been sexually abused. Detectives zero in on her PE teacher (Daniel Hugh Kelly) after the girl names him.
Tropes
- Birthday Episode: The episode's final scene is set on Elliot's birthday.
- Bittersweet Ending: Holly's real attacker is caught, but Mark has lost his job and his life will never be the same.
- Can't Get Away with Nuthin': Mark falsifies evidence once in order to be able to continue his teaching career and, years later, winds up getting framed for child molestation in part for that reason.
- Chekhov's Gun: Holly's third drawing, the one in the football field with a man in violet shirt watching, is what ultimately answers the case. In particular, the image shows the man with a yellow stripe on his arm, which only the captain of the lacrosse team (the real perp) has.
- Chekhov's Gunman: The Captain of the high school lacrosse team Elliot and Fin interview when Mark was still the primary suspect is the real Villain of the Week.
- False Rape Accusation: Holly accuses her teacher because she was too afraid of the real culprit.
- Forgotten Birthday: Under the stress of work, Stabler forgets his own birthday, and his family has to come to the squad room with a birthday cake to celebrate it.
- Framing the Guilty Party:
- The soccer moms believe they are doing this when they coach their kids to frame Mark for a crime for which there was already evidence against him.
- Mark is ultimately fired because he falsified evidence after an underage solicitation arrest in order to keep working as a teacher. So the moms who framed him for child molestation ultimately only got him busted for something he actually did, something that quite reasonably should have gotten him fired and which would likely have come out in the investigation anyway even if he hadn't been falsely accused, given that he would have been investigated due to his close association with the victim.
- Good All Along: Mark Dobbins didn't rape Holly and was a genuine Honorary Uncle to her.
- Hiding in Plain Sight: The actual perp is hanging out on the practice field to ogle the fourth grade girls when the detectives interview him, but they don't notice that he matches the drawing they've been given because they are already locked in to a false interpretation of the evidence.
- I Did What I Had to Do: Holly's mom rationalizes away her contribution to getting Mark framed (which left the real perp free to continue posing a menace to Holly and the general public).
- It's Personal: Stabler has trouble controlling his emotions on the case; the victim Holly looks like his daughter Elizabeth.
- Jerk Jock: The real Villain of the Week is The Captain of the high school lacrosse team.
- Karma Houdini: The evil soccer moms go completely unpunished for framing Mark.
- Married to the Job: Even after Stabler's family has had to come down to the station to celebrate his birthday (because otherwise he's not going to take time to celebrate it) he has to break away from them to go fulfill a work duty, apologizing to the Red Herring whose life has been ruined by the investigation.
- Pædo Hunt: Holly's accusation sets off mass hysteria in her community and results in several other false accusations.
- Prison Rape: Stabler and Fin invoke the possibility of this to get the culprit to confess.
- Sanity Slippage: Stabler admits the case is getting to him, and he nearly punched Mark's wife in the face.
- Teens Are Monsters: The real Villain of the Week is a high school athlete and a budding Serial Rapist that was thankfully stopped.
- Villain Ball: The soccer moms coach their kids to frame Mark, ultimately contributing to his exoneration, because Holly recanting alone would likely have been dismissed as exonerating evidence (the detectives do that initially) but several accusers recanting at once is more convincing.
- Wham Line: "Uncle Mark didn't do anything to me."
