Recap / Law & Order: Special Victims Unit S7 E15 "Manipulated"

Written by Jose Molina

Directed By Matt Earl Beesley

Per policy, Recaps are Spoilers Off and all spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned.

The murder of a top lawyer leads detectives to discover that the victim also worked as a stripper. DNA further leads them to suspect her husband and from there, her boss who turns out to have been faking her illness for sympathy from her cheating husband.

Tropes:

• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Tessa McKellan.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Walter Inman has a daughter in college, and is paying for her education with the money he earns working for Tessa. In exchange for his confession implicating Tessa, Casey agrees to allow him to wire the money for her to finish her schooling into her account (as it is otherwise against the law to profit from criminal activity).
• House Husband: Linus doesn't work, and spends most of this time at home taking care of his paralyzed wife.
• Hollywood Law: The detectives use a facial recognition program to compare a picture taken on the street to the DMV records for driver's licenses. The judge later throws this out, claiming that the technology was too inconclusive and all the subsequent evidence was tainted. A person has no privacy expectation in a picture taken on a public street or their driver's license photo, so comparing them to each other cannot possibly be a violation of the 4th Amendment. Without a violation, the tree isn't "poisoned" and the remaining evidence is acceptable. What's more, the unreliability of the technology bears upon its admissibility at trial, but they don't need the computer match at trial - once the computer found the picture, the detectives confirmed it by the eyeball test and the suspect's admission. Even further, they already knew of the suspect because he was the husband of the victim's boss and they had an easy argument for inevitable discovery (they would have recognized him from the photo given time).
• Jekyll & Hyde: A variation with the first Victim of the Week, Vicky Riggs. She was a successful lawyer in Tessa's firm. Turns out she moonlights as a stripper, not for the money, but because she likes it.
  • In a way, this mirrors the duality in Tessa as well.
• Manipulative Bastard: Tessa, to the point that it's implied she faked Munchausen Syndrome to be declared incompetent to stand trial.
• Münchausen Syndrome: Tessa is revealed have this, faking her paralysis and injecting herself with viruses to make herself appear sicker. Her lawyer tries to use this to claim that she isn't fit to stand trial.
  Attorney Walsh: My client is sick, Your Honor, but she cannot stop. Whenever she's under stress, she will make herself ill.
  Casey: Well, then, gee, why don't we let her off before she injects herself with HIV.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: Tessa's husband cheated on her because her disability makes it impossible for them to have sex. But, it turns out she had already recovered and thus could have been a partner to her husband. Instead she chose to continue pretending because she loves the sympathy, which caused her husband to cheat, which then drove her to seek revenge on him by killing his mistress and an innocent friend of said mistress.
• Noodle Incident: Fin tells Olivia, "Please don't get him [Munch] started on Dick Cheney again!", with Olivia clearly trying to avoid laughing.
• Obfuscating Disability: Tessa, who had long since made a full recovery from an accident keeping her wheelchair bound and making herself sick for the sympathy and to control her husband, who she was framing for a couple murders - it's revealed when he shoves her wheelchair into a pool. Just to double up on the trope, she may have been faking the Münchausen Syndrome as a defense.
• Prison Rape: Benson may have implied this when telling Tessa she'll never be alone in prison.
• Rule of Pool: The McKellan's house has an indoor pool, which Linus angrily wheels Tessa into. After lingering for a few moments, Tessa starts swimming, proving she isn't paralyzed at all.
• Screw This, I'm Out of Here!: Linus leaves Tessa after the extent of her lies, including faking her own paralysis, are exposed.
• Spoiler Title: It was kind of easy to predict that Tessa is actually manipulating the events of the episode, given that the title of the episode is "Manipulated". Having Tessa played by Rebecca De invoked Mornay, recently infamous for The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, may have increased the viewer's suspicion.
• Sympathetic Adulterer: Linus cheated on Tessa because her paralysis makes it impossible for them to have sex. Despite this, he is a genuinely loving husband and does everything to take care of Tessa.
• Tranquil Fury: Linus has this reaction after the detectives make him realize that Tessa might be faking her paralysis, which she is.