This episode is strange for reading like a Law & Order: SVU episode. Evidently the Mothership writers wanted to try their hand at a sex crime plot. As is common in with most SVU episodes, they gussy up a banal sex-crime plot with brief glimpses at footage of nude or scantily clad women, in the increasingly perverse pursuit of pushing further the line that divides 4 p.m. TNT broadcasts and 2 a.m. Cinemax programming.
A young man is found murdered in a film trailer for what is essentially a lawsuit-friendly version of Girls Gone Wild, and a single bloody fingerprint found at the scene matches none of the records. Everyone denies having seen anything, and security footage proves that they are lying. From a shaky ID obtained from a bartender, they determine that the killer was a probably young blonde woman. One suspect stands out as unusually academically focused in comparison to the other blondes whom the detectives interview. She declines their request for a fingerprint sample, but she is then tricked by Det. Cassady who feigns mistakenly handing her two business cards. I can excuse the suspect, Nicole, for not watching enough Law & Order to recognize this rather common ploy, but the writers ham-headedly assume that the viewers don't watch Law & Order, either: under the assumption that the viewer is a moron, Det. Cassady blurts out Det. Green that now it's only a matter of getting the business card to the lab for fingerprint analysis. Okay, except anyone who's ever filed a police report would know that police use matte cards, because they often need to write the case number down on the card for your reference. Matte cards are better for writing on, but glossies would be a lot better for retaining a print.
They arrest Nicole, and she confesses to the murder. She said that the show's producer blackmailed her into having sex with him in order to withhold nude footage of her that she'd consented to when she was drunk, on vacation. After having sex with her, he told her that he was changing the deal, and that now she had to have sex with his friend. He left to get his friend. When the friend came in, she panicked, bludgeoned him to death, and escaped through the window. Nicole pleas to manslaughter with the agreement to testify against the producer, whom they decide to charge with felony-murder. This was actually an unexpected turn, because had this been an SVU episode, I am sure that charges against Nicole would have been dropped, as it sounded as though she was defending herself against gang rape. Part of the logic for charging her seemed to rest on the fact that she had an opportunity to leave the trailer voluntarily in-between her encounters with the two men. However there was not very much time in-between encounters. She would have needed to first put her clothes back on, she was clearly traumatized, and her encounter with the second man could easily be construed as rape.
During Nicole's testimony, in one of the most preposterous court-room displays on this side of SVU, the producer's attorney shows to the jury the original Girls Gone Wild video of Nicole drunkenly consenting to being taped and then fully disrobing. Just because the plot is SVU doesn't mean you need to follow SVU's lead in abandoning all notion of reality -- and taste. Although this damaged Nicole's credibility as a prosecution witness, the mother of another young woman comes forward, who was apparently subjected by the film's producer to an ordeal exactly like Nicole's.
Several times during this episode, they explained the logic behind what is admittedly a legal peculiarity, felony-murder. I suppose that this was for the viewer's benefit, but right before the jury's decision the producer, for about the fourteenth time this episode, was like, "How can I be convicted of murder if I didn't commit the murder?" That has already twice been explained -- and then they explained it again. I guess they ran out of questionably pornographic material so they needed some good ol' filler. He declines a plea offer for rape minus the murder, and the jury comes back with a murder conviction. The end.
The series was on an obvious decline during this period, and it's surprising that they bounced back later with two strong closing seasons. While Law & Order had traditionally featured the occasional allusion to real-life headlines, during this period they formed the story of virtually every single episode around a rather obvious link to headlines. I guess that they thought viewers were too stupid to follow a story not crafted around some headline.
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