dukesmom

A BOY IS KILLED AT THE HANDS OF A DISTURBED NEIGHBOR--KYLE MACLACHLAN GUEST STARS -- When a five-year-old boy disappears from a playground, Benson (Mariska Hargitay) and Stabler (Chris Meloni) are on the scene, searching for suspects. They meet the boy's thirteen-year-old neighbor, Jake (guest star Jordan Garratt), who witnessed the boy being watched by a man earlier that day. The case takes a grim turn when the boy is discovered dead by suffocation and all clues lead to Jake as the killer. Jake admits his crime but claims he has been mentally unstable since he suffered abuse at a camp he attended upon suggestion of the victim's psychiatrist father (guest star Kyle MacLachlan, "Sex & the City"). Tamara Tunie also guest stars. Richard Belzer, Ice-T, Diane Neal, B.D. Wong and Dann Florek also star. TV-14

tvguide.com's Watercooler snippet:

Crossbow

My journal comments from this morning:

Kyle McLachlan was on “Law & Order SVU” last night. He was good! It’s weird seeing him with grey hair, though.

It was ironic – the episode died in directly with the book I was reading last night. I’m reading Why They Kill, which is about the fact that people don’t really “snap” or “blank out” when they become violent, and how if you really dissect what happened, you find a specific thought process. So this character Kyle played had killed someone (for what looked to me like a rational reason, if not a legally defensible one) and then claimed he didn’t remember doing it. The character was a psychiatrist. I was thinking, “Oh, no way.” Then the show’s forensic psychiatrist interviewed him and said he was showing classic signs of – Oh, I don’t know what they call it, whatever they’re calling temporary insanity this week – and I was disgusted that he’d fall for that, especially since it was coming from another psychiatrist. But turned out he wasn’t entirely falling for it, although he refused to argue against it. I was all ready to be really upset that the show was perpetuating the myth that people don’t know what they’re doing when they kill. The jury did find him not guilty, but at the end he approached the prosecutors and told them that yes, he did know what he was doing and he believes he made the right decision. I was so relieved. I should know by now to trust the writers of that show. But I’m still disillusioned with Dr. Huang. He should have completely seen through that.

NikNak

Yeah, it was weird, but I agree that he played his character very well.

dukesmom

This episode surprised me more than usual. First of all, from reading the episode description I figured the twist would be that MacLachlan’s character was the abuser of Jake. His too calm demeanor kept me thinking this until the interviews with the other boys at the camp. Then when he did the about face so quickly in the courtroom and shot the kid outside, I was again surprised. I was not as disappointed in Dr. Huang as Crossbow when he refused to state for the record that MacLachlan was positively lying; if Novak had backed down, though, I would have been. I was surprised again at the end when MacLachlan stated flat out that he was guilty and had lied. Too bad they didn’t have a tape recorder handy…

stranger451

It wouldn't have mattered anyway... double jeopardy.

dukesmom

For the murder charge, double jeopardy would apply. What about perjury? It ain't much but it would be something.

Subject

It was a great episode. I loved the twist when the boy was shot. I really wasn't expecting it. In fact I think I looked like Stabler did when he saw it go down. That was huge.

It's always hard to determine something going through the mind of another person. You have to judge based on that person themselves and the situation. It's never really a sure thing.