Law & Order: Special Victims Unit – Remember Me in Quarantine

By: Jess Dyer

This episode starts with Captain Benson (Mariska Hargitay) on the phone with the Italian police discussing a missing girl, Maria (Brittany Conigatti). She is an exchange student that’s been missing for a month and they’re requesting SVU’s help in finding her.

Finn (Ice-T), Rollins (Kelli Giddish) and Tamin (Jamie Gray Hyder) head to her last known address to interview her roommates. Maria’s roommate Brad (Christopher Gray) is adamant that he hasn’t seen her in three or four weeks stating the extremely true to the current times line of “between the protest and pandemic you kind of lose track of time.” Her other roommate, Lexi (Jordan Lane Price), has been under the impression she’s been “super-quarantining” this entire time up until a few days ago. Her entire room is spotless – a little too spotless. The whole place has been scrubbed down with bleach and CSU is being called to check it out. They head to the courtyard where they see an attached closed down restaurant. Searching in the back, they find her body has been stuffed in the freezer.

We’re in the morgue now with Melinda (Tamara Tunie). It turns out Maria was alive when she was put in that freezer. Benson video calls with Maria’s father (Dominic Comperatore) and gets confirmation of Maria’s identity. From him they find out that Maria wasn’t too happy with her hard partying roommates. Cut back to those two as Lexi doesn’t know what happened. She claims to have been out of awareness due to her intaking of edibles. Brad doesn’t know what happened to his hockey bag and he was out of town. He claims that Maria was social-distancing and didn’t invite anybody over. He also mentions another roommate that moved out around the time this all took place, Perry (Austin Reed Alleman).

At the rescue center Tamin and Rollins find out that Perry moved out due to Lexi’s party-going non-masking habits. He says he hasn’t seen Maria since Labor Day and seems very apprehensive about giving a DNA sample. Cut back to Benson’s office and the results are in. The DNA came back and one of the samples belongs to Brad. He lied about being with her. He’s also engaged to someone else. He doesn’t have anyone to corroborate his claim of being in the Hamptons.

In the interrogation room Lexi claims she “thinks she was home alone,” but the last six months were a blur. She tells Rollins and Benson that she brought home an anonymous “stress-relief hook-up” but is unsure of who he is. Benson gives Carisi (Peter Scanavino) the rundown on the three suspects in custody and the one anonymous man that they’re still on the lookout for. Lexi keeps making excuses about how and where she met this mysterious man. Apparently it was at a “COVID speakeasy” and maybe his name was Sean (Jelani Alladin). At the bar the bartender confirms his name was Sean and that he’s a well known ladies man at the speak-easy. They arrive at his apartment to him already hostile, camera in hand, saying this is harassment and that everything was consensual. He said anything he took was because Lexi owed him money. Kat finds Maria’s passport and jewelry in Shawn’s drawer and he says that the girl gave it to him. (Who gives someone their passport?) The news then comes in that it’s confirmed to be Shawn’s DNA and prints on the hockey bag she was transported in.

Shawn is in interrogation now and says everything was cool, didn’t Lexi tell you guys? They had a threesome. It’s all good. It was all Lexi’s idea. She had Shawn drug Maria to loosen her up for sex with them. Back to Lexi who  is now saying that Shawn is lying and it was all him. She’s claiming she remembers nothing and nothing was her fault. Rollins and Benson are severely into this interrogation now and this is definitely not the threesome that Lexi had signed up for. They know that Lexi is a part of this but couldn’t have moved Maria’s body by herself so there had to be multiple people involved in this. Brad is cleared because his GPS confirms he was in the Hamptons. That leaves Shawn and Perry as possible accomplices to the body dump. Perry now says that he was there that night and suddenly he’s remembering a lot more now like Lexi bringing someone home and Maria joining them in Lexi’s room. Crazy how he knows all this while being in his room with his headphones on. He says he didn’t tell them any of this information before because he didn’t want them to think he was a racist for bringing Shawn up.

Results are in from the lab and Maria’s DNA was in Lexi’s room and  Maria’s bra was in Lexi’s bed with Lexi’s fingerprints on the clasp. Lexi seems to be remembering more now. She says that she gave Maria alcohol and Shawn gave her drugs. She claims thata she was only trying to comfort Maria but it turned into a threesome. In the course of it, the bed frame broke so they took the party to Maria’s room. She claims that Shawn said he’d take care of Maria and she doesn’t remember anything after.

The news is on with the update that Lexi and Shawn are now arrested but that doesn’t mean that we’re done with the other two possible accomplices. Finn is talking to Brad about him testifying. They know he got back to the city earlier that he claims to have been due to his mom’s EZPass. His alibi now to why he came back early…his fiancé’s sister. (How does he still have a fiancé at this point?) Perry;s alibi is that he was doing outreach with the homeless. They interview a nun at the outreach who tells them about how he donated a bunch of his roommates clothes that she thought had to have been Lexi’s. Uh oh! Itturns out he donated Maria’s clothes and the nun has one of her sweaters on right at that moment. She’s not sure as to when he dropped the clothes off though.

Perry is in interrogation again. He says he took her stuff since he assumed she wasn’t coming back. Finn describes the sound of Maria’s head smashing the wall to which Perry looks extremely sickened. He heard it. Finn drops the knowledge that Maria was alive whenever she was put into the freezer and that she had tried to get out of there for hours. Perry claims that he checked Maria’s pulse and there wasn’t one. He recounts that he’d been mad about the noise that night. He could hear all three of them having sex. He went into Maria’s room after Shawn and Lexi had left. He was upset because he had feelings for her and that she said no to him because of social-distancing due to corona. He didn’t understand how she could get with someone else and not him. He said the whole thing was an accident where he tried to kiss her and after she pushed him away he pushed her back causing her to hit her head.

After the confession the Italian police express Maria’s father’s gratitude for the SVU members’ help. Benson ends it with the sentiment that, “Life is precious and that’s why we are here.”