LAW & ORDER: SPECIAL VICTIMS UNIT {LAW AND ORDER: SVU}: PARASITES (TV)

Summary

One in this series of police dramas—a spin-off of "Law & Order"—about the sexual crimes investigated by the elite Special Victims Unit of the New York Police Department. In this episode, a skeleton and sexual paraphernalia are found buried in the background of a newly-sold home. The detectives investigate the former owners, the Stantons, and learn that the couple had an unpleasant divorce and that the wife seems to have vanished. They suspect the husband and the new wife, but soon learn that the woman is still alive and incapacitated by her drug habit. The coroner informs Elliot and Olivia that the victim was a Caucasian female from Eastern Europe, and they look through Missing Persons’ files and try to match a computer-generated image of the woman’s face. They soon discover the file of a Romanian woman named Ava Perulis, who lived close to the crime scene and who was reported missing several years previously. When they go to visit the man who filed the report, George Burton, they are startled to find that his wife is Ava’s identical twin sister, Irina.

Irina tells the detectives that her sister was wild and took up with many different rich men, and George says the sisters had a falling out over her lifestyle and Ava vanished shortly thereafter. He gives Olivia and Elliot the name of one of Ava’s men, and he tells them that he had a brief fling with her, but she quickly moved on to a Romanian diplomat. Cragen encourages them to question the man carefully, as he has diplomatic immunity. The man, Toscu, says he attended a ball with Ava but nothing more, and shows them an orchid hybrid that he has bred himself. He says he does not know how or why Ava got to the United States. When Munch and Fin investigate Ava’s former apartment, they learn she had one regular visitor, an older man. They then learn that Ava entered the country via a fiancé visa, set up by the company EuroMatch, run by a woman named Valentina, which pairs American men with European women and skirts the green-card rules by having them meet briefly ahead of time. They talk to Ava’s husband and learn that he “returned” her because she carried on with another man, a dentist, who then informs them that her husband was abusive, and provides them with Ava’s dental records. Irina admits that she knew her sister was married, but was afraid of her husband, and they bring him in as a suspect. Their interrogation is interrupted, however, when the coroner explains that the dental records do not match the bones, although all of the other physical characteristics do, and Elliot and Olivia are stunned to realize that Irina is in fact Ava.

They now suspect Ava of killing her sister and taking her place, and quickly go to her house to find that she has disappeared, leaving a note and taking all of their money. George refuses to believe that he has been “married” to his sister-in-law for several years without knowing it, but is convinced when they show him a crucifix necklace taken from the grave, and explains that his wife changed significantly after a suspicious confrontation with his sister several years previously. They hurry to get George and Irina’s young daughter from school, and find that Ava has just left her. The daughter, Julia, tells them that she and her mother regularly go to see Valentina, and they hurry back to EuroMatch and interrogate her assistant. They locate her in her “other office,” a brothel in Chelsea, and find Ava there with her other, younger sister, Oksana. As they question her, she explains that she was trying to buy his sister’s freedom and that she did not kill Irina, but found her dead at her apartment and buried her, knowing the killers were really after her, Ava. They theorize that she is protecting the real killer, and Oksana guesses that Valentina did it, saying that she forced her into prostitution when her own mail-order husband changed his mind about her. They threaten to charge Valentina as an accessory in Irina’s death, but she refuses to cooperate.

They question Valentina’s assistant again, and he finally shows them where her records are, and they realize that she has been working with Toscu, the diplomat. However, they cannot arrest him because of his immunity. George appeals to Ava, and she tells him that she saw Toscu kill Irina, thinking it was her, as he had been controlling and abusing her, and that she took her rings and her life and buried her to protect them. She protests that she only wanted to free Oksana, but George rejects her coldly. Cabot attempts to get Toscu’s immunity revoked, but the government officials say that she does not have enough evidence. They agree to have him kicked out of the country, which displeases Elliot and Olivia. They return to the crime lab and have the soil from the grave tested further, and quickly return to arrest Toscu, as they found traces of his unique orchid in the dirt. The detectives then stop by at Irina’s funeral, and Ava says she is finally at peace. Commercials deleted.

Details

• NETWORK: NBC
• DATE: April 27, 2001 10:00 PM
• RUNNING TIME: 0:43:44
• COLOR/B&W: Color
• CATALOG ID: B:71780
• GENRE: Drama, police/detective
• SUBJECT HEADING: Drama, police/detective; African-American Collection - Drama; Drama, legal
• SERIES RUN: NBC - TV series, 1999-
• COMMERCIALS: N/A

CREDITS

• Neal Baer … Executive Producer
• Ted Kotcheff … Executive Producer
• Dick Wolf … Executive Producer, Created by
• Martin Weiss … Co-Executive Producer, Writer
• Judith McCreary … Co-Executive Producer
• Arthur W. Forney … Co-Executive Producer
• Jeff Eckerle … Producer
• Joe Lazarov … Producer
• David DeClerque … Producer
• Lynn Goldman … Co-Producer
• David Platt … Director
• Mike Post … Music by
• Christopher Meloni … Cast, Detective Elliot Stabler
• Mariska Hargitay … Cast, Detective Olivia Benson
• Richard Belzer … Cast, Detective John Munch
• Stephanie March … Cast, A.D.A. Alexandra Cabot
• Ice-T … Cast, Detective Odafin 'Fin' Tutuola
• Dann Florek … Cast, Captain Donald Cragen
• Mili Avital … Cast, Ava Parulis / Irina Parulis
• Lance Reddick … Cast, Dr. Taylor
• Victor Steinbach … Cast, Razvan Toscu
• Michele Pawk … Cast, Valentina Bilescu
• Matt Servito … Cast, Dr. Brad Stanton
• Melissa Bowen … Cast, Pam Stanton
• Gary Basaraba … Cast, George Burton
• Michael Berresse … Cast, Matt Sloan
• Neal Benari … Cast, Dr. Lowenstein
• Peter Van Wagner … Cast, Al Shipley
• Elza Zagreda … Cast, Slavic Woman
• Yuka Takara … Cast, Nahlin Amis
• Jillian Stacom … Cast, Julia Burton
• Carol Schneider … Cast, Mrs. Sawyer
• Manu Narayan … Cast, Henry
• Samuel Maupin … Cast, Mr. Sawyer
• Jerome LePage … Cast, Paul Amis
• Jon Krupp … Cast, Walt
• Stacy Highsmith … Cast, Aide
• Marcia Haufrecht … Cast, Mrs. Varella
• Scott Andrew Harrison … Cast, Worker #2
• Steven Michael Harper … Cast, Andrew Heaton
• Joseph Vincent Gay … Cast, Reynolds
• Michael Creo … Cast, Worker #1
• Andrea Burns … Cast, Teacher
• Lili Bordan … Cast, Oksana
• Iren Bordan … Cast, Theresa
• Ezra Barnes … Cast, Jack Greenwalt
• Guy Ale … Cast, Davia