An obnoxious visitor to a sperm bank gets an education on why sperm donors get paid so much more poorly than egg donors (even when the "boys" are donated by an Ivy Leaguer). He also gets an education on what a portable cryotank to the jaw feels like, when someone rushes out of the clinic, clocking him with it.
The chief of detectives (when he shows up in the squad room, Elliot says, "What did I do now?") wants Olivia and Elliot on the case, as he feels they're the best candidates to butt heads on whatever issues crop up over the episode. Why is it Special Victims? All the frozen embryos in the tank. A hundred of 'em. "Those are potential children who have been kidnapped. If they're not special victims, who is?" says the chief of D's. The chief of detectives puts down the can, and the opener, and the detectives get to work on the worms wriggling all over the place.
The detectives bemoan that Marty Fiorello had the case before him, since his handwriting is terrible, like a serial killer or a doctor didn't do enough leg work on the case, with Olivia wrinkling her nose at the suggestion in the file of following up with a "hormonal wannabe mama." And hey -- one of the stolen embryos belongs to the police commissioner, notes Elliot, who gripes that they've got a lot of cases they should be working ahead of this one. Olivia says it's not like stealing hubcaps. Elliot douchebaggily announces that he had his kids the old-fashioned way, and thankfully refrains from offering to demonstrate the method. Olivia informs him that many people aren't as blessed as he is, and shows admirable restraint in not kicking him square in the balls.
Olivia and Elliot interview the doctor, (after asking him, "Hey, weren't you once a judge?") to find out who'd want to do this. Elliot suggests somebody did it to stop him from playing God. "Many of these couples have been trying for years to get pregnant," says the doctor, and he tells the detective about a couple of particularly sad cases, including a desperate woman who doesn't want to wait the required time after her chemo (which made her infertile) before being implanted, and a woman who froze some eggs as an insurance policy for her husband after going off to Iraq. The doctor mentions her by name, but I'm sure it's not important.
The doctor espouses all the reasons that people come to him. "Olivia is putting off having children longer, especially for her career," he says. Oh, wait, he was talking about women in general; it's just the long, lingering reaction shots from Liv that made me think he was talking specifically about her.
So how did the thief get in, if you need a keypad? A tech, who, like anyone being interviewed by cops, doesn't stop working to answer questions, says she accidentally let the thief in when she went out the lab door to confer with Doctor Berletch.
Still, we have no idea who it is, so it's back to the receptionist to find out about any clients who might have had trouble with the clinic, and it's on to visit Maya Jorgensen, who's upset that the clinic was holding her "babies" "hostage" and now they've conveniently disappeared. Convenient to whom? Well, perhaps the husband, er, former husband, who wanted out of the marriage after Maya decided to go the in-vitro route. "What am I supposed to do [with the embryos]? Toss 'em in the garbage?" asks Maya. Fortunately, she's dealing with the super-sensitive Chester and Fin here; Fin says she's going through a nasty divorce, and the last thing she wants is to drag a kid through that. She says she's divorced, with no prospects. "I want children. All I have are those embryos." There's your motive, figure the detectives, and she suggests that if she has a baby in nine months, they can come and arrest her. But the detectives get nowhere with Stan, who, until "assholishness" becomes a crime, will probably remain free.
Time for the pro-life aspect to get ramped up! Outside the clinic, a nice-looking couple is explaining to an assembled throng of media all the ways in which fertility clinic doctors are just like Nazis. This is James and Victoria Grall (Victoria played by the still-lovely Janine Turner), of the Values Defence League. Olivia tells the reporters to turn off the cameras, which of course they all do. Yeah, let us know when you cops are done questioning the press conference people, so we can get back to covering the "news." Despite the fact that the clinic was vandalized, and you can't spell vandalism without VDL, the couple says they actually want the embryos returned to the clinic and are encouraging people to adopt and bear the unwanted ones, instead of letting them be destroyed or used for research.
The detectives "discuss" the pros and cons of screening for debilitating diseases. "It's tough," is Elliot's stance. Olivia snaps, "No, it's not. You give your kid a fighting chance." There's a woman at Benson's desk. And not just any woman, but Gabrielle Anwar. "The cryobank said you were handling my case," she tells Olivia. This is Eva Sintzel, who wanted to impress upon Olivia the need to find the eggs, since she's run out of time. "Forgive me for prying, but you're so young and attractive," says Olivia. Easy, Liv. Eva says she got caught up in her career and was in complete denial about her biological clock. And then she got cancer: "So these embryos are my last chance." Olivia unwisely promises they'll find the eggs, and she and Elliot have another couple to check out.
We're over to the Harvey residence to hear the sad story of Alicia, the eight-year-old with brain damage and a mental age of three months. Mommy and Daddy are having eggs screened at the clinic, to make sure their child doesn't have the same disorder, and since the case was published in a medical journal, they've been flooded with hate mail, because the eggs being screened are from their eight-year-old daughter.
Alicia's being given high-dose estrogen treatments, since females' eggs don't mature until puberty. The mother would be the surrogate, delivering her own grandchild. Neither detective bothers to hide their disgust at that, or at the experimental procedure done to keep the girl from growing much (which ostensibly would improve her circulation, thereby causing fewer complications like sores).
Outside, though, Elliot's much less judgmental about the hard choices parents have to make, so Olivia gives it to him: "You can't possibly be okay with what they're doing to her." Elliot points out that Kathy was over forty during the last pregnancy, increasing the risk of things like Down syndrome. But Eli's perfect, so "spare me the perils of women over forty having babies," she snaps. Elliot realizes he's touched a nerve, and tries to make it better by telling Olivia she'd make a great mom, and she's good with kids, and he ignores way too many pleas from Olivia to just shut up.
Chester and Fin interview a dwarf pissed at the doctor because he wouldn't implant an embryo that would be a Little Person like her and her husband, and Fin, as always displaying his winning sensitivity, can't believe she purposely wants her child to have a disability. "Size is not a disability. We have normal lifespans and lives. Why shouldn't I be allowed to have a child who looks like me? Everyone else can." Well, I'm learning that Little People can be selfish too. Still, she probably didn't steal the tank, because, as she puts it, they'd have noticed if the thief were four foot one.
Munch has nothing better to do than draw blobs on paper (victim sketch) and joke about "donor siblings" (same father, different mothers), which he calls the "master-bated race." There's a picture of a whole brood fathered by Donor 10-29, which could be Munch himself, he points out, as far as anyone knows. Fin doesn't think the kids are Munch's, because "those kids don't look like freaks." Olivia strolls up, having missed all the hilarity, and Munch says, "Liv, if you're in the market, you could do worse than donor 10-29." She immediately turns to Elliot, calls him an "idiot," and stomps off. All the detectives make a "don't blurt out 'time of the month'" face.
Liv meets with Eva in a diner, which is probably a lot less useful than working on the case. "You're not going to find them," pessimizes Eva. Well, no, not sitting there, she's not, but Olivia says, "I'm not going to stop until I do." Then, Eva asks Olivia a couple of tough questions: "Do you have kids?" and "Don't you want them?" The answers are no and yes, respectively. If anyone would be aware of just how hard it can be to conceive, it would be someone pursuing in-vitro, but Eva flat-out asks, "What are you waiting for?" Olivia doesn't answer, instead of getting all shirty with Eva like she did with Elliot, her longtime friend and partner, when he broached the same subject. Of course, Olivia's the one who was puzzled by the "young and attractive" Eva haven't trouble conceiving, so this may be a little karma.
Or now, like when Elliot tries to tell her he didn't say anything to Munch, but she snaps at him to drop it. Munch, watching surveillance video, has noticed that the cleaning woman tried to get into the lab, even though cleaning staff aren't allowed in there. Also, the cleaning woman didn't leave the building after her (half-assed) shift, but came back in the day until she snagged the cryotank.
Enrique was the regular cleaning dude, who, under intense questioning from Chester and Fin, admits that he was told not to come in for his shift that night.
Who told him that? Carol, the receptionist, who, upon her arrest, breaks down and says the VDL won her over through their relentless propagandizing. Victoria Grall was the one who snatched the tank, wearing a wig, but the VDL, which only did it for publicity, was supposed to bring the embryos back today.
Olivia and Elliot, with their impeccable sense of timing, arrest the couple during an on-air interview.
They interrogate James, who's pissed about all the unused embryos. "Drastic measures needed to be taken!" he says. In a separate interrogation, Victoria says there are many organizations that will find adoptees. Chester pushes all the right buttons by saying that's great, because of all the gay and lesbian couples out there looking to adopt. "They're only put in suitable homes," sniffs Victoria. Fun fact: Janine Turner has donated money to George W. Bush, the Republican National Committee, and Elizabeth Dole!
Sure, James might go to jail. You know who else went to jail for his beliefs? Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Nelson Mandela. Olivia's head explodes, and Elliot tries a different tack, pointing out that according to his own beliefs, if anything happens to the embryos, it will be murder. But both James and Victoria were under the impression the embryos would be back by now, since the delivery company promised morning delivery!
A tense chase leads to the detectives intercepting the delivery truck and rushing the tank back to the clinic. But it's too late; all the cooling liquid nitrogen is gone, and the embryos are lost.
Olivia delivers the news to Eva, and she doesn't even have to say a word, but does say, "I'm sorry."
Eva shows up for the Gralls' arraignment to yell, "They should be charged with murder!" and she has to be removed. James agrees (of course, he has the safety net of knowing that under the law, the embryos weren't people until they drew breath). Victoria doesn't seem quite as committed to the cause, and after the arraignment, she ducks out the back, unlike her husband, who happily skips down the courthouse steps to talk to the press. Unfortunately, the courthouse steps have killed more people than Jack Bauer, and James gets gunned down, and the cops have no idea who did it.
Eva comes down to the station and is ridiculously surprised that the police might be considering her as a suspect. Olivia says since Eva was going to have to talk to the cops, she preferred it would be with her. "Why? Because we've become such good friends?" says Eva. Ouch. Well, not anymore. Eva can't vouch for her whereabouts, so Olivia tells her not to leave the city.
The detectives pore over the James Grall footage, and Olivia basically says, "We can't even see a gun, what with that arm with a jacket draped over it, the one that recoils right when the shot goes off...hey, wait a minute!" Some excellent pause and fast-forward work locates the shooter, but no one recognizes him. And what's this? Footage from just before that shows that Victoria Grall also went down the courthouse steps (despite supposedly going out the back door) and wound up talking to the man who, a few moments later, shot her husband.
But she's as shocked as anyone when the detectives show her the picture of the man who killed her husband. She says he just stopped her on the street and said he recognized her and asked if she was all right and knew about VDL and said he would pray for her. "First kind word I'd heard all day," she says. Anything else? Yeah -- she said she and James would be fine as long as they had one another.
So while the detectives now try to figure out who this guy is, Elliot tells Olivia that he didn't tell the other guys about her wanting a baby. "That was Munch being Munch." He gently talks about it a few more minutes with her, until she reveals that she looked into adoption a few months ago: "They turned me down." She's single, no extended family support system. She's almost killed, like, every few hours. So she's not prime parent material. "They're wrong," says Elliot. That's nice of him.
There's one more person at the clinic they didn't show the shooter's picture to: Carol the receptionist, rotting in a cell on Riker's Island. She says it's the husband of Kelly Ryland, the soldier who stored some eggs at the clinic. You know, detectives, the doctor mentioned her by name. You should have WRITTEN IT DOWN.
They go to the Rylands' apartment. There's no one there, but they find a nine-millimetre gun, and a rather convenient notebook with "La Guardia 2:45" written on it.
The detectives head out there while Munch looks for Ryland on any passenger lists. Nothing from departures. But there is a Ryland arriving, in a coffin with an American flag draped over it, and that's where the detectives find their shooter, who co-operatively tells him his wife was a supply truck driver whose convoy was attacked by a suicide bomber. He complains about all the media hoopla over the Gralls, but no one being there when his wife comes home dead. Well, the Pentagon has something to do with that, but I get your meaning, guy. Elliot tells him the jury will understand, but he'll still have to do time. "Doesn't matter. My time already ran out," he says. Well, join all the overused plot devices over here, then, please.