TVSquad

(S08E10) This episode was all about Elliot's concern about growing apart from his daughters. The beginning of the episode shows Elliot in church with his fractured family and his middle child hating him very much. He is tipped off to an investigation from his priest, who heard the confession of a man dying of lung cancer. He won't tell Elliot what the confession was, but he suggests Elliot visits the man, named Judson Tierney (played by Brian Dennehy).

The episode seems pretty simple in the beginning-- as it appears that Tierney needs to confess to more than a priest that he molested his daughter, who hates him. But it gets much more complicated and Tierney actually ends up being the good guy. Through his fingerprints on a box of cards his daughter never opened, the detectives discover that Tierney goes by another name (Jake) and has a criminal record of robberies. Even more interesting is the money he included in all those unopened cards. It was being tracked by the FBI since the 1970s because it was stolen in a long string of robberies by the Fedora Bandits.

We eventually discover that Tierney killed his robbery partner, Jack Colino, and kidnapped Jack's baby-- Tierney's angry daughter. He did it all to protect the baby though because Jack, who had already killed the baby's mother, was going to kill the baby too. The end of the episode is a race against time to get the man accused of the mother's murder out of prison before Tierney dies. He gets out and Tierney dies-- before his daughter can reconcile with him. It ends with a heartbreaking scene where the daughter sits at the foot of her father's deathbed and obviously regrets not mending their relationship before he died.

While there wasn't a whole lot with Elliot's family in this episode, it's obvious what is motivating him. He lets Tierney get under his skin because Elliot sees his own daughters pulling away from him--and hating him--the way Tierney's daughter hates him.

We see very little of the supporting characters-- Det. Tutuola pops in for a great one-liner, "In 48 hours, you solved 21 bank jobs, a murder and a kidnapping?" And Wong appears briefly to explain the title of this episode, "Scheherezade". That's the name of a Persian queen and storyteller in The Book of One Thousand and One Nights, which is referenced (as is Ana Karenina) by Wong as he counsels Stabler. It was kind-of an awkward moment, really. In an episode all about secrets and mystery, suddenly Wong gets a scene where he's quoting literature.

Next week: Blair Underwood may be a very, very bad man.