Law & Order SVU season 25 episode 6, "Carousel" sees Olivia (Mariska Hargitay) and her new SVU team get to the bottom of what happened to Leah (Anastasia Lin), a Singapore resident visiting New York. When Leah decides to experience the nightlife, she's overserved and later sexually assaulted. As the detectives work her case, they discover her assault may be a result of a horrific game.
Here's what happened.
A night out gone wrong
Maura (Mara Topic) walks into the lobby of a hostel and speaks to the desk clerk. He compliments her appearance, and she shares she and Leah are going out to celebrate Leah's last night in the city. He suggests a bar for them to go to.
Watching this all unfold are Hayden (Jesse Aaronson) and Frederick (Alex Fox), with Hayden telling Frederick, "Happy hunting." The two men find out where Maura and Lead are headed and prepare to leave. They cross paths with their friend Dustin (Jake Murphy), who opts not to go out claiming he has food poison.
At the bar, Hayden and Frederick meet up with Maura and Leah. While Leah seems to be enjoying herself, Maura is less enthusiastic as the guys don't pay her as much attention. Maura suggests she and Leah leave, but the latter is convinced to stay at Hayden's suggestion. Leah then excuses herself to go to the bathroom, and Hayden oddly decides to accompany her.
As the night goes on, Leah is very inebriated and sandwiched between Frederick and Hayden on the dance floor, while an annoyed Maura leaves Leah behind. It's not too long before Frederick, Hayden and Leah also leave, jumping into a cab. Leah can barely sit upright in the car.
Midway through the cab ride, the boys tell the cab driver to pull over. The two claim they have to catch a bus before it leaves, but tell the driver to make sure Leah gets back to the hostel.
The next morning back in the squad room, Captain Curry (Aime Donna Kelly), Agent Sykes (Jordana Spiro), Bruno (Kevin Kane) and Velasco (Octavio Pisano) are getting situated as the new and improved SVU team when Olivia walks in. The SVU captain barely has time to make chit-chat before she gets a call from the hospital about a victim.
A twisted game
At the hospital, Olivia and Curry speak with Leah in her hospital bed, while Sykes speaks with Maura in the waiting room. Maura shares she found Leah in the shower at the hostel unconscious and managed to recover Leah's underwear from the night. Leah says she hung out with a white guy and an Asian guy, but the last thing she remembers is waking up in the shower.
Bruno and Velasco question the desk clerk at the hostel, who recalls a cab driver in his mid-40s carrying Leah over his shoulders to her room, but he then quickly left. This tip and video footage leads Bruno and Velasco to track down this mysterious man.
The cab driver says he was just helping Leah get to her room as she was too drunk to walk, adamant he didn't harm her, which Bruno believes. The cab driver also explains that the two boys who got in the car with Leah wanted to be dropped off before the hostel so they could catch a bus.
Back in the squad room, Olivia says the lab found no DNA evidence in Leah's rape kit. Curry also gets a call from Leah that she just booked a ticket back home to Singapore, putting a clock on SVU to hurry up and solve the case. Thankfully, Bruno finds street camera footage of a white man and an Asian man boarding a Budget Bus to Cambridge. Olivia immediately sends Bruno and Velasco.
At the Cambridge Institute of Technology, Bruno and Velasco speak with Hayden and Frederick, who immediately claim innocence. Hayden admits to fooling around with Leah but says it was consensual, and Frederick says he was definitely trying to make something happen with her but nothing did.
In New York, Olivia and Curry show Leah a lineup of men on a tablet. She identifies Frederick and Hayden. She also confirms what happened in the bathroom between her and Hayden was consensual. Leah then drops the big tip that she saw Frederick and Hayden at the hostel before she went out with Maura.
Back in Cambridge, Bruno and Velasco are walking around the campus when they spot Frederick arguing with Dustin. The cops find this suspicious and follow Dustin home. After speaking with Dustin, the episode cuts to Frederick and Hayden's place, and on their wall is a world map with different colored pins in it.
Who assaulted Leah?
Having brought Hayden, Frederick and Dustin back to the SVU squad room, the team splits the friends up to talk to them. When interrogating Hayden, Olivia and Curry ask why he and his friends had to go off campus to find romance. He answers the girls on campus are a "lost cause" due to the "sexual politics" of the day.
Frederick tells Sykes that Hayden came up with the game. You get a point for each girl you hook up with from a different country, but no repeat countries. He also is adamant there is a strict rule against forcing someone to have sex. Bruno and Velasco only get Dustin to admit that Frederick and Hayden tend to get girls drunk.
After the three boys get lawyers, the case stalls out until Sykes gets a call from her contacts at the FBI about a similar unsolved case involving a Bulgarian woman named Nikol (Olivia Vadnais), and the woman is en route to the consulate.
Speaking with Nikol, Olivia and Sykes learn she was in New York for New Year’s Eve and was staying at the hostel when she met three guys. One left early with food poisoning. She then went with the other two guys to the bar. At first, it was fine and she felt flattered, but then it got ugly when she felt like a prize to be won.
When the three of them left the bar, they went back to the guys' room. One of the guys fell asleep and the other one followed her to her room with a bottle of champagne. When he tried to kiss her, she said "no," but he ignored her and forced himself on her. As Nikol finishes telling her story, Olivia and Sykes show her a lineup on a tablet and she identifies Hayden as her attacker.
Before the SVU duo leaves, Nikol informs them that a week after the assault, she got a strange call from 23andMe saying they found genetic indicators for cystic fibrosis. She never sent them a DNA sample.
With all of this new information, Olivia speculates the guys were illegally collecting DNA samples from the women they slept with and genetically testing them. This leads the detectives to question a student in the genetics department at the Technology Institute. He claims he was aware of the game, but didn't participate in it. When Bruno and Velasco ask about the last DNA sample he received from the friend group, the student pulls out the sample from Leah and says it was Dustin who brought it to him.
Dustin winds up taking a plea deal, confessing he sexually assaulted Leah. He apparently crept into her room at the hostel while she was passed out drunk.
New episodes of Law & Order: SVU debut on Thursdays at 9 pm ET/PT on NBC. Episodes become available the next day on Peacock.
