Air date: March 23, 2023, Director: Norberto Barba, Writer: Brendan Feeney
Two women, Zoe Greene and Jenna Scott, are in a nightclub. Jenna is pushing hard for Zoe to date again after the death of her husband. Jenna introduces Zoe to a dating app and gets her to connect to “Klaus Darcy”. Zoe’s online relationship with Klaus escalates to sexting, a little D&S, and gift exchanges, like lingerie. (Zoe mentions that she and her late husband used to get “a little freaky”.)
Zoe sets up a meeting with Klaus at a hotel room, including bondage with her late husband’s neckties. She’s wearing black lingerie and a collar with an O ring. The text messages tell her to pose by the window, and she answers “Yes, sir.”
Next: Zoe and Jenna turn up at the police station. Zoe says, “I think I was raped.” In the subsequent interview, she tells the officer about how her relationship with Klaus grew to include D/s play via text and gifts. The officers don’t consider this shocking, even when she describes how they only ever met when she blindfolded herself with her dead husband’s neckties. Last night, even though she said her safeword, he penetrated and ejaculated in her.
The detectives find no way to trace “Klaus” and the picture was of some guy in Sweden who’s never been to the USA. The DNA from the semen reads as a male relative of her late husband. This is actually her nephew’s semen, but he has an alibi.
Zoe is shocked by this bizarre turn. She describes him as a “gentle dom” and says they were having fun. Benson attributes this to a “pregnancy fetish, as the ultimate exertion of power.” Klaus texts her again, and wants to set up another meeting. The police set up a sting operation. Zoe waits in her usual outfit in the same hotel room, and a masked stranger comes in. The police move in, pull a flogger out of the stranger’s hand and pull off the mask to reveal it’s Jenna.
Benson explains this to Zoe as “a fantasy of power” over Zoe’s life. Jenna explains this as all being to help Zoe after her husband died, even using the analogy of potty training.
Benson and another detective meet with the assistant district attorney to hash out the best way to prosecute this case, considering the consent, the prior encounters, the false pretenses, etc. In the end, the charges are sexual abuse.
Zoe wants to go to trial, and testifies that she had a BDSM relationship with “Klaus”, but she didn’t consent to penetration, much less impregnation. The defense questions if Zoe couldn’t recognize a familiar person, and brings up that Zoe and Jenna did have a sexual relationship as college roommates.
Jenna, on the stand, tries to claim that Zoe knew all along it was her as “Klaus”, that they were sharing a fantasy, and that she didn’t hear Zoe’s safeword. The ADA proves that Jenna couldn’t recognize her own husband in the dark. The jury returns a partial guilty verdict, but Zoe doesn’t want Jenna to go to jail, even for a misdemeanor.
This episode has potential for interesting discussion of consent issues, and the moral and ethical messiness that you wouldn’t see in an episode of CSI. But it’s buried under a tabloid plot involving catfishing, lesbian rape, quasi-incest, BDSM, forced impregnation, gender roleplay, and more. It’s easier to throw in more weirdness than go deeper into the characters.
The scenes of Zoe in the hotel room waiting for “Klaus” are shot a bit like a giallo with classic “woman in peril” mise en scene. However, the idea that this woman is doing BDSM is treated as matter-of-fact.
