The Ledger

Skin Deep: Claire Danes, Murder Suspect

In this snappily-written episode (3.1), the first episode of season 3, a 13-year-old Claire Danes turns in a great performance as the daughter of a former model suspected of killing a fashion photographer. After Cerreta and Logan investigate, they learn that the photographer also served as a pimp to struggling models, particularly those who had fallen on hard times as they got older, including Danes's mother. Despite her shifting alibi, it doesn't take long for the detectives to settle on the mother as their prime suspect. They come up with some underwear found in the woman's apartment that is an 80% DNA match on material found at the crime scene, but an overly cautious judge throws it out. Stone and Robinette have to find another way to convict, but they find a formidable opponent in defense attorney Shambala Green, who is perhaps my favorite of the show's recurring defense attorneys. Green tells Stone "I'll clean your clock, and when I'm done, you won't even care what time it is." She gets off to a good start, and Stone's case ends up looking pretty shoddy, but after some more digging, Stone comes up with a new suspect: the defendant's daughter, Claire Danes. He discovers she had a sexual relationship with the photographer, and suspects that somehow led to her involvement in his death. When Schiff hears this, he's fed up with Stone's bungling of the investigation and says, "Since when did control of this office get turned over to the Marx brothers." The judge orders a psychological evaluation of the daughter, which Olivet performs. Olivet comes away thinking the daughter is the murderer.

It's clear that the mother was willing to be convicted to protect her daughter, a move we've seen a million times on this show, but Stone's not about to let that happen. He confronts the girl's father, who implicates her, and then gets the mother to cave, too. Shambala asks Stone to sentence the girl as a juvenile, arguing the photographer acted cruelly towards her and she didn't understand everthing she was doing. Stone interviews the girl in the presence of Shambala, and she tearfully offers an account of what happened: her mother ordered the photographer to cut off the relationship, the photographer had sex with the daughter then ended things, telling her that his mom's value as a prostitute was more important to him than Danes was. He also told her she was too ugly to be a model, even though he had lured her into the relationship with promises of making her a top model. She flipped and stabbed him in the back with the scissors. Stone consents to the juvenile sentence, and Danes is shipped off to Spofford, the juvenile detention center.

Age is a prominent theme in the episode, as several models discuss how their careers have sagged along with their bodies as they got older, and the women all seem resigned to a more difficult life after the glory days of their late teens. One woman, 38, tells the investigators, "I haven't looked 30 since I was 20." Age also becomes a factor in the relationship between Danes' character and her older lover, the photographer, and it is a critical factor in her sentencing. The theme of young models growing old before their time is also picked up in "Baby It's You," one of the L&O/Homicide: Life on the Street cross-over episodes.

Posted by adm at February 11, 2004 01:12 AM

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