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| “ | Science and the future wait for no one! If not me, someone will clone a human being! You wait and see! | „ |
| ~ Lang's final lines during the trial |
Dr. Garret Lang is the main antagonist of the Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episode "Perfect". Lang is a cult leader obsessed with the advancement of cloning technologies, his authority over his networks being tyrannical and brutal enough to result in trafficking of teenage girls and the murder of one of the girls in his captivity.
He was portrayed by Gale Harold.
Biography[]
Lang founded the Lang-Foy Clinic ("FOY" standing for Fountain of Youth) to offer services in gene and hormone therapy. His career and financial stability was also invested in establishing a cult he named the Foundation of Knowledge Expansion to advance his experiments into cloning. At Knowledge Builders institutes across the country run by Marcie Kinderski, Lang's networks would find impressionable teenage girls to indoctrinate into their beliefs. The chosen girls would be brainwashed to take paid flights to New York City, where Paula Haggerty would supervise them all in a brownstone. The girls would be used for inseminating with alleged reproductive cells from paying clients who wanted their dead and missing children born as clones to be returned to them, their reproductive systems being enhanced with hormone regimens. Any disobedience would be punished by locking the girls in the brownstone's cold, squalid basement, beating them, and starving them. Lang's lawyer, Joan Quentin, represented the cult as well, but her real job was preventing them from speaking out against her client. In truth, Lang's operations were elaborate cons, as he inseminated the girls with his own sperm to make long lines of children for his lineage, and he swindled every client, donor, and cultist he worked with.
Lang's operations were found out when one of the girls, Samantha Tassler, challenged her instructions. When Jessica Morse reported her, Lang and Haggerty sent Samantha to the basement. This time, Lang refused Samantha food and water until it killed her, despite Haggerty trying to stop him. Haggerty left Samantha in an alley and covered her with a blanket out of guilt.
Samantha was later found when a stray bullet during a shootout between police and a robber hit her temple, when she was already dead. Detectives Olivia Benson and Elliot Stabler of the NYPD's Special Victims Unit investigated and found a custom necklace commissioned by Lang. They question Lang, and he said he gave the necklaces to patients, not the girls he never mentioned. The detectives were automatically suspicious, so they went to the brownstone, where they recognized Jessica, who was publicly know to be missing for a year and a half. They arrested Haggerty and put the girls in protective custody. They were too indoctrinated to turn on the cult, but Benson and Stabler still found enough evidence to arrest Lang, catching him just as he was about to inseminate yet another teenage girl at his labs at a separate location. By then, the SVU team had taken apart all of Lang's operations once identifying his inner workings.
Jessica was successfully deprogrammed and returned to her parents, and Assistant District Attorney Alexandra Cabot appealed to Haggerty, who was promised the return of her daughter who ran out on her after their last fight. Jessica was the ultimate voice of reason encouraging Haggerty's testimony, and she described how Lang barred her from rescuing Samantha and how Haggerty later took the girl to an alley and hoped she'd be found. Lang condemned Haggerty and the entire court, and while he was taken away, he protested he opened the door for cloning advancements and he was being persecuted. Lang was ultimately imprisoned for life.
Trivia[]
- Lang is inspired by multiple cult leaders: Claude Vorilhon, the founder of the Raëlism movement; the late John Humphrey Noyes, the founder of the Oneida Community; and the late Roch Thériault, founder of the Ant Hill Kids, several of whom were killed by him.
External links[]
- Garret Lang on the Law & Order Wiki
