Plot
In the Season 7 finale, Detective Goren brings flowers to his mother's grave and finds an old framed picture of him and his older brother Frank. When Frank is found murdered the following day, the victim of a poisoning meant to look like an overdose, Goren deduces that his nemesis Nicole Wallace killed his brother.
Soon afterward, Goren's mentor, Dr. Declan Gage, is also found to have been poisoned (but alive); subsequently, Bobby Goren and Eames are led on an interstate scavenger hunt, which leads them to Wallace's former stepdaughter, Gwen Chapel, in Arizona — who is now dying of cancer, which is believed to be the factor that triggered Wallace's recent actions — and ends at a hotel where they find a box with Goren's nephew Donny's name on it, containing a fresh human heart. Although Goren believes that Wallace murdered Donny to torment him, M.E. Rodgers confirms that it is in fact Wallace's heart in the box. Goren refuses to believe this, stating that Wallace has "nine lives". Gage suggests to Goren that Wallace had a partner who acted on her wishes, and that they were trying to frame Goren for her murder and Frank’s. The captain orders a secret investigation of Goren (in case he is the actual perpetrator), which Eames only agrees to as a means to exonerate Goren. Later evidence turns up that Frank Goren had a life insurance policy naming William Brady (Goren's undercover alias) as his beneficiary, supporting Gage's theory. At this time, Goren reveals that he has confirmed that serial killer Mark Ford Brady is his biological father.
In a twist ending, it is revealed that Dr. Gage engineered this entire chain of events as an elaborate plan to "free" Goren from all of the negative people in Goren's troubled past—people who had created the metaphorical demons that have increasingly tortured Goren throughout his life. Goren realizes this after he notices someone has "tried to glue the pieces of his life together" throughout the case. He learns that Gage wrote a book on female serial killers (such as his daughter Jo, who, as it turns out, was in a coma after biting off her tongue, just hours before Goren tried to meet with her) to attract Wallace's attention. Knowing that she would try to seduce him, Gage spurned her advances to trick her into attempting to kill him. Gage suggested to her that he also hates Bobby, to manipulate her into killing Frank. Knowing that Wallace's next move would be to kill him, Gage killed Wallace, cut out her heart, mailed some flowers in her name (aside from the ones she herself mailed to Goren), and faked his own poisoning to set the scavenger hunt in motion. Gage thought that Frank was "going down anyway", and that such people in Bobby's life—including himself—were "dead weight" that would inevitably cause Bobby to completely self-destruct (since Goren felt too responsible for them to voluntarily shut them out of his life). In Gage's twisted view, he did this to give "the son he never had" (but always wanted) a "clean slate": a fair chance at having a healthy, happy life free of emotional baggage. Gage assures Goren that his nephew Donny is unharmed and still missing, as killing him would never have served his goal of "helping" Goren.
Gage also tells Goren that Wallace's final words were "Tell Bobby he was the only man I ever loved".
Read more about this topic: Frame (Law & Order: Criminal Intent)
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