'Professor T' Recap: Episode 6

Professor T is available to stream. Recap the previous and following episodes, and find more recaps at wttw.com/recaps.

James Samson, the wealthy owner of Samson Bell, is about to hold a press conference. As he steps up to the podium, a helmeted man on a motorbike pulls up outside the glass-walled room, shoots at Samson and misses, then speeds away. Despite the assassination attempt, Samson is unfazed and wants to continue with the press conference. His wife Natasha and sons Henry and Freddy quickly dissuade him.

Lisa interviews the Samsons with Rabbit, who is back from leave and looking better. James suggests that someone has targeted him because of Samson Bell’s work with stem cells and a recent confrontational interview that he did. Dan appears as Lisa and Rabbit are wrapping up. He bats away questions from Lisa about his date the previous night.

Professor T also wants to avoid talking about himself. Mrs. Snares has gotten him a donut for his birthday (he doesn’t like cake) and cancelled his appointments, but he doesn’t like celebrating his birthday.

Surprisingly, Rabbit wants Professor T’s advice on the Samson case. The motorbike has been found, but it has false plates and no vehicle identification number. Turns out Professor T has a vague connection to Samson: James’s business partner Aaron Bell was T’s father’s drinking companion. Bell’s ideas are what made Samson Bell’s fortune.

James Samson is now committing to give away most of that fortune before he dies—which Professor T suggests provides his sons or young wife with a motive for killing him, given that they would lose most of any inheritance.

Natasha at least seems more concerned than James about the assassination attempt. She wants him to get a bodyguard, and tells the detectives that he received a bullet in the mail but threw it away as nothing. James, however, is relaxing by skeet-shooting with Freddy. Professor T notes that this prevents the detectives from doing a gunpowder test on Freddy, to determine if he was the shooter earlier in the day.

Freddy doesn’t have much of an alibi. He was supposed to meet a date near the press conference, but was stood up. Henry’s alibi is better: he was at a horse farm in the morning and then was already at the press conference when James was shot at. He does resent James, however: James met Natasha when Henry was dating her. Freddy is adopted, but James wants Henry to spend time with this new family. Henry believes both Natasha and Freddy are close to James because of his wealth.

Freddy is Aaron Bell’s son. James bought Aaron out of the company, then made a huge amount of money a decade later; Aaron committed suicide soon afterwards. But Freddy says Aaron’s death was alcohol related. Aaron became violent when drunk, and James protected Freddy. James is more of a father to Freddy than Aaron ever was.

Freddy’s not the only one with a violent alcoholic father. The reason Professor T dislikes his birthday is because of an incident that occurred on it when he was a child: his father became violent towards his mother. So when Adelaide toasts Professor T and herself at lunch, saying how the day is difficult for her as well, he reluctantly joins her.

Dan must also overcome some reluctance. He’s in bed with his new date when his phone rings with an update: James Samson has disappeared, his office smeared with blood.

Henry has an alibi and Natasha was gone for the evening, but she saw Freddy as she was leaving the house. When the detectives go to Freddy’s house, he’s in a robe, apparently having been woken up. He says he only saw James for a half hour; he has a text message from James after he left to prove it.

Under questioning, Natasha puts to bed rumors that she married James for money by revealing that she forced him to sign a pre-nuptial agreement preventing her from inheriting his fortune, to prove to him she was marrying for love. James wanted his business to go to Freddy and Henry, but Henry was angry and kept rejecting the offer.

Professor T made a different sort of pre-nuptial agreement. He seems to have been set to marry Christina, but left her at the altar. He tells her now that he didn’t want to ruin her life; she deserved someone normal. She replies that she has always understood, and has now forgiven him. Now he just needs to forgive himself.

Professor T is convinced that James’s abduction is staged. While the blood in James’s office is his, tests show it was collected over time, in stages. But then Rabbit comes in with the news that James’s body has been found, burned and with a gunshot to the head.

Except the cause of death was a heart attack.

Questioning Henry and Freddy, Professor T suggests that one of them was a dutiful son who honored James’s wishes to help him stage an abduction. Freddy cries and admits it was him, even though he thought it was a bad idea. James planned the incident to try to bring Henry back into the fold, the idea being that the scare would draw the family closer. James was to go into hiding for a week or so and then pretend that he had escaped his captors and reappear.

But James had a heart attack while he was in Freddy’s trunk, being driven away from his home. Freddy panicked—he couldn’t go to the authorities. So he tried to stage a killing, but there wasn’t much blood when he tearfully shot his father’s corpse since he had been dead a while. He tried burning the evidence—but it was too wet.

Listening to this story, Professor T hallucinates blood on his own hands. All those years ago on his birthday, he drew a gun on his father to protect his mother. His father goaded him to pull the trigger. The child Professor T set his face—and we don’t know what happened next.