'Baptiste' Recap: Season 2 Episode 5

Baptiste airs Sundays at 9:00 pm and is available to stream. Recap the previous and following episodes and the previous season.

We finally know what happened to Emma’s late daughter Laura. She found the door to the house open at night, and turned around from closing it to find a man with a knife. She tried to run past him and he stabbed her. Her youngest brother Will found her first and saw the man before he fled. Will stopped speaking after Laura’s death that night.

Now Will is Emma’s only surviving child, and she and Baptiste are desperate to know how he is tied up with the far-right terrorist Gomorrah. Zsofia reluctantly gives them access to the basement of the mall where she is a security guard, and they join him in a locked electrical cage. Baptiste refuses to undo Will’s ziptied hands.

Emma asks to have a minute alone with Will, so Baptiste takes his phone and leaves them. Emma tells her son she’s furious with him for all that has happened, but that she has also missed him and loves him. Her conversation is interrupted by an angered Baptiste brandishing Will’s phone. He plays a video of Will speaking about violence he has committed, a pre-emptive recording to be released after another planned attack.

Now that she knows Will speaks again, Emma demands that he reveal his plan. Baptiste drives into him with a recitation of all the deaths that have occurred—his father, his brother, all the people at Józsefváros—and finally Will yells “Shut up!” and begins to speak.

After Laura died, Will began frequenting online far-right forums. His brother Alex found out and joined him. They blamed Laura’s death at the hands of an immigrant on lax immigration policies, and the killing radicalized them.

Richard, their father, wasn’t supposed to be there the morning he was killed in the forest. Alex had been meeting with someone who knew Gomorrah, and had set up a meeting with another person tied to Gomorrah in the forest that morning. Will woke up with him and insisted on joining him, leaving his phone behind in the rush.

Richard soon woke up too and saw the boys walking into the forest. Noticing Will had left his phone, he followed them out of fear that something was wrong. When the boys met Andras Juszt, he brandished a gun at them. Having learned that Alex was the son of the ambassador, Andras didn’t trust him—and Will’s appearance when Andras was supposed to meet Alex alone made it worse.

Richard, following them, spotted a woodpecker—he was a birdwatcher—and began filming, then heard Alex shout. He rushed to his boys and tried to intervene, and Andras shot him, while his phone continued filming. Andras then demanded that the boys get in his car, and fled the scene with them.

Emma can’t stand interrogating her son any longer, and asks Baptiste to continue without her. He tries to sympathize with Will, saying he has lost someone important too, but it doesn’t work: Baptiste killed Will’s brother, in order to stop him from killing more people at Józsefváros.

So Baptiste goes off to call his ex-wife Celia and tell her he found Will. When this is done, we should talk, he says. I needed you, she responds, and you buried yourself in your work. We’ve made our choices, she says before hanging up. Emma, meanwhile, calls her aide Nadeem and updates him, asking him to find someone for Will to speak to about his trauma.

Returning to Will with Emma, Baptiste tries a new tactic. Zsofia has a police friend who lost his longtime partner at Józsefváros. He would jump at the chance to unofficially “question” Will. Baptiste pins Will against the cage to show he’s not bluffing, and Emma says she would let it happen, given all the terrible things Will has let happen. Will relents. He doesn’t know when or where the attack is to take place—Alex didn’t know either, until right before Józsefváros.

It was in the moments when Alex left for Józsefváros that Will recovered his voice, asking Alex not to go—but Alex wanted to avenge Laura. In the time after, Gomorrah spoke to him about Alex’s heroism and asked Will to carry on his legacy. Hallucinating, Will saw Gomorrah as the man who killed Laura.

Baptiste asks him if, after the hallucinations, Gomorrah was Kamilla Agoston. Alex says yes, and answers more questions: she kept him locked in her basement for the first few months, until he had made up his mind to aid Gomorrah. Baptiste leaves to speak with Kamilla, and locks Emma in with Alex, per her own request.

She tries to understand and counteract Will’s virulent hatred towards immigrants. Eventually she tells him that he was always sensitive; she doesn’t believe he could kill people. Learning that he and Alex felt abandoned by her after Laura’s death as she buried herself in work, she apologizes for letting him down.

He asks her about her paralysis, and tells her he’s sorry that she got hurt and that Richard died—it wasn’t meant to happen. He asks her to undo his zipties—they’re hurting him. She does, telling him she’ll find someone to speak with him about his trauma and fix this.

Baptiste has asked Zsofia to have her police friends look into the area where he found Will. A camera picked up only his and Kamilla’s car within hours of the encounter, and Will didn’t take any nearby trams, so he must have walked there from somewhere close. The only thing in the area is a shuttered abattoir.

Baptiste arrives at Kamilla Agoston’s and tells her they found Will, before barging into her house and going to the basement. There’s no lock on the door.

Back in the mall basement, Will trips Baptiste when he unlocks the door. Emma is on the ground, shoved out of her wheelchair. Will flees, and Baptiste loses him in the crowd of the mall.

Will lied to us, he tells Emma. Kamilla is not Gomorrah; there’s no lock on her basement door as Will claimed. Who is Gomorrah? The other person who told them what they wanted to hear and played them for time: Andras Juszt.