'Van der Valk' Recap: Season 3 Episode 2

Van der Valk airs Sundays at 9:00 pm and is available to stream via the PBS app and wttw.com. Recap the previous and following episodes.
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Van der Valk and his team know that the person who killed Caspar Yuliani and also presumably shot at Marian Segers' hospital room is a good marksman, so they must have been trying to flush Marian out of the hospital, not kill her since they didn’t hit her. They learned what room she was in by calling the hospital and pretending to be family. 

Lena stitches Lucienne’s cut hand before the detectives leave the hospital, and admits to Lucienne that she didn’t end up marrying after all, even though the impending marriage was the reason she left Van der Valk. She’s not sure if Van der Valk is the cause or symptom of her change of mind about the marriage. Lucienne doesn’t tell Van der Valk, but he surmises the truth on his own. Lucienne no longer feels the need to look after him in his romances; he has changed, been more upbeat, since being with Lena.

The bullet casings found by the hospital match the ones found at the scene of Caspar’s death. They lead the detectives to a shooting club, where Lucienne knows the bartender—she’s a member. A membership list shows that Lenny Holst and Finn Jonker are members. 

Meanwhile, Citra and Eddie are working at the team’s regular bar, where Citra is out of place but quickly befriends Frank, the homeless man who hangs out there. They have acquired access to Milton’s phone via the cloud, and find footage of Caspar climbing and jumping across containers at the port—just like the ones that Lenny’s crew were practicing on when Van der Valk and Lucienne first interviewed them. Van der Valk thinks Caspar was demonstrating how to do a difficult climb for someone else. 

But Milton won’t explain the footage—it would put both Marian and himself in danger if he did. 

With Frank’s help, Citra figures out exactly where at the port the footage was shot, using a code on a sign in the background.

Eddie goes through CCTV footage of the train station overlooking the place where Caspar was shot, and sees a hooded figure with a limp there just before the shooting. They disappear behind a sign just as Milton appears. Could it be Lenny, who has a limp?

The team stakes out the port that night. As they wait, Eddie resists sharing any information about himself with Citra, as does she about herself. A crowd of people in dark clothes eventually appears, freerunning across containers. One executes the climb Caspar demonstrated in Milton’s footage, opens a container, and begins throwing packages of cocaine from inside down to his accomplices. 

Van der Valk sends in his waiting squads to apprehend the crew as they start to leave. But the person who climbed the containers slips off. Van der Valk and Lucienne are waiting, and apprehend him: it’s Finn Jonker. 

When Lucienne and Van der Valk go to Lenny to tell him that they’ve apprehended his men smuggling drugs, they find Lenny’s brother Gert sobbing over Lenny’s dead body. He’s been shot through the head; bullet holes in the brick wall behind him illustrate the execution.

Gert says he was in back gaming and had headphones on—he didn’t hear anything. He admits to knowing that Lenny was involved in smuggling, but that Lenny wouldn’t tell him anything about it in order to keep Gert safe. Gert blames the detectives for his brother’s death once he learns they foiled his smuggling: the dealers must have learned the job was botched and come to kill Lenny for the failure. 

Van der Valk tries to learn from Milton’s friend Sanne why Milton is so afraid and what he’s not telling the police, but she doesn’t know anything. She does reveal that Marian wouldn’t talk about her time in a relationship with Lenny, presumably because it was bad, other than that she felt bad for Gert and was kind to him. Sanne says Caspar and Milton were against drugs, but that she thinks Marian was once a user. 

Milton finally opens up when he learns that Lenny is dead, since Lenny is the person he feared. He explains that Marian was once an addict, and that she sometimes worked for Lenny in his drug smuggling. Milton didn’t want to tell the police this in case they charged her. Lenny was cruel, especially after he injured himself in a fall, but he said he would no longer hold Marian’s criminal activity over her if Caspar demonstrated how to climb a container at the port. 

So Caspar and Milton left Caspar’s departure party to film the climb, then Caspar returned to the party while Milton went to bring the footage to Lenny. But Lenny simply took Milton’s phone and said that he’d kill both Caspar and Marian anyways. Milton went to the train station to warn them, but was too late. 

Hendrik has noticed something odd about the scene of Lenny’s death, and goes to the gun range to confirm his suspicion. A handgun isn’t powerful enough to have pierced both Lenny’s skull and a brick wall. But forensics say the bullet—the same as the one used on Caspar and at the hospital—is definitely from a handgun. Lenny was probably killed somewhere else, then his murder was staged. 

The team searches near where Lenny was killed, and find a locked room with some drops of blood as well as a chair and rope—perhaps Marian was kept here, and Lenny was killed there. Who is responsible? Gert, whose favorite video game is up on a screen there.

Gert fell in love with Marian, then blamed Caspar for “taking her away,” so he killed Caspar. He faked a limp at the train station to deflect blame onto his brother. And he used a fake name at the shooting club. 

Van der Valk suspects that Gert is now going to a vigil being held for Caspar at the scene of his death—and he’s right. Gert tells Marian that he was happy when they were together, and everyone else ruined it. He handcuffs them together, then pulls her to the train station overlooking the street where the vigil is taking place. He forces her to step over the railing with him: the only way for them to be together is to die by jumping, and everyone will see that they loved each other.

Van der Valk tries to talk Gert down, but gets nowhere and so warns that a sharpshooter will take him down if he moves. Gert thinks Van der Valk is bluffing—but Eddie’s expert shot proves otherwise. Marian is saved.

Van der Valk knows from Eddie’s file that he’s a brilliant marksman, if a bit impulsive. Van der Valk welcomes him to the team, especially after they finish their chess game and Eddie demonstrates that he can actually best Van der Valk. 

Citra has to rush out rather than get drinks with the team, but Van der Valk tells her, too, that they will be there for her. When the team arrives at their bar, they find Citra already there, buying Frank and Dahlman a round.