'Professor T' Recap: Season 2 Episode 4

Professor T airs Sundays at 7:00 pm and is available to stream via the PBS app and wttw.com. Recap the previous and following episodes.
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Professor T’s therapist is frustrated by his disdain for her methods, and suggests a male therapist might be better for him, given his hostility to women. He disagrees that he has a female problem, but follows her advice to try to act positively towards the women in his life, giving Lisa a sideways compliment and bringing his mother a gift of bulldog clips. If this is a result of your therapy, Adelaide says, it’s progress.

The professor is planning to ask Christina to dinner, but his secretary Mrs. Snares advises him to first rehearse with her. Mrs. Snares ends up absolutely drunk.

Luckily, there is a case to distract the professor. Malcolm Davies, a baker, has been receiving threatening mail. He’s not taking the threats seriously, surmising they are from fellow bakers who are jealous of his success, or possibly related to a years-long legal dispute with his former neighbors. But his husband, Aiden, brings the threats to the police.

One of Malcolm’s fellow bakers believes he is taking shortcuts in his bread, and publicly accused him. He does admit that Malcolm hasn’t been himself for the past few weeks.

Malcolm used to run a mail delivery business with his former neighbor Steve Sanderson. They got along well, until Malcolm suddenly told Steve he was done with deliveries and they stopped talking. Then the Davies sued the Sandersons for putting up a fence without asking. The case has been in the courts for years. Malcolm, never a gambler, suddenly won a bunch of money gambling, allowing the Davies to move and begin renting out the place.

Lisa is frustrated to be investigating such a small-scale thing as threats in the mail—but then Malcolm is found dead in his car in the middle of nowhere, his throat slit. 

It turns out there’s more to Malcolm than disputes over bread and property: he was also the key witness in a murder trial eight years ago. He was delivering a package at night to Sunil Mehta when he overheard an argument, then saw Larry Buckland leave Mehta’s office. Buckland had been fired by Mehta for fighting and was heard making threats against Mehta. Malcolm found Mehta dead, his throat cut, and 170 grand missing from his safe.

Larry is still in prison, but his wife and son are currently renting the Davies’ house. They insist it’s a coincidence: they’ve moved a lot, and Malcolm wouldn’t have recognized their name from the lease because Larry’s wife is now using her maiden name. They only realized the connection when Malcolm came to fix something at the house.

Nevertheless, a knife is found in the shed, and Larry’s son Jonah doesn’t have an alibi. He would have motive to kill the man who put his father in prison, but Professor T doesn’t believe he’s guilty: psychiatrists have evaluated him as stable and not vengeful over the years.

Larry also insists, still, that he’s innocent. He was drunk and lost his temper when he asked Sunil for his job back, and beat him up—but he didn’t kill him.

Professor T asks Christina to dinner, and, thinking of Adelaide’s threat not to toy with the professor’s feelings, she refuses. However, when the professor tells her it’s for therapy, she agrees.

Steve Sanderson comes into the police voluntarily, having learned that Malcolm was killed. He and Debbie were surprised to receive a visit from Aiden the night after Malcolm’s death. Aiden wanted to settle the lawsuits and even offered to pay the Sandersons’ legal fees; he had just been looking at the property and the garden before.

The professor asks Steve if their delivery company typically made late deliveries, and he says no—unless Malcolm was being pushed around by his bossy husband. So it would have been unusual for Malcolm to have been delivering to Sunil at night, when he found Sunil’s body.

The detectives turn up a detail in reports about Sunil’s murder: the package delivered was from Aiden Cockett, now Davies—Malcolm’s husband. He was Sunil’s accountant, and so might have known how much money was in Sunil’s safe.

Given Aiden’s domineering personality, the professor finds it odd that he would have let Malcolm leave the evening he was killed without knowing where he was going. The professor surmises it was to meet Larry’s son, Jonah—and he’s right, as Jonah admits.

Jonah believes his dad is innocent and decided to prove it when Malcolm resurfaced in his life. Jonah started bothering Malcolm at the bakery but was going to give up when Malcolm threatened to evict him and his mother. Then Malcolm suddenly invited him for a drink, the night Malcolm was killed.  Jonah says he never showed up.

Professor T makes another deductive leap. Aiden is an abrasive person; it’s odd that he would suddenly change his attitude towards the Sandersons and pay their legal fees. The professor believes he killed Malcolm and was hiding the knife in Jonah’s shed to frame him when the Sandersons saw him, so he had to come up with an excuse for being there at night.

Why did he kill his husband? Aiden, not Malcolm, was the one who made the delivery and found Sunil beaten up on the floor of his office by Larry—but Sunil wasn’t dead. Aiden decided to take advantage of the opportunity to take Sunil’s money and kill him while he was unconscious, then forced Malcolm to testify against Larry and used the money to buy him a new house and a bakery to assuage him.

When Jonah started bothering Malcolm, Aiden worried Malcolm was going to admit the truth. So he told him to set up a meeting with Jonah and went with him. He then stopped the car and killed Malcolm to protect himself.

Unfortunately, there’s no hard evidence for this theory, and Aiden won’t admit to anything. Professor T talks to him in his cell, off camera, telling him that it’s likely the police will find evidence against him: blood spatter, the money he took from Sunil. But Aiden is clever enough to convince a jury that Malcolm killed Sunil and terrorized Aiden to keep him from telling; Aiden finally broke and killed his husband out of self-preservation. It would mean a lesser charge.

Aiden takes the bait and confesses to killing Malcolm. But he has forgotten the death threats he sent Malcolm, which suggest premeditation and thus will make charges against him worse.

Christina is considering promoting Lisa to replace Rabbit while he goes on leave—despite Dan being the one angling for a promotion, and Lisa and Dan are now dating. Later, Lisa and her dad look at old photos together, and he tells her that her graduation was the proudest day of his life.

Christina heads off to an awkward dinner with Professor T, who is trying to implement Mrs. Snares’ suggestions, to ill effect. Before she leaves, Christina reveals that she is dating Simon, another cop, and the professor dismisses the relationship: she’s just foolishly infatuated with Simon. She bristles and leaves.