'Professor T' Recap: Season 2 Episode 6

Professor T is available to stream via the PBS app and wttw.com. Recap the previous episode.
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Adelaide won’t respond to texts, calls, or even visits from her son, Professor T, after his accusation of infidelity to his father in a joint therapy session. Dan won’t respond to Lisa after he and she argued, but Rabbit says that Dan is on a training exercise—that’s why he’s absent. The two stonewalled people run into each other while the professor is visiting his mother’s regular haunts. Lisa offers to drive him around—if the professor helps her with a murder case.

A body has been found in the trunk of a car left in a parking lot for days. He was shot in the head, but his clothes are suspiciously clean. The driver’s license identifies him as Steven Daniels, but no one with the birthday listed matches that name. His home is weirdly empty, except for a series of photos with a woman and a message from a woman worrying about him.

Daniels looks familiar to Lisa, but she can’t place him. Turns out he’s an undercover cop, as fingerprints show: his name is actually Danny Stevens. Lisa recognizes him because he was undercover with Kenny Holland, a suspected drug trafficker the detectives met once before. Christina’s new boyfriend, Simon, told them then to stay out of the drug investigation into Kenny; now a higher-up, Alf Mercer, appears to explain everything to Lisa and Rabbit.

Alf doesn’t think Danny’s cover was blown: he was too careful. He allows Lisa to investigate his murder, but warns that Kenny probably has cops on his payroll.

Danny’s wife Nicky says he was often gone for days at a time. She last saw him the morning the car with his body first appeared, when he came home to grab a change of clothes.

Lisa brings the professor to the club where Kenny and Danny were known to hang out. The professor recognizes his “intimacy coach” as one of the women who works there, and Lisa recognizes another worker, Katherina Kaminska, as the woman in the photos with Danny. Katherina is shocked to learn of his death.

The club’s owner, Chas Parton, says that Danny got in a fight on Wednesday night when someone got handsy with Katherina. She thinks the guy was one of Kenny’s drivers.

Lisa was told not to interfere with the drug investigation by interviewing Kenny, but she works around the prohibition by having the professor speak to him. He says that Danny got into several fights at the club on Wednesday, and that Chas ended up kicking him out—Chas doesn’t like people having relationships with his girls, as Danny seemed to with Katherina.

Chas is arrested when an unlicensed gun is found in a dumpster outside his club. The professor notices that Chas and Dan, who has returned to the station, seem to know each other. He overhears them in an interrogation room: Chas tells Dan to get him out or he’ll start talking. Then the professor sees Dan chatting with Simon.

Dan then argues against Lisa’s belief that Chas killed Danny, arguing that the gun was planted and casting suspicion on Katherina instead. The professor also believes Chas is innocent, and he gets released.

The professor uncovers the real killer by noticing that Danny’s belt buckle was upside down even though he was right-handed. Someone else dressed him before putting him in the trunk, and the only person with access to clean clothes for him was his wife Nicky.

She admits to shooting him in the shower and then changing his clothes and depositing his body. She put up with his absences for years, wondering if he had affairs. But then he told Nicky he loved Katherina, and was going to leave Nicky after he finished this latest job. So she killed him.

Christina thanks the professor for his help in the case, and apologizes to him for not telling him about Simon earlier. But she thinks the professor is wrong to dislike Simon.

The professor sees Dan getting in a cab and follows. He watches Dan get into a van with Simon and Calvin, and takes a photo. Simon gives Dan a gun and tells him they’re on for tomorrow. Dan just has to drive Kenny to a hand-off. Simon is confident the police won’t raid them.

He’s wrong. When Lisa tells the professor that Dan is acting odd, and cruel, towards her, the professor agrees. He lists his suspicions, including that Simon now pretends to have known Dan for years when he introduced himself to him just a few weeks ago.

Lisa and Dan go to Chas’ night club, but Chas won’t answer any questions about Dan. Katherina, however, has heard from the professor’s “intimacy coach” that he’s a gentleman, and so she tells them that Dan was there recently, drinking with Simon and Kenny for hours. She took a photo, thinking it might be connected to Danny’s death. Before they leave, the professor tells Katherina that Danny was going to leave his wife for her. She thanks him.

Lisa and the professor go to Alf, who admits that he has been surveilling Simon. He knows that Simon has logged in to Christina’s laptop in order to access high-level intelligence. He has a raid planned to intercept Kenny and Simon’s drug handoff tonight.

As the big night begins, Kenny gives Simon cash for the job, and Simon tells him Dan is expendable. While Dan drives Kenny, Kenny pulls a gun on him. He takes Dan’s gun and throws his phone out the window, and directs him to a new location. As Dan gets out of the car, he surreptitiously activates a panic button.

He has been working with Alf, as Lisa now knows. Dan went to Rabbit with his suspicions about Simon; they kept Lisa out of the loop lest she tell Christina, who was too close to Simon.

Dan tussles with Kenny but is beaten to the ground. Kenny and some thugs start unloading a van full of drugs. Dan sneaks into his car and grabs his gun—but it’s empty. Kenny shoots and clips Dan’s shoulder—right as police descend.

They apprehend Calvin in Simon’s car, but Simon is nowhere to be found. Lisa decided to tell Christina that he was corrupt, and Christina has asked Simon to her office for a “surprise.” He arrives, and she pulls a gun on him.

The professor, having learned that Christina found out about Simon from Lisa and suspecting that she might do something rash, appears. Simon knocks the gun out of Christina’s hand and tries to flee—but the professor pulls a rifle, just like he did to his father as a boy when his father was abusing his mother. Simon taunts him, just like his father, and the professor fires at the ceiling before knocking Simon out with the butt of the gun while Christina grabs her own gun and other police officers rush in.

Christina thanks Lisa for telling her about Simon, and tells Lisa  she has gotten the promotion. It can only complicate her relationship with Dan, given that Lisa has just told him they needed some time apart to think, after almost asking him to move in with her.

The professor could be in jail for some time, for firing an unlicensed gun in a police station. He tries to call his mother, but she doesn’t pick up, even though, failing to locate his mother, he has gone to the dean and told him he owes Adelaide an apology—which the dean conveys.

But Adelaide is worried, as she tells the dean. Having made progress in therapy, the professor is going to start digging things up best left buried—which is bad news for those of them who know what really happened.