'Professor T' Recap: Season 3 Episode 2

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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It’s a perfect wedding: a gorgeous old mansion, cherished guests, a happy couple. Except the bride is dead.

Greta Parkes, newly – and briefly – Greta Hall, is found drowned in the pool by a cleaner early in the morning after her wedding. She went for a swim in the middle of the night, but didn’t drink or do drugs, so she didn’t accidentally drown after partying too hard. In fact, she and her new husband Graydon Hall upheld strict morals: she met Graydon when she joined the church his father, the Reverend Virgil Hall, leads, about a year ago.

The CCTV doesn’t work, so that’s of no help in determining if the drowning was a murder.

The detectives set about interviewing every guest and gathering any footage they have of the wedding from their phones. They learn that Greta lost both her parents when she was 17 and had a wild streak that led to her being expelled from one school but has since been tamed.

Graydon is confused by what happened; he must have fallen asleep, then woke to find Greta gone and heard a scream. It was the cleaner finding Greta’s body. Another hotel staffer suggests that the detectives talk to Fabian Scholes, who was fired yesterday after he was caught stealing from Greta’s room.

Fabian snidely stonewalls questioning and denies returning to the hotel that morning even though a witness saw him. But the police find expensive clothes, some with nametags from guests at the wedding, in his flat, along with enough cocaine to deal. In exchange for dropping the theft and coke charges, Fabian admits to returning to the hotel to retrieve a bag of stolen clothes he had stashed and seeing Greta floating in the pool. He didn’t try to save her or raise an alarm, so Lisa will charge him with negligence manslaughter, to his dismay.

Another possible suspect is Rosemary Parrish. One of Greta’s friends tells Dan that Rosemary is lying to the police: she wasn’t invited to the wedding. She’s Graydon’s ex, and simply showed up. Graydon says failing to invite her was an oversight and that she was welcome, but Greta’s phone has more than 200 stored messages from Rosemary threatening to “expose” or kill her and calling her a slut and whore.

Rosemary admits that she had a breakdown when Graydon broke up with her and took it out on Greta. Given Greta’s past, she thought there would be something to expose – but there wasn’t. Rosemary is a different person now, and that’s all in the past.

The detectives are beginning to think Greta’s death wasn’t an accident. Professor T’s therapist had asked them to call on the professor to help solve a case in order to give him something to focus on and a break from prison, which is breaking him, but Rabbit initially refused. Now he calls in the professor and gets him released for four hours to survey the crime scene.

A nasty prison guard insists that the professor be back right on time. The professor has already made an enemy of the guard, having witnessed him seemingly taking bribes from other prisoners and being confronted by another guard for some transgression. The guard has angered Ms. Snares by manhandling the baked goods and tea she brought for the professor, and promised to try to prevent the professor from getting any more therapy.

The professor apparently needs it, however. His mother visits him under the guise of therapy, since he wouldn’t OK a visit from her otherwise, and she becomes increasingly worried. The professor is barely eating or sleeping, and his job at the university is in danger since he has been charged with firing an unregistered gun in a police station. 

And he might soon be charged with a greater crime: the corrupt cop Simon Lanesborough has claimed that the professor pulled the trigger while pointing his gun at Simon and thus tried to kill him. Simon says he saved himself by grabbing the barrel of the gun and pointing it upward, and the presence of his fingerprints on the barrel lend credence to his story.

Christina continues to deny that she had a gun and was trying to kill Simon. She is caught in a lie about luring Simon to her office when an investigator plays her voicemail to Simon doing just that, but she changes her story and says she was going to arrest him. The professor still refuses to say anything to defend himself even when he is questioned again and charged with attempted murder. He could get a life sentence if convicted.

Adelaide, suspecting that the professor is protecting his ex, confronts Christina and tells her about the professor’s declining condition. The professor’s therapist suggests that the obsessive rules and habits he has constructed for himself are not necessarily his true self. Their breakdown in prison might allow him become his real self.

As he takes in the particulars of the case of Greta’s death, however, he is still very much the same old professor. He surveys the pool and notices a small gold chain at the bottom near a drain. Then Dan, who has been popping pills and sweating due to an oozing gunshot wound sustained taking down corrupt cops, faints into the pool.

He recovers and is sent away to get new stitches and recuperate. Lisa asks him to convalesce at her place; we don’t know how he responds.

The professor watches videos and looks through photos of the wedding, then asks the cleaner who found Greta’s body what happened. She explains that Graydon, some staff, and the Reverend Hall all came running and jumped in the pool after she screamed. The professor’s final request is to see Greta’s body. He notes faint marks on her ankles and learns that there are traces of fingerprints there, although they can’t be identified.

Before returning to prison, he reminds Lisa of a famous old case in which a bigamist murdered all of his wives by holding their ankles and drowning them in a tub. He suggests that Lisa question some suspects again to look for inconsistencies; if that doesn’t work, she can try to clear the hotel and see if the murderer comes back to cover their tracks.

Rabbit and Lisa once again question Graydon, focusing on what happened after the wedding was over. They know that Greta searched on her phone for hymenoplasty – she wasn’t a virgin, and must have considered trying to hide that fact from the pious Graydon, although she didn’t go through with it. They get Graydon to admit that he and his new wife didn’t consummate their marriage; Greta said she had to do something first and went for a swim.

Rabbit and Lisa also question the reverend, who failed to mention that he jumped in the pool even though he arrived after several other people were already in it trying to revive Greta. He shrugs off the omission as occurring simply because he was frazzled after the death.

Lisa pulls the fire alarm, and everyone is evacuated. She and Rabbit wait in the darkened pool and see someone dive in to retrieve Greta’s ankle chain, which the professor spotted. It’s the reverend, just as the professor suspected from observing his interactions with Greta in the videos.

Greta and the reverend slept together once; he claims she “tempted” him. She asked to meet him at the pool after the wedding and told him that she was going to tell Graydon the truth. She was warning the reverend so that he could figure out what to say to his son. Instead, he drowned her, lest she ruin everything he had built up. He then noticed her anklet at the bottom of the pool and was going to retrieve it to cover his tracks when he heard the footsteps of the cleaner approaching and hid. That’s why he also jumped into the pool when everyone else did, but he failed to get the bracelet.

Greta was simply trying to live out the reverend’s preaching of absolute honesty. In exchange, she was murdered by him.