'Professor T' Recap: Season 3 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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Despite being on the verge of a breakthrough while in prison, Professor T has decided to abandon his therapist now that he’s a free man. Unfortunately, the police are requiring him to undergo a psychological evaluation before they will reinstate him as a consultant. He believes his therapist won’t clear him and so goes to Maiya Goswami, the detective who is replacing Christina now that she has moved to the coast with her family, to request an independent evaluation.

But Maiya dismisses him out of hand. She hasn’t read his therapist’s report, but she has already decided the police will no longer consult with him. The gunshot hole in the ceiling of her new office is proof enough that he’s unstable.

Lisa immediately takes a dislike to Maiya, who shows up at the scene of an unexplained death without introducing herself. Amara Dhar had called her boyfriend sounding drunk and told him something was wrong with her before toppling over a staircase railing. Lisa believes the death was a drunken accident; Maiya chastises her for being uncaring.

That’s partly because Maiya is Amara’s aunt, as Lisa learns from digging online. But Maiya doesn’t share that information, even though it means she should recuse herself from the case. This seems especially hypocritical to Lisa because Maiya insists that either Lisa or Dan must transfer to a different station because they are in a relationship again. Do as I say, not as I do, Maiya tells Lisa when she confronts her.

Lisa unsurprisingly ignores Maiya’s injunction against consulting the professor and goes to him for help when five more people surface with unexplained deaths similar to Amara’s, where they vomited before suddenly perishing. One’s a ten-year-old boy, and another stopped drinking years ago, so it’s not likely to be alcohol-related.

The professor suggests poisoning, and Lisa finds a possible culprit toxin that mimics the symptoms of drunkenness: ethylene glycol. The professor recalls an infamous case of mass poisoning in Japan where a doomsday cult mixed ethylene glycol with mirin – the sweetness of the rice wine masked the sweetness of the poison. One of the poisoned people in Lisa’s case, Hal Harwood, owned a chocolate company – perhaps the chocolate was poisoned. The fact that Hal died before all the other victims certainly suggests that is the case.

Hal oversaw the shop floor, sampling every batch of chocolate, while his brother Edwyn ran the business. The Harwoods recently forced a 40% pay cut on their workers. The professor identifies one shifty-seeming employee, Ferdy Walters, and the detectives find speed in his car and arrest him. He admits that he started selling speed to other Harwood employees after they had to start working more for reduced pay, and begs for leniency – he’s a single father.

Hal was found with a substantial sum of cash in small bills with traces of both speed and ethylene glycol on them, and Ferdy admits that Hal was taking a cut of his drug sales under the threat of turning Ferdy into the police. To get revenge, Ferdy injected twenty chocolates with what he thought was a laxative in order to both hurt Hal and humiliate the company. But Ferdy wasn’t the mastermind – and the chemical he was given wasn’t a laxative but ethylene glycol.

The professor noticed at the Harwood factory that the company’s logo had recently been altered, and through some digging found out that the company was founded by the Harwoods along with a partner named Justin Dennis. Justin was ousted a couple months ago. The professor suspects he is behind the poisoning.

Ferdy is reluctant to name Justin as the mastermind, because Justin has Ferdy’s daughter and Ferdy is afraid of what he’ll do to her. (Justin’s wife often babysits.) When Justin can’t be found at home, the professor suggests to Lisa that the disgraced man will have gone somewhere he associates with past success – like a country home.

So Lisa sets off in search of Justin and Ferdy’s daughter, accompanied by Maiya rather than Dan at Maiya’s insistence – she wants to make the arrest because her niece was a victim. Maiya sneaks around back while Lisa confronts Justin, who pulls a knife. Maiya grabs him and disarms him, saving Ferdy’s daughter in the process.

Lisa tells Maiya about all the help the professor provided on the case, but Maiya still insists that he’s unstable and so the police will no longer be using him.

That’s unfortunate for the professor, given that his job at the university was given to a rival and the appointments board won’t reinstate him because he still has minor charges, such as possession of an unlicensed gun, pending against him.

But the professor manages to prove himself to Maiya with one further coup. When Justin is arrested, all twenty poisoned chocolates have been accounted for: nine total victims of poisoning and eleven recalled, uneaten poisoned chocolates. But the professor is skeptical about one of the poisoning victims. She is the wife of Anthony Dixon, the head of the toxicology lab that was investigating the poisoning for the police. Immediately after the lab confirmed that chocolates were the source of the poison, Anthony reported his wife as one of the victims.

But the professor had noted earlier that Anthony mentioned his wife was ailing. He believes Anthony murdered his wife. He asks Anthony about her death, and Anthony says she bought the chocolates from a particular store the day before.

The professor tells a skeptical Maiya and Lisa to check that story, then sets off in search of the last poisoned chocolate – if Anthony’s wife didn’t die from one of the chocolates, one is still out there. 

Ms. Snares had tried to give the professor a gift of chocolates when she thought he would get his job back, but he passed them on to the dean when he learned he wasn’t being reinstated. The dean in turn gave them to Adelaide. Professor T rushes to his mother’s house and finds that one of the chocolates has a bite taken out of it – by her dog. The dog lays silent – and then suddenly coughs up the chocolate. He has survived.

As for Anthony Dixon’s wife, CCTV footage shows her buying chocolates at the store, just as Anthony claimed. Except it’s not her, as a glimpse of Anthony’s watch on “her” wrist reveals – it’s him, dressed up like her to cover his tracks. She was ill, and he had already been through a horrible illness and death with his mother. He didn’t want to do it again, and he and his wife had discussed euthanasia – but he went through with it without telling her, using the poisoning as a cover story.

This story hits Lisa hard. She has just decided to put her declining father in a home, but worries that she’s doing the wrong thing. Maiya kindly reassures her that it’s the right decision. And she gives her the good news that the police can continue using the professor as a consultant – on a probationary basis.

The professor decides he still needs therapy after all.