'Professor T' Recap: Season 3 Episode 5

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.
Keep up with your favorite dramas and mysteries by signing up for our newsletter, Dramalogue.

The professor can finally be a professor again. Although his job was given to a rival, Erik Haiden, the dean has engineered a way to reinstate him: Haiden has been offered a job as the head of Oxford’s criminology department, thus freeing the professor’s old position for him. But first Haiden must impress his future employers in order to secure the job, by giving the keynote address at a criminology conference organized this year by the dean.

The professor has given the keynote for the past five years, and is insulted to lose his position to Haiden – especially once he reads Haiden’s speech in a copy filched by Ms. Snares. She urges the professor to help Haiden improve his speech so that Haiden can win the new job and vacate the professor’s position. She directs the professor to the hotel where the conference will be held – Haiden has taken a room early in order to indulge his penchant for prostitutes.

The professor reluctantly goes to Haiden’s hotel room and overhears an argument with a woman over prices. Haiden refuses to accept the professor’s help.

So the professor joins Tina Morley, a brilliant former student who now teaches at Oxford, for dinner. They’re joined by her husband Alex, who was deselected as a Member of Parliament after swearing at a reporter on live TV for pressing him about Tina’s postpartum depression. Despite her marriage and child, Tina tells the professor she has always had a crush on him while Alex is away from the table. She asks for the professor’s room number, but he demurs.

Tina also points out Haiden’s wife Gisele at dinner. She thinks Gisele is at the hotel to see if Haiden is cheating on her. Gisele goes up to Haiden’s room around 11:00 pm and finds the door open – and Haiden dead from a blow to the back of his skull.

When the police arrive, Gisele breaks down under questioning and leaves. Haiden’s watch is broken, stopped at 9:25 pm. His phone is missing, and no one is answering it. There’s a key card for his wife’s hotel room in his room, even though Gisele says she didn’t go inside. And there are gaps in the hotel’s CCTV coverage, including of a back staircase near his room.

Nevertheless, the prostitute with whom the professor heard Haiden arguing shows up on the CCTV, arriving at Haiden’s room around 6 pm and leaving an hour later. Her name is Vinette Lawson, and she was charged for robbing a client years ago. CCTV shows her outside the hotel again at around 9:20 pm, and then she is found using Haiden’s credit card a couple hours later.

She admits that she returned to the hotel because Haiden called her again, and she used the back stairs not covered by CCTV. But Haiden didn’t answer his door and she couldn’t reach him. She spotted his credit card on the ground outside his room, so she took it and left.

Haiden’s phone is discovered on the grounds of the hotel, and shows that he did call Vinette twice: before she came to his room around 6 and again at 8:45 pm. But the postmortem reveals that Haiden died as late as 8:25, despite his watch – which means the second call to Vinette came after his death.

When Gisele sits for a fuller interview with the police, she explains her presence at the hotel in a separate room paid for in cash under an assumed name as a way to spice her marriage up. When the detectives ask if she was actually trying to catch her husband cheating, she leaves, insulted.

She does give permission to the dean to move forward with the conference, despite her husband’s death – and for the professor to give Haiden’s keynote speech, as the professor has suggested.

The professor wants to improve upon Haiden’s keynote – and use it to gather evidence for the police. He knows who murdered Haiden, and can prove it through his speech, if the police will allow all the suspects to attend. Maiya very reluctantly agrees.

At the beginning of his speech, with detectives waiting in the wings, the professor announces that someone in the audience committed murder within the past 24 hours, and that their identity will be revealed at the end. He discusses Haiden’s death. The killer knew they couldn’t flee the hotel after the murder because that would attract attention, so they planted misleading clues to distract the detectives in the early stages of their investigation. They smashed Haiden’s watch an hour after he actually died, left his credit card on the ground outside his room, and hid his phone elsewhere on the grounds.

The professor then begins to allege that his former student Tina is the killer, because she had been bypassed for the department head job for Haiden and therefore wanted to kill him and simultaneously show her fellow academics how clever she was. The professor even says that she faked her postpartum depression to gain her husband’s support.

Alex, her husband, tries to attack the professor, but is tackled by Lisa first. I killed him, Alex announces. I know, the professor responds.

The professor has surmised from Alex’s disastrous TV interview that led to his firing as an MP that Alex has a temper that can be triggered by empathy for his wife. The professor insulted Tina to get Alex to angrily reveal himself as the murderer.

Frustrated that Haiden got the job over Tina, Alex wanted to catch Haiden in the act of cheating on his wife, hoping that would prevent him from getting the job. He managed to get a photo of Vinette leaving Haiden’s room – but Haiden saw him and grabbed his phone, bringing it into his room. Alex followed and killed him when he began ridiculing Tina, who has always struggled to explain the gaps in her resume resulting from her postpartum depression and thus failed to get jobs she thought were hers, like department head. Alex then laid the misdirecting clues, calling Vinette back to the hotel and smashing the watch on a trip to the bathroom during his dinner with the professor, thus cementing his alibi.

The professor suspects that Tina was the one who thought up such misdirection. She even contributed to it, by professing a crush on the professor, confusing and distracting him. She tells the professor that no one will ever love him as much as Alex loves her.

Lisa knows well the difficulties love can cause. She loves Dan, who does such thoughtful things as giving her a CD for her dad as he settles into a nursing home and ordering room service as he and she work long hours on the investigation into Haiden’s death. But Maiya has insisted that Dan and Lisa cannot work together if they are dating, so Lisa has accepted a job at a nearby station – and starts next week. At least she will not have to move, and will still be close to Dan.

Lisa is not the only one with a parent in trouble. The professor’s mother Adelaide has become concerned that he will keep digging into traumatic memories and so has decided to destroy any physical evidence from a bad day long ago. She ends up in the hospital with a broken hip, having fallen down the stairs while heading up to the attic.

The professor asks the dean why she was going to the attic, where she hadn’t been for years? Was she looking for something?