'Van der Valk' Recap: Season 4 Episode 5

Van der Valk airs Sundays at 9:00 pm and is available to stream via the PBS app and wttw.com. Recap the previous episode and previous seasons.
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Hendrik refuses to visit a doctor and get his self-diagnosis of throat cancer confirmed, despite Van der Valk’s entreaties. Death is coming for him, and that’s that.

Tycho Bos and Ray Mesman also seemed to think death could be coming for them. They were both scientists researching cancer; Ray was Tycho’s mentor. Tycho had just visited Ray at home, where he lived with his son Ruben, to enthuse that he had “cracked it.” Ray worried about Tycho’s safety, however.

Rightfully so. Tycho headed to a nightclub after that visit, where short films by his partner Alis often played on the walls. A pink-haired woman aggressively questioned him there, but Tycho shoved her off. He tried to flee when he glimpsed a blond woman, but she caught him in the back passages of the club, hauled him to the roof, and threw him off after he told her she’d never find “it.”

While running from her, he managed to text the police: “If they get to me, tell Alis I love her.”

So the detectives know the fall wasn’t an accident. Bruising on Tycho’s arms and a broken neck that occurred before his body hit the concrete indicate that a professional hit person probably killed him.

When Ray learned that his fears about Tycho’s safety had been well-founded, he agreed to meet Van der Valk and his team. But as he walked towards them outside in broad daylight, a motorcyclist in a helmet drove past and shot him point-blank. The accuracy once again suggests a professional assassin.

The detectives noticed a pink-haired woman following Ray before he was killed, and Eddie tried to catch her as she ran away from the shooting. But she kneed him and escaped – although he managed to snap some photos of her as she fled.

Facial recognition software used on the photos identify the woman as Inge Palmberg, a conspiracy theorist and critic of Freddie Klink, a powerful billionaire for whom Ray once worked. She explains to Lucienne that she has been looking into Ray and Tycho because they worked for Klink. She was trying to question Tycho about Klink at the club, and she was following Ray because she thought he might know something about Tycho’s death.

She thinks Klink was trying to silence Tycho and Ray. Most of his money is from pharmaceuticals; if Tycho and Ray had discovered a cure or radical new treatment, he would lose business. Klink is not above dirty tactics: Inge claims that some of the more eccentric rumors about her were started at his behest, because she criticized him.

Tycho’s research was on genome editing, according to his partner, Alis, who’s so upset to learn of his death that she begins shattering plates. She says that Tycho went to a science library to work every day, but the library tells the detectives that they’ve never seen him. Alis starts to realize that she knows less about Tycho than she thought. She learns from the club owner, Jurgen, that Tycho used her email to send him a new version of her film for the club. It consisted of her “Judas Kiss” film on parasites – which was inspired by Tycho’s work – with random-seeming images flashing over it. Tycho deleted the email after he sent it, then went to Ray’s and then the club to watch it play on the walls there.

Alis also has a connection to Ray’s son, Ruben – he texted her goodnight after Tycho left his father’s house the night he was killed. He tries to visit her after Ray is killed but she turns him away.

Ruben has some drug offenses and thefts on his record, but he has been clean for three years. He explains that Ray has known Klink for years, and that his work for him was more of an honorary position.

Van der Valk wants to talk to Klink himself, but the billionaire is shielded by layers of bureaucracy that not even the police can penetrate. Fortunately, Klink is taking part in an important fundraiser for which the security is being handled by Van der Valk’s old flame Kalie Tenkers. She knows all of Klink’s movements, and shares them with the team.

Van der Valk and Eddie meet Klink as he disembarks a helicopter in Rotterdam. Klink explains that Ray helped him early on, so he brought Ray on as a sort of adviser on other businesses’ research when his own business took off. He says he doesn’t know Tycho. Despite Eddie’s warning to Van der Valk that Klink doesn’t like to be touched, the detective offers the billionaire a hand, which is ignored.

Van der Valk is also, of course, ignoring Hendrik’s wishes to be left alone. He asks Dahlman for a favor, presumably related to Hendrik, but she refuses, saying it would be tantamount to kidnapping. He also tells Hendrik that he’s done nagging him, but that’s surely not true.

Nor is the claim of the assassin who killed Tycho and likely Ray that she is a police officer. She visits the club owner Jurgen at the club and asks about Tycho, pretending to be a detective. Jurgen thinks he recognizes her from the previous night, so she leaves. But she quickly reappears with a gun, interrupting his phone call to Lucienne about the odd encounter.

Lucienne and Van der Valk rush to the club, where the woman learns from Jurgen that Tycho edited one of Alis’ films to show in the club. She then kills Jurgen just as Van der Valk enters the club. She runs out the back door, knocking Lucienne over in the process. She points a gun at the downed Lucienne, entering a standoff with Van der Valk. He acquiesces to her demand to drop his gun in order to save Lucienne, and she gets away.

Upset at his failure to prevent another killing and worried about other possible victims, Van der Valk sends Kalie to protect Alis.

Meanwhile, the conspiracy theorist Inge has scoured the dark web and learned that Klink and Ray fell out over a patent filed by Ray for a medical breakthrough. Inge thinks Klink bought Ray’s patent and then refused to develop it.

Ruben confirms this when Eddie and Hendrik go to visit a location that Tycho visited every day, as shown by his phone GPS. It’s a secretive research facility run by Tycho and overseen by Ruben. Tycho is the only person who knew everything about it. It was funded by Ray, who made a fortune from his sale of the patent to Klink. Ruben was an addict in debt to some bad people at the time, so Ray accepted Klink’s offer in order to pay off his son’s debts. He then used the rest of the money to fund Tycho to continue the research he had started.