'Van der Valk' Recap: Season 4 Episode 6

Van der Valk is available to stream via the PBS app and wttw.com. Recap the previous episode and previous seasons.
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Hendrik doesn’t want to visit a doctor for his cancer self-diagnosis, but rather simply celebrate the life he still has. So he and the team all decamp to Van der Valk’s boat for a night of drinking. When Hendrik passes out drunk, everyone else snaps out of their pretend stupor. They carry the prone Hendrik to an ambulance waiting with Lena and Dahlman. But Hendrik wakes up as Lena takes a blood sample. He roars at everyone and flees into the night.

Fortunately, he is a forgiving man. He shows up the next morning at the team’s regular pub and tells Cliff the previous night is water under the bridge. He asks for a steady stream of coffee as he sits down to try to decipher what the detectives believe is a code hiding a medical breakthrough in the fight against cancer.

They have determined that the images the murdered Tycho Bos superimposed on his partner Alis’ film are a code. Tycho must have put it in the film to be played at a nightclub because he knew the nightclub would stream it, leaving it available for anyone to see. Hendrik determines that the code is probably for a chemical formula – he just has to figure it out. He thinks the images can be translated into letters and numbers, but not everything makes sense.

The team wonders if Alis holds the key to break the code – and if she is therefore in danger, assuming that whoever killed Tycho and his mentor Ray Mesman did so to gain access to their breakthrough. Van der Valk has assigned Kalie to protect Alis, and she warns Lucienne that Ray’s son Ruben has confronted Alis. Lucienne arrives to find Alis and Ruben arguing, with Alis calling Ruben a loser parasite.

Ruben leaves, and Alis explains to Lucienne that she has been friends with Ruben for a long time. She was never interested in dating him, but he started to come on strong recently as Tycho was often busy working. Meanwhile, Kalie finds Alis’ apartment trashed – someone was looking for Tycho’s breakthrough, or a way to break his code.

Van der Valk and Lucienne go to visit Ruben and break in when there’s no answer. They find him passed out next to drugs and alcohol. The former addict has relapsed.

Eddie has been leading a parallel investigation into the apparently professional assassin who nearly killed Lucienne at the nightclub after killing its manager (along with Tycho and Ray). Her image was captured on a surveillance camera, and Eddie has noticed her in the background of a photo of the billionaire Freddie Klink, for whom Ray once worked.

Klink had earlier denied knowing who she was, but now admits that she was his former bodyguard. Her name is Nettie Haak. They were in a relationship but he broke up with her, and she moved on to another job two years ago.

Klink has also told Van der Valk that he has never sat on a patent, as the conspiracy theorist Inge believes and Ruben confirmed he did with a patent of Ray’s, supposedly to keep the breakthrough from cutting into his pharmaceutical sales. Klink explains that ego is even more important to him than profit; he wouldn’t want to miss out on the credit for a breakthrough.

Nettie is police-trained; in fact, she lived in the same apartment as Kalie during training. Kalie says that Nettie is not interested in money or status, but has a violent temper if given a reason.

Eddie has been surveilling Klink, and alerts the team when he heads into the heart of Amsterdam, dismissing his bodyguards. Eddie loses Klink in the crowd, but Kalie finds Nettie on a bench – dead. She was stabbed in the throat by scissors found on the ground next to her. (She had asked Klink to meet her without guards there, not that the detectives know that.)

Hendrik recognizes the scissors as those used in a lab – like the one run by Tycho and Ruben that he and Eddie discovered the previous day. It’s only a few blocks away.

Klink is tied up there, with tape over his mouth. Ruben hands him a handwritten confession to the murders of Tycho, Ray, and Nettie along with a pen. Ruben has a new patent that perfectly mimics a person’s handwriting, and has had it write the confession in Klink’s hand. Klink purposefully drops the pen – but Ruben points out that he can forge his signature the same way. He just needed Klink’s fingerprints on the pen. He also stabs Klink to add a little of his blood to the confession to make it even more authentic.

Ruben then demands the chemical formula for Tycho’s breakthrough – it’s his birthright, since it emerged out of his father’s research.

But Van der Valk and his team appear. They get Ruben to un-tape Klink’s mouth so the billionaire can explain things. Ray’s discovery needed some more work, so Klink has been providing funding for more research in secret. Ray couldn’t trust Ruben, with his problems of addiction, so he pretended the research was taking place behind Klink’s back. But Ruben overheard Ray talking to Klink on the phone and learned everything.

Ruben was jealous of Tycho, who not only took Alis from him but was also more trusted by his father. So he teamed up with Nettie, who wanted revenge against Klink for dumping her. But she was killing everyone without actually getting the formula for the breakthrough from them, so Ruben killed her – she had gone rogue.

Ruben realizes the game is up, and surrenders to the detectives.

They still haven’t cracked Tycho’s code, however. Van der Valk asks Klink what he would do with the formula if he had it – he doesn’t, and he doesn’t know Tycho’s code because he wasn’t in contact with him. Klink says he would do whatever Alis wanted, for the greater good.

Van der Valk returns to the message Tycho sent to the police as Nettie was chasing him down. He ended it, “Ciao, bella.” Alis explains that she and Tycho said that to each other ever since an unforgettable trip to Sorrento. Van der Valk looks on the back of a photograph of them in Sorrento that’s on display in her house and finds a key to Tycho’s code.

Hendrik has cracked it in the meantime, but it doesn’t make sense to him – because he needs to subtract two from every number and go two letters back in the alphabet for every letter, as the key Van der Valk found explains.

Hendrik tells the team that their attempt to medically test him against his will was an outrage – but also touching. He finally goes to a doctor, with everyone – even the dog Sniffer – behind him.