'Grantchester' Recap: Season 10 Episode 2

Grantchester airs Sundays at 8:00 pm on WTTW is available to stream. Recap the previous and following episodes and other seasons. 
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Alphy has finally found a woman he wants to go on more than one date with: the librarian Margaret, also known as Meg. On their first date, they swap books and plan a picnic for the next one. They kiss in Alphy’s open-top car outside the vicarage – and are interrupted by the bishop, who also happens to be Meg’s father. He lectures Alphy – “I’m aware of your reputation” – while Meg waits nervously and Mrs. C and Leonard eavesdrop.

As always, there’s a police case to distract Alphy from his personal troubles. Christina Parsons, a student at Newnham college, is found dead near a crashed scooter. But there’s no sign of the key for the scooter and no grass or skid marks on Christina’s body, suggesting that the crash might have been staged. A ring made out of an American dollar coin is found in her bag along with a book by Sartre.

The scooter was registered not to Christina but Peter Grayson, a janitor at the college. The Sartre came from him, too, as he tells the detectives. He’s a Mod, and she became interested in him and that subculture when she first saw him out of his janitorial clothes and in a trim suit. He says they’ve sort started a relationship, and he loaned her the scooter to go to the lab at Newnham. But he’s also been arrested before, for brawling, so Geordie is suspicious.

The porter at Newnham did see Christina arrive at the lab before 9:00 and leave in her helmet and parka a bit after 10:00. She was a researcher for Professor Clarence Aldo, whom the detectives first meet when he marches into a lecture by Professor Madhu Joshi and demands that she retract a genetics paper she just published. His anger is clearly motivated in part by her race and sex; she throws water from a glass on him.

The two professors admit that they are both eager to receive credit for new research, especially as a faculty chair position will be coming up soon. Aldo accuses Joshi of publishing too early; she says he sat on his research too long.

The detectives also meet Terry, another student at Newnham who works for Professor Joshi but often collaborated with Christina. Terry is at Newnham on a scholarship and feels like an outsider, but Christina helped him fit in, stopping other students from bullying him, while he helped her with her school work. He says he saw Christina leave the lab last night, but claims that she had recently been fighting with her boyfriend, Peter Grayson.

Christina died from a head trauma that seems to have come from a flat surface, even though she was wearing a helmet when the porter saw her leave the lab with her scooter. There’s also an oddly regular series of puncture wounds on her back.

From a glance at Aldo’s papers, Alphy realizes that the professor is interested in coins. Turns out he is the person who made and gave the coin ring to Christina; they were having an affair. Such a secret could damage his reputation – or perhaps he grew jealous of Peter Grayson’s relationship with Christina, which he dismisses as a mere dalliance.

The coin ring gives Larry an idea. He has been writing love letters to Miss Scott, including one that Geordie found. Larry decides to make a coin ring for Miss Scott and use it to propose – but she says no, even though she loves him. She doesn’t want to give up her career and raise children.

Cathy is almost ready to give up her career, given that her boss keeps overpassing her. She wants to help him order clothes for the department store since his taste is boring and retrograde. Her children assure her she would be great at the job. But Geordie is startled to find that his young son David is also interested in clothes: Geordie returns home one day to find David in a dress, dancing to pop music, and demands that David take the dress off immediately.

Alphy suffers his own crisis of identity when Professor Joshi accuses him of being a traitor to his Indian self by becoming a tool of British institutions like the church and the police. Troubled by this charge, Alphy lashes out when Meg visits to apologize for not telling him who her father was. Alphy thinks she’s using him, as an Indian boyfriend, to rebel against her father, with whom Alphy does not have the best relationship.

Alphy then turns to the papers of Aldo, Joshi, and Christina, making samosas to tide him through the research. Leonard joins him; Daniel is away, visiting his parents, to Leonard’s discomfort. Alphy tells Leonard that he already regrets taking out his feelings on Meg.

Alphy eventually notices that Aldo’s research numbers in Christina’s notebooks exactly match those published in Joshi’s paper. Joshi stole Aldo’s research and used it to publish.

Meanwhile, Geordie has discarded Peter Grayson as a suspect, even though the keys to his scooter are found in his bag. Someone planted them there, because, while the porter’s log shows that Peter was at Newnham last night, he was at the library, as a librarian confirms. He’s not allowed into the library as a janitor, but wants to impress Christina and so has been going there at night to read.

Geordie has found a blood spot outside the window of the lab, however. And Alphy finds a broken piece of a DNA model in the lab with spikes consistent with the punctures on Christina’s back – and they have dried blood on them. Christina must have been killed in the lab. Someone left wearing her parka and helmet for the porter’s sake, then retrieved her body through the window, staged the scooter crash, and planted the scooter keys on Peter Grayson for extra security.

Alphy is back in the lab with Geordie to confront Joshi about stealing Aldo’s research. She was at a dinner party but was confronted by Aldo himself, who realized what she had done. So she retreated to the lab in her gown with a bottle of wine to try to replicate his research results herself. As Alphy realizes, her accusation of selling out was actually about herself, not him; she regrets leaving her Indian identity behind to try to fit in when no one will accept her anyway.

But Joshi fails to replicate Aldo’s results, and realizes why when she runs into him at the police station: he faked them. That’s why he didn’t publish them himself.

The detectives note a different person’s handwriting in Christina’s notebooks next to Aldo’s results, and realize it must be Terry’s – he helped Christina with her work. And he used the chance to steal Aldo’s results on behalf of Joshi while he was at it.

When Joshi published, Christina realized what Terry had done and confronted him in the lab, turning on him and threatening to tell his parents. Terry was desperate to keep his place and make his parents proud, since they worked so hard to send him to college, so he pushed Christina. She fell into the DNA model, then he threw her again and she hit her head on the table, dying. He then staged everything to protect himself.

Case closed. Alphy visits Meg at the library to apologize for lashing out at her, bringing along the promised picnic. He asks her to come to dinner at the vicarage; he’ll cook for her.