'Patience' Recap: Episode 3

Patience airs Sundays at 7:00 pm and is available to stream. Recap the previous and following episodes.
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Bea’s ex-husband David wants to have their son Alfie tested for ADHD, but Bea is resisting. She’s protective of Alfie – even more so now that she has also grown protective of the autistic Patience. Her colleague Jake has at least reluctantly agreed that Patience is an asset to detective work. So when a conservator is found dead at the local natural history museum where she works, Bea immediately includes Patience in the case.

Emily Barret was found in a fossil exhibit by a cleaner in the early morning. The cleaner immediately contacted the museum director, Raymond Starr, but he took almost an hour and a half to call the police; he says he thought the cleaner had contacted them already. While the detectives are speaking to Raymond, a journalist from Paleontology Today tries to barge in for a previously scheduled interview.

Patience immediately concludes that Emily drowned – but there’s not a drop of water in sight. Nevertheless, the autopsy later confirms this cause of death.

Emily is already in the police system: she was charged for trafficking fossils when some were found in her bag while leaving Mongolia four years ago. The charges were dropped when her boyfriend Peter Venkman admitted to putting the fossils in her bag; he served six months. Patience also looks to see if anyone else at the museum is in the system. Raymond has a speeding ticket, but that’s it.

When the detectives search Emily’s rooms, they find a hip fossil ready to be photographed and confiscate it. Bea has to stop after the search to drop off Alfie’s lunch, which she forgot to pack earlier. Having learned that Alfie loves the natural history museum, just as Patience herself did as a child, Patience follows Bea and shows Alfie the fossil, to his delight.

The fossil could sell for an impressive sum of money – and known trafficker Peter Venkman is seen on CCTV footage outside the museum the night Emily died. He shows up not long after an apparently drunk Emily enters the museum. Unable to get in, he reappears an hour later and then leaves again. Despite all this, Bea doesn’t believe Emily is a thief. She has grown fond of Emily after finding a presentation of Emily’s in which she discussed women scientists whose credit was instead taken by men.

Bea once again forgets she has to pick up Alfie but doesn’t want to lose the chance to interview Peter Venkman while he’s attending an auction. She doesn’t want to ask her ex to help her out, so she calls Patience – who agrees to pick Alfie up, to both of their surprise. Patience finds Alfie in the midst of being bullied, the contents of his backpack on the sidewalk. She takes him to her job, where she has built an elaborate maze for mice. They talk about their mutual struggle to make friends, then Patience brings him to Bea’s house. When Alfie gets upset that a dinosaur model lacks instructions – it was given to him by Raymond when he learned of Alfie’s interest in fossils – Alfie asks Patience to put it together for him. She brings it home and turns her attention towards it.

While Patience was with Alfie, Bea and Jake approached Peter at the auction and caught him when he tried to flee. Peter explains that he didn’t want to go back to jail. He hasn’t seen Emily in three months, but she called him and asked to meet at the museum late at night. She said she had something exciting to share; he thought she wanted to get back together. But she didn’t answer when he showed up. Indeed, her phone is missing. Peter seems genuinely shocked by news of Emily’s death.

Peter also received a voicemail from an unfamiliar number that night. A woman that sounded like Emily spoke, but was slurring so much he couldn’t understand her. He deleted the message.

Patience has happened upon a clue while doing research to put together Alfie’s model: Emily had a tattoo of Darwin’s tree of life. When she and Bea look at the tattoo, they notice that it has a new, extra branch. Her regular tattoo parlor says she would get new ink to mark milestones, and that she only just added the new branch. Asked about the tattoo, Raymond says it could mean there was a discovery of a new genus in some dinosaur species.

Stymied by the lack of water at Emily’s drowning death, Bea wonders if Patience could be wrong. Challenged, Patience digs into case files and determines that Emily could have died by secondary drowning, in which water enters the lungs and slowly weakens a person before killing them – it could explain why Emily was slurring, especially since there was no alcohol in her system.

Unfortunately, Patience interrupts Bea and Jake’s questioning of Peter Venkman to share this news. Jake is furious – they had just asked Peter why his prints were in the lab at the museum, and Jake thought Peter was about to confess. Jake yells at Patience, who flees and cries. Bea follows her and shrugs Jake off when he says that Peter only admitted to making out with Emily in the lab when they were dating.

Patience goes to sit outside York Minster, a place she would go with her late father, and explains to Bea that she’s afraid of disappointing her father. Bea tells her that she won’t, and that Patience can continue to be an informal adviser on cases so that the stress doesn’t overwhelm her. Bea tells her that they can simply be friends who help each other out.

After apologizing to Patience, Bea then apologizes to Jake, who still worries if Patience can adapt to working with them. But Bea says they can adapt to Patience, just as she does to them.

So both Bea and Jake stand behind Patience when she figures out who killed Emily and presents it to their boss, Baxter. The detectives have traced the mysterious call to Peter to a driver’s phone, and determined that he picked up Emily near a quarry soon before her death. Testing of the water in Emily’s lungs shows it came from the quarry. (Bea and Jake briefly thought the driver, who had been accused of indecent exposure, was Emily’s killer.)

Meanwhile, Raymond’s speeding ticket came from a camera near the quarry around the same time – and he generally seems like a cautious, rule-abiding person. When the detectives speak to the journalist who was to interview Raymond, she says that he was to publish an article that was the culmination of two years’ work, then suddenly submitted a new article in its place right before the deadline. That article involved the fossil that Emily had taken to her rooms to photograph.

Raymond admits that Emily asked him to look at her article and was surprised that it supplanted his own. He submitted it under his name, and the journalist said it would make the front page. Raymond knew that Emily was searching for fossils at the quarry and so went to offer her credit. But she became angry: he was another man taking credit for a woman’s research. He lost his temper at her, annoyed that someone so much younger had leapfrogged him, and threw her laptop into the water. She started filming him on her phone; he tried to grab the phone from her and she fell in the water and went under. He fled. She got picked up by the driver, made her way to the museum, and died there from the water in her lungs.

Patience brings the completed dinosaur model to Alfie and then helps him pack when his dad arrives to pick him up from Bea’s house. Alfie hugs Patience, and Bea tells David that she will  allow Alfie to be tested for ADHD.