'Grantchester' Recap: Season 10 Episode 4

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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An orphanage is closing as the government begins to favor foster families, and its residents are upset about the impending change. So Revered Stuart Potts, who has run the place for some four decades, calls in an old acquaintance to talk to and reassure them: Alphy. Leonard is left in charge of the vicarage and feeding Dickens.

But when Alphy goes to speak to the children, there’s a creepy doll with red paint on it pinned to the chalkboard. Potts says that strange things like that have been happening ever since the closure was announced. Indeed, Alphy finds voodoo dolls of Potts and Nurse Butcher, who helps run the orphanage, in his bed that evening. He’s woken up in the night by chanting and finds the children all engaged in some sort of ritual that Butcher desperately tries to stop. They suddenly cease on their own and return to their rooms. 

Alphy hears creaking in the hallway later and then some thuds, and finds a boy named Joshua at the bottom of the stairs, dead from hitting his head. The local detective immediately rules it an accident and refuses to investigate – he has more important things to attend to. So Alphy calls in Geordie for help.

Potts also believes it’s an accident: Joshua is known for sleepwalking and was ill last night, vomiting and saying strange things. But Alphy worries there’s more to the death, especially when he finds a Ouija board surrounded by candles at the bottom of the stairs where Joshua fell. He and Geordie go to talk to Joyce, a girl who gave Alphy a candle just like the ones surrounding the Ouija board.

Joyce says she was trying to speak to Joshua and find out what happened. Another girl at the orphanage, Rita, showed her the Ouija board.

Rita tells the detectives that she loved Joshua the most of any of the residents. She urged Joyce to use the Ouija board to learn the truth so that she could protect herself from Potts and Butcher, who want to close the orphanage because they hate the children there. The children have to fight back – that’s why there’s all the weird spells and voodoo. She urges the detectives to look at Potts’ notes about the children.

Alphy resists the suggestion but Geordie does it on his own. Potts wrote about Joshua that there were worries he wouldn’t survive in the wider world; perhaps it would be better if God took him. Alphy defends Potts: the reverend loves the kids in the orphanage. Alphy would know, because he grew up there. He was left on the doorstep, and has no idea who his parents are.

The conversation is interrupted by another resident, Oz, who mutters loudly as he stumbles down the stairs. Geordie grabs him before he falls. Nurse Butcher – who was also at the orphanage with Alphy – takes Oz to bed. She thinks Oz has ingested some sort of poison. She explains that she was with Potts seeking comfort when Joshua fell to his death – she too is upset about the closure of the orphanage, the only home she has ever known.

Back in Grantchester, Cathy is ready to take a leap into the unknown. She has finally left her job, fed up with her boss, but she still wants to work. Mrs. C encourages her to go into the clothing business herself. After Mrs. C visits Leonard at the vicarage and finds him drunk – and Leonard makes a nasty remark when she tries to gingerly bring up his escalating drinking problem – she returns to Cathy and tells her that she will join her in launching a new business. 

When Oz wakes at the orphanage, he learns that the parents who were due to adopt him have changed their mind, having heard about Joshua’s death and become worried about all the kids at the orphanage. He tells the detectives that Joshua gave him a potion before he died, telling him it would help him meet a sports idol – it induced hallucinations. 

Alphy knows that every resident has a secret space in which to hide things, so he and Geordie set off to search for them. They find a bag of flowers in Butcher’s room, and identify them as wolfsbane, which induces vomiting and hallucinations. The nurse claims ignorance even though Alphy saw her earlier gathering something out on the grounds. She explains that she was collecting helicopter seeds, something she did even when she and Alphy were kids at the orphanage, for the children to play with. 

She says she loves the orphanage and the children, and explains that Rita’s assertion that she and Potts hate it all is just because Rita is looking for someone to blame for the closure. Rita would do anything to stop the orphanage from shuttering.

Indeed, Rita tries to run when Geordie and Alphy approach her. She was the one who thought Joshua wouldn’t survive in the outside world, not Potts. That’s why she poisoned him and then hid the wolfsbane in Butcher’s room. He was meant to die peacefully, not fall down the stairs. She was planning on poisoning everyone, then killing herself, too, to join them all in heaven, where they could be together forever. 

With everything explained, Alphy, Geordie, and Potts call the parents who were to adopt Oz to the orphanage and reassure them. Impressed by Alphy as a product of the orphanage, they agree to adopt Oz. Over his time at the orphanage, Geordie has grown fond of the sporty boy – and feels guilty that he wants to adopt him when he already has his own son, whom he’s worried about after finding him in a dress.

When Alphy sees Potts give Oz’s new parents a box of things left for the boy by his birth parents, he wonders if his own parents left anything for him. Potts reluctantly hands over a letter and warns him to open it only if he’s ready. As everyone prepares to leave the orphanage, Geordie gives Oz a football and Butcher gives Alphy a doll that was once his, before the kids enlisted it in their spells. 

Alphy avoids saying goodbye to Potts, wounded that the reverend kept information about his parents from him. He returns home and throws the letter from his mother into a desk drawer.