'Patience' Recap: Episode 6

Patience is available to stream. Recap the previous and following episodes.
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A man collapses on a bus, dead with a bloodied shirt. Another man with a distinctive tiger tattoo on his neck panics and flees. When the police arrive, they’re urged to wear paper masks in case the cause of death was tuberculosis. The dead man’s fingerprints have been chemically removed, and his only form of ID is his bus card, but the detectives have to wait on information for that from the bus company.

Patience and Bea haven’t interacted since Patience left Bea’s birthday party embarrassed. Bea finds Patience to give her a book on the science of relationships, then takes a call from the pathologist Dr. Parsons about the dead man on the bus. Patience is intrigued enough to follow Bea to the mortuary.

The blood on the man’s shirt is not his own but from cows. He appears to have died from anthrax, not tuberculosis – and the kind of anthrax that gets into the lungs can be caught from infected animals such as cows. Furthermore, the only thing on the dead man’s phone is disturbing footage of a slaughterhouse – and there’s only one in the area.

The slaughterhouse’s owner shrugs off the footage even though it shows possibly illegal animal cruelty. He recognizes the dead man as Wes Hutton, who started working for him about a month ago. But the identification numbers “Wes” used for his employment appear to have been stolen – the real Wes Hutton reported his wallet stolen on a recent trip. Soon the dead man’s footage of the slaughterhouse is posted online by an activist group called the Climate Defense Force.

The Home Office characterizes the CDF as a terrorist group, blaming it for arson at a meat plant five years ago. One person died in the fire, and the CDF’s founder Jean Crick was tried and sent to prison for the death. But the file on the arson has been restricted by the counterterrorism agent Zara Blackwood. She makes Bea’s boss Baxter stop Bea from any further investigation, without providing an explanation.

Bea is undeterred. She asks Patience to access the arson file – but it’s missing. So Patience compiles information about the arson from other sources. The man who died didn’t know about the fire exits. Another employee went missing after the fire, but his remains were never recovered. Some time after the fire, anthrax was found in a lab connected to the CDF – perhaps they were planning to infect the meat industry.

But anthrax carried via cattle was not the cause of death for the still unidentified man on the bus. The slaughterhouse where he worked has been tested, and its cattle are clean of anthrax.

Bea visits Jean Crick in prison. The CDF founder is dying of throat cancer, and won’t reveal anything useful to Bea. The interview ends when Crick has a coughing fit.

Bea has her own cough that has been worsening, but she doesn’t let it stop her from her unsanctioned investigation. The bus company finally comes back with a name attached to the bus card of the dead man: Roland Mitchell. The address listed on the pass is the home of Vicky Crick, Jean Crick’s sister.

Bea visits Vicky, who confirms that the dead man is Roland Mitchell. A kid running around the house is not Vicky’s but Jean’s and Roland’s. Although they were both activists pessimistic about the world, having a child together changed them. Roland was even talking about leaving CDF to raise their son.

Inside the house, Bea sees a man with a distinctive tiger tattoo on his neck – maybe it’s the man who fled the bus after Roland died. The man flees again, knocking Bea down – but Jake arrives in time to catch him.

Bea is sent to the hospital for wounds from being hit by the fleeing man, who is questioned by Zara. He says he was ordered by Jean to protect Roland and her son. But Zara posits that Jean was upset about Roland’s ideas about leaving the CDF and had him poisoned.

Bea is summoned to Baxter’s office the next morning; Zara is there, too. Bea is suspended for continuing her investigation despite orders – although Baxter is reluctant to sanction her. Zara warns Bea that she will be dismissed if she interferes again. Jake, however, is let off because he caught the man with the tiger tattoo.

And Jake also wants to keep investigating. He visits Roland Mitchell’s mom to tell her that her son has died – but she says the dead man from the bus is not her son. So Jake turns to Patience for help, having apologized to her for laughing at her gift to Bea at her birthday party. He tells Patience that the dead man is not Roland Mitchell, that two more passengers on the bus have had symptoms of anthrax poisoning, and that he has the bus’s CCTV footage. Patience quickly looks at it and immediately notes that Roland was vaping – which means the anthrax that killed him could have been present in the air of the bus after all, not just his lungs.

She rushes to Bea’s apartment but there’s no response. She finds a hidden key and opens the door to find Bea collapsed, unconscious. Patience calls an ambulance and begins to sob.

While Bea is at the hospital recovering from the anthrax, Patience goes back to the police station, where the crime scene researcher Elliot Scott runs into her and apologizes for asking her on a date. She tells him she likes him, but is confused as to whether she is attracted to him or not. So she doesn’t want to go on a date, at least for now, while she’s worried about Bea. Elliot mentions that Dr. Parsons can access restricted files such as that about the CDF arson if there are public health emergencies, like anthrax poisoning. Patience is so excited she says she could kiss Elliot – and she does give him a peck. Then they kiss more wholeheartedly. Now I’m even more confused, Patience says as she goes to Jake to ask Parsons for help.

Jake has found out that some of the anthrax impounded from the CDF lab has gone missing from the evidence room. He and Patience convince Dr. Parsons to access the file on the arson. Jake then goes to visit Jean Crick in prison, and convinces her to sign an affidavit in order to help her now fatherless son before she dies of cancer – which she does that night.

When Jake and Patience approach Baxter with their findings, he’s furious that they have continued to investigate but agrees to listen. The man who died on the bus is not Wes Hutton or Roland Mitchell but Tyler Rose, a counterterrorism agent believed killed in the meat factory arson while working undercover against the CDF.

In fact, Tyler had fallen in love with Jean Crick and renounced the police before having a child with her, as Jean explained to Jake in her affidavit. Tyler began working on behalf of the CDF rather than against them as he and Jean searched for a way for him to start a new life.

He got a job at the meat factory and set the fire there. No one was supposed to be there, but he found Roland Mitchell dead from the fumes and saw an opportunity. He doused Mitchell’s body in gas so that it would be unidentifiable, then left some of his own belongings, including a titanium ring that didn’t melt in the fire. Zara, his fellow counterterrorism agent, found it and identified the body as Tyler’s.

Zara and Tyler had their own clandestine relationship, as Patience discovered by tracking down a wedding license between them. They kept their marriage secret so that they could continue to work together in counterterrorism. So when new cameras were recently installed to surveil CDF members, including at Vicky Crick’s house, Zara recognized Tyler with a son and figured out what had happened.

Tyler was once again working for the CDF, having stolen Wes Hutton’s identity to infiltrate the slaughterhouse. Zara took anthrax from the evidence room, put it in vape cartridges, and shipped them to Tyler – the police have recovered the package and three vape cartridges. The credit card used to pay for the package is registered to Z. Rose – Zara Rose, or Blackwood. She was seemingly motivated to kill her husband out of jealousy that he had a child with Jean and not her, and for making her think he had died in order to live with another family.

Bea recovers from her own anthrax exposure. She visits Patience with Alfie, who is now on medication and in a new school after a behavioral diagnosis. He asks about a puzzle box from Patience’s mom that she has never opened. She’s finally ready to do so, but when she solves it, there’s nothing inside. But she peels off a piece of tape on the outside listing the box as property of her mother. There’s a number underneath.