'Professor T' Recap: Season 4 Episode 1

Professor T airs Sundays at 7:00 pm and is available to stream via the PBS app and wttw.com. Recap the previous and following episodes.
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Following the revelation of the truth about the death of the professor’s father, his mother Adelaide has gone on a world tour – leaving the professor and a dogwalker to watch her beloved Kafka. But she quickly has doubts and calls in reinforcements in the form of the professor’s Aunt Zelda, a photographer.

She surprises not just the professor when he visits but the dean as well – he’s in charge of Adelaide’s plants. There’s some sort of past spark between Zelda and the dean – she tells him she’s been unlucky with the deaths of husbands, and he could have saved her a lot of trouble – but he stands her up when she asks him out for a date, and she ends up drinking with another man who has also been stood up.

The professor has also been avoiding people: he is ignoring any contact from Dan or Maiya. It triggers flashbacks to the death of Lisa six months earlier. But now those flashbacks have started interrupting his regular life, as he tells Dr. Goldberg, his therapist. She suggests that he pick up a musical instrument. Though he scoffs, he later finds himself idly tapping rhythms, and eventually buys himself a drumset.

But he has backslid. The psychological breakthrough he had right before Lisa died has receded; he has started wearing gloves all the time again. Dr. Goldberg believes working on police cases might help him, as it did before, but he refuses.

Rabbit has retired, so the detectives are stretched a bit thin – but Dan has a new colleague in the young, flustered Carol Highsmith. Nevertheless, she has good instincts, as she demonstrates when she argues that the disappearance of Ophelia McQueen at sea should be investigated as suspicious, not accidental.

Ophelia was on a luxury yacht with her boyfriend, JC Lewis, and his married friends Byram and Vicky Stafford. JC frequently traveled with his mother and the Staffords on the yacht. His mother recently died, and the Staffords suggested JC scatter her ashes at sea. But Ophelia was nowhere to be found when JC returned to the suite after drinking at the bar with Byram. There’s vomit in the tub and an empty bottle of champagne. Vicky smells a trace of her perfume in a public toilet. Another passenger said she saw Ophelia head towards the top deck. It’s presumed that she fell overboard while sick from alcohol in a thunderstorm.

But JC and Ophelia were heard arguing by the Staffords, and Byram glimpsed her over JC’s shoulder smashing a glass in JC’s suite. Carol suggests Ophelia may have been pushed overboard.

The captain of the yacht tells the detectives that he thought Ophelia was romantically interested in Byram. The Staffords say Ophelia was jealous of JC’s relationship with his mother, hence all the arguing. JC’s mother wrote books on childcare, advocating a harsh approach; he was often locked in his room while friends like Byram played outside when they were kids. JC brought his mother traveling with him because he feared her.

Dan and Carol visit Ophelia’s mother Margo to tell her Ophelia is missing. Carol lies about her policing experience in order to convince Dan to let her break the news – and she bungles it. But she was right that Ophelia’s disappearance may have been suspicious: Ophelia’s phone has been recovered and has messages revealing that she and Byram were having an affair, and that she told Vicky via text message the night she disappeared.

Vicky tried to talk to Ophelia while JC and Byram were at the bar but wasn’t let in to the room. She also texted Byram, who left the bar for a time to talk to her – but couldn’t think of what to say and so didn’t actually call her in the end.

Dan convinces Miss Snares to let him see the professor, and lays out the case. But the professor won’t help.

Until he gets a call from Dr. Goldberg, who knows Ophelia’s mother. Margo doesn’t know whether her daughter is alive or dead, by foul play or accident, and Dr. Goldberg wants the professor to help her. So he goes to the police and insists on watching all the interviews for the case – alone.

He then checks out JC’s mother’s books before heading to Dr. Goldberg and asking her to drive him to tail JC. He has determined that Ophelia was never on the yacht; JC has her locked away somewhere, and the professor doesn’t want to inform the police, lest they reveal their suspicion to JC and thus prevent Ophelia from ever being found.

JC was locked away as a child, and now wants his own control, the professor says. Neither Byram nor Vicky ever got a good view of “Ophelia” on the boat, only smelling her perfume, seeing her from afar, or glimpsing her in a dark room. JC paid another passenger – the one who said she saw Ophelia go above deck – to impersonate Ophelia. She boarded the boat under her own name, then returned with big sunglasses as “Ophelia.”

Dr. Goldberg thinks the professor is trying to rescue a woman in distress because he couldn’t save Lisa, and refuses to help him. He enlists Miss Snares instead, while Dr. Goldberg calls Dan.

Miss Snares and the professor follow JC to the farmhouse he inherited from his mother. The professor sneaks inside while JC unloads his car. The professor finds Ophelia behind a locked door in the basement, and deduces the numbers in the code on the lockpad from which are least dusty. He figures out the order of the code by recalling the title of one of JC’s mother’s books: 9 to 10: The Hard Years, or 9-2-10.

As he and Ophelia leave the house, JC spots them and points a rifle. Dan and Carol arrive, and Dan tries to talk JC down. The professor insists JC won’t kill anyone. But JC hits the professor when he mentions JC’s mother, and attacks Carol when she appears behind him. She manages to wrest the gun from him and Dan arrests him.

Dan is upset by the dangerous actions of the professor and Carol, while Maiya worries that Dan is intentionally putting himself in harm’s way. Dan has just taken Lisa’s old office and found her coat still hanging in it. Maiya tells him to take the next day off and watch the sentencing of the woman who killed Lisa, but he says he’s too busy.

Carol tells Maiya she might not be ready for this new job. But Dan takes her to see Margo McQueen, who hugs her and thanks her for saving her daughter. Carol tells Dan they have the best job in the world.