'Professor T' Recap: Season 4 Episode 3

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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There’s been a spate of burglaries that have been escalating in violence as more and more take place. Community police officers are going house to house to recommend security measures, as Dan discovers when he finds one talking to his dad at his home. 

And then a burglary ends in murder. Tyrone Walsh calls emergency services at 7:32 and gasps that he was stabbed; officers find him dead at 7:38 in his burgled house. He has been stabbed five times, but died from being smothered by a pillow, which is found supporting his head.

Tyrone’s wife Tilly was playing badminton at the time of Tyrone’s death, as surveillance footage confirms. While Tilly volunteered at a charity shop, Tyrone was a school inspector – and his car was vandalized while he inspected a school that very day. He accused Ash Robertson, the headmaster there, of making death threats.

Ash denies it, saying that Tyrone was a bully. Ash claims Tyrone was biased against alternative education; he recently closed down another school whose director, Harman Redpath, had funded with his own savings. Harman not only lost money when the school closed, but also his marriage. But he tells the detectives that he doesn’t blame Tyrone for the closure; Harman was in over his head. And he was attending a screening of Casablanca at the time of death. 

Chloe notices that Harman has lots of used DVDs and wonders if he might know Tyrone’s wife Tilly through her volunteer work at a charity shop. And Harman’s alibi doesn’t check out: the Casablanca screening was cancelled. 

A neighbor saw an unfamiliar car in Tyrone’s driveway and noted the license plate number because of the burglaries. It’s Ash’s. He admits that he went to apologize to Tyrone for arguing with him, sat in the driveway for a while, and then changed his mind. He never went in.

Dan has begun attending the professor’s lectures to learn more about criminology, and he asks the professor for help on the Tyrone Walsh case. But Dan fails to show up to another joint session with the professor and his therapist, Dr. Goldberg. The professor tells her that Dan’s strength as a detective is his instincts; the lectures won’t help him. But the professor invited Dan to show him that he doesn’t need to try to replace Lisa; he can be his own detective. 

Dan misses the session because his dad has heard a burglar downstairs. Dan rushes over to find the intruder prone on the ground; his dad has knocked him out. But when Dan arrives, the intruder throws him aside and then flees. Dan chases him and is excessively violent when he catches him. He recognizes him as the supposed community cop who was at his dad’s house to recommend security measures.

Indeed, Cameron has been casing houses while pretending to offer safety advice, then robbing them. He denies being involved in Tyrone’s death, but a ladies’ badminton trophy that belonged to Tilly is found in his home. Nevertheless, the professor says Cameron was not the murderer. Dan disagrees, citing the escalating violence of the burglaries, but the professor says the two methods of assault on Tyrone – stabbing and smothering – are strange, and suggest two killers, one of whom felt guilty and thus laid Tyrone’s head on a pillow. 

While the detectives are occupied with Tyrone’s death, Miss Snares has been carrying out her own investigation. Noticing that the professor and dean lately seem to be on better terms, she asks the dean about it. He refuses to explain, so she searches old yearbooks and finds a photo of him with the professor’s mother. When she asks the dean if they ever dated, he says no – but she surreptitiously takes a cup he drank from and a hair from him to send for testing.

The dean did, however, date Adelaide’s sister Zelda, who is currently house-sitting for Adelaide. She has been seeing Miss Snares’ father Peter, who is learning photography for her. The dean tells the professor that when he tried to propose to Zelda, perhaps too early, they broke up. Now the dean wonders if her relationship with Peter is serious.

Back to the killing of Tyrone. Harman’s fingerprints have been found in Tyrone’s house. Harman explains that he met Tilly through the charity shop and asked her for help when his school was being closed. She invited him to her house, but Tyrone never came downstairs to talk to him. 

While Dan questions Harman, the professor is at Tyrone’s house talking to Tilly – Dan is supposed to meet him, but has been waylaid by the discovery of Harman’s fingerprints. The professor questions her about her badminton club, revealing some inconsistencies in her story. She gets uncomfortable and grabs a firepoker with which to attack him – but he pepper-sprays her first, just as Dan arrives. 

When Harman sees Tilly brought into the police station, he confesses to murdering Tyrone. But there were traces of Tyrone’s blood in Tilly’s locker at the badminton club, where she hid the knife after stabbing her husband and rushing away from her home. She then called Harman from a pay phone – Tyrone was a tyrant who wouldn’t let her have a credit card, much less a cellphone – and asked him to go to her house and call emergency services from Tyrone’s phone, thus making it appear that he had been killed by Cameron, who burgled their house earlier that day. It was the discovery of the burglary that led Tilly to stab Tyrone, as he blamed her for it and hit her.

But when Harman arrived at the Walsh house, Tyrone was still alive – and calling emergency services himself. Harman smothered him to prevent him from saying anything more than that he was stabbed, then put the pillow under his head out of guilt. 

Tilly went to Harman for help in the first place because she knew he would understand: they were both victims of the same sadistic man. 

Maiya commends Chloe on recognizing the possible connection between Harman and Tilly – even though Chloe has just taken the national detective exam and failed. She gets one retake, and Maiya assures her that she can pass.

The professor has been pursuing his own education, taking up the drums as a form of therapy, per a suggestion from Dr. Goldberg. He hires a teacher and is unnerved when it’s a relaxed young woman, but she helps him start to loosen up – he even snips the tip of the index finger off his gloves. 

Dr. Goldberg ran into Lydia, the drum teacher, as she was leaving the professor’s house, and she now worries that Lydia’s therapy will prove more effective than her own, as she tells a therapist. She has become perhaps too invested in the professor.

And she’s worried about him: Dan has called her to say that the professor keeps putting himself in danger, first by trying to rescue the missing Ophelia and now by confronting Tilly alone.