'Patience' Recap: Season 2 Episode 1

Patience airs Sundays at 7:00 pm and is available to stream. Recap the previous episode.
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There’s a new detective inspector in town: the speeding motorcycle rider Frankie Monroe. She and Patience have a run-in – nearly a run over – when she zips down a street as Patience, in her noise-canceling headphones, tries to cross. Frankie has arrived to take up her role in York a week early; she didn’t want to hang around in Manchester any longer. When she meets Patience at the police station, she criticizes her for making the streets dangerous for motorcycles.

It’s a much different relationship than the maternal one Patience had with Bea, whom Frankie is replacing. Bea was on leave following a near-death experience, but now she has moved to Glasgow, where there’s a good school for her son Alfie, as she writes to Patience to explain. Patience reads the letter in tears.

Part of her sadness stems from Frankie’s dismissiveness. Although Jake commends Patience’s analytical skills and encourages Frankie to be kinder to her, Frankie doesn’t want to hold anyone’s hand – and Patience isn’t a detective. Even as various team members include Patience in meetings, Frankie sends her away – but not before benefiting from her knowledge.

Such knowledge is necessary in the case of the photographer Jonathan Starper’s unusual death. He is found by his agent Marina Murray with a wooden stake through his ribs in an old castle where he was setting up an exhibition. His corpse is pale, having been drained of blood, even though there are no bloodstains near his body. There are two fang-like marks on his neck, but they were made after he died from the impaling – which would have taken an extraordinary amount of force, given that the stick isn’t all that sharp.

Patience recognizes Jonathan’s name from a scooter accident a few months ago. It involved a man named Kevin Gill, who has been associated with all sorts of unsavory gang-related activity. But he denies even knowing Jonathan, as he did at the time of the accident.

Jonathan had a vanishingly rare blood type known as “golden blood” because anyone else can accept it. People even believe it has anti-aging properties; it’s used in expensive private clinics. But when Patience turns up Jessica Shaw, a local owner of a blood bank who was arrested during some protests, Jessica insists that blood is not for sale. She says she met Jonathan a few months ago, after he learned following his scooter accident that he had golden blood. He wanted to make money off his blood; Jessica refused.

But there are less scrupulous clinics in places like St. Petersburg, and Jonathan’s credit card statement shows he visited there. A clinic offering transfusions of golden blood there confirmed he visited. A video from an elevator there shows Jonathan – with Kevin Gill, the gangster who hit him while he was on a scooter. Jonathan owed gambling debts to Kevin. He paid Kevin 125,000 – but still owed double that. 

Inspired by reading some vampire books – Dracula was one of her mother’s favorites – Patience returns to the castle where Jonathan’s corpse was found and spots a bloodstained chair missing a leg in the dumpsters. She surmises that Jonathan fell from an exposed upper floor onto the upturned chair and was impaled on its leg. Frankie again chides Patience for involving herself in the case and tells her to stop: her naivete is dangerous. 

Patience is also confused by her dealings with the forensic scientist Elliot Scott, who has just returned from a three-month training course. After he asked her on a date and they shared a kiss, she’s starting to realize that she might like him – even if she turns down an offer to eat with him, for many good logical reasons. But she consults with her autism support group and decides to buy him a cactus, and tell him that she wants to spend time with him – on her own terms, of course. They can go to the library together, but they can’t talk inside.

The detectives turn up a young girl with sickle cell anemia who received a bone marrow transplant only a few hours after Jonathan’s death. She required regular blood transfusions before the operation, and the transplant itself almost didn’t happen because there wasn’t enough blood available for it – until a last-minute anonymous donation came through.

Will visits the girl’s father, Jimmy Brams, who is furious at any insinuation that he might have killed Jonathan to get his blood to save his daughter. But Will follows Jimmy and sees him carry a cooler labeled “Helsing” – a company that sets up home transfusions – from his house to his car. He then brings it to the blood bank owner Jessica Shaw’s house. When the detectives enter, they find golden blood in the fridge.

Jessica admits that she introduced Jonathan to the Bramses, hoping their girl’s plight would change his mind about selling his blood. It didn’t, and he kept asking for more and more money to give his blood to them. When they requested the large amount they needed for the bone marrow transplant, he asked for 100,000, which they didn’t have. Jimmy and Jessica went to see him as he set up his exhibition – and found him already dead. Noticing a pulley on the ceiling, they strung him up and drained him of his blood.

But who killed Jonathan? The detectives develop the photos on his camera and find many of his agent, Marina Murray, whom Frankie suspects was having sex with and in love with Jonathan. She is the one who found his body, and although she was seen at a gallery party at his time of death, she could have slipped out and returned. 

Frankie and Jake question a cabdriver who may have driven Marina, and Jake surreptitiously keeps Patience on speakerphone so that she can help without Frankie’s knowledge. The cabdriver mentions that his passenger was chewing fragrant pineapple gum.

Patience saw Marina popping some pineapple gum at the police station, and so goes to her house to confirm that it was her in the cab. She finds pineapple gum packets in her trash – and then hears and sees Kevin Gill rush into her house and assault Marina before putting her in his car and driving off. Patience films this, sends it to Jake, and then sits down in a panic attack.

Jake and Frankie rush over and then go to the horse track where Kevin works, where he has injected Marina with something that knocks her out. Frankie catches Kevin as he tries to flee, then knocks him down when he briefly gains the upper hand and tries to stick a syringe in her neck as well. 

Marina survives, and admits that she went to the castle to ask Jonathan to marry her. He laughed at her and said he was firing her as his agent. In a rage, she pushed him – and he fell off an edge onto the chair. She didn’t know he was dead until she returned later. 

She was paying off his gambling debts owed to Kevin, until Jonathan discovered the value of his blood type. Kevin was trying to get the rest of the money from her.

Frankie calls Jake and Patience to her office and tells them that she’ll fire them if they lie to her or go behind her back again.