'Patience' Recap: Season 2 Episode 2

Patience airs Sundays at 7:00 pm and is available to stream. Recap the previous episode.
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Patience is finally going to go on a date with Elliot – but right before their lunch he is called to a possible crime scene. She walks there with him, and is then encouraged to come inside by the pathologist Dr. Parsons. Good thing: She notices that the dead organ student Helen has blood on her hand from the blood coming out of her ear, so she can’t have simply died from a fall, as Dr. Parsons thought. Her ear was bleeding before she died if she touched it with her hand, which means the impact didn’t cause the bleeding. 

When Frankie arrives, Patience flees before the detective inspector sees her, not sure she is allowed to actually be at the crime scene. Frankie talks to Vanessa, the student who was practicing when Helen died and found her. Vanessa’s adviser at the university, Bernie Hudson, rushes to comfort Vanessa during the interview.

Frankie then heads to the sound booth where everything in the rehearsal hall is recorded. Patience is already there with the student sound engineer, and has noticed nearly inaudible talking under the organ. The engineer isolates it and amplifies it: it is Vanessa and Helen’s professor, John Greville, yelling at Helen. 

There have been complaints about bullying by Greville, but he also produces successful students. He says Helen was “weird” and “mediocre,” obsessed with Vanessa. A search of her residence produces a flash drive with a secret recording of Greville violently berating Vanessa, but he insists he didn’t kill Helen over it.

Parsons backs this up. Helen had a stroke caused by the rupture of an aneurysm. The blood in her ear was leakage from her brain. It wasn’t murder after all.

Patience has worked out that the number she discovered on a puzzle box left for her by her mother is a so-called “vampire number” used in computer programming. She cracks it and shows it to Douglas, who says it looks like a case number from the old filing system at the police station. Patience and Douglas look up the file and find an address in Patience’s mother’s handwriting inside – she must have slipped it into the file of a case her husband was working on. Patience doesn’t know yet what she wants to do with this information.

She worries that she is too boring for Elliot, as she tells Jake when he notices Elliot smile at Patience. Jake says she surprises him everyday; she’s not boring. Patience also tells him that she looked Frankie up, and Frankie’s team had the highest case clearance rate in the country in Manchester – but she also was only there for a short three years.

Patience is with Jake and Elliot at another crime scene, requested by Frankie because she was helpful with the recording of the earlier organ rehearsal. Professor Greville has now died in the same hall. He, too, has blood coming from his ear.

Parsons again explains that as natural: he had a heart attack, fell, and hit his head, causing the bleeding. But the rest of the team notices that he drew a fermata in the dust on a piano against which he fell. He was trying to send a message – he wouldn’t do that unless it was murder.

Vanessa is found waiting outside Greville’s house: She was supposed to get a ride. She is shocked by news of his death. She’s devastated, saying that she needed him for her career. She didn’t want Helen to release the video of him berating her. She will never live up to the ideal of Greville’s best student, someone he called “Theos,” without him.

Patience again goes to the recording engineer: She has noticed some interference at a fermata in the music Vanessa was playing when Helen died. The engineer isolates it, and Patience finds out that it is an infrasound generator. She finds it in the organ, set to trigger at the playing of the note held by a fermata. It generates a barely audible low sound that can interfere with things such as a heart valve – which Greville had – or burst an aneurysm – which Helen had.

So we’re back to murder – but not for Helen. She was taking an antidepressant, which she wouldn’t take if she knew she had an aneurysm. If she didn’t know, a would-be murderer couldn’t know. She must have been an accidental casualty of a murder attempt meant for Greville.

Jake and Frankie venture into the archives with Patience to try to find a lead. Elliot tries to call Patience and she doesn’t pick up. After obsessing over an outfit, she went to a show by his band – but had to quickly leave in tears because of the noise level. Jake asks how things are going, and Frankie wonders why Patience would even try to go to a rock concert when Patience explains. Frankie is beginning to warm to Patience, and see how valuable she is to investigatory work. When Elliot calls again later while Patience is with Frankie, the detective inspector encourages Patience to simply be herself around Elliot rather than trying to surprise him. It seems like he really likes her as she is, if he keeps calling.

Will finds a tape of the “Theos” student Vanessa mentioned was Greville’s favorite at Greville’s house: he has recordings of all his students’ recitals. Patience recognizes the York Minster organ on the recording, while Baxter knows that the specific tape for the recording was only made for a period of six years. 

Patience and Frankie search through programs of concerts in that time period at the York Minster. Frankie recognizes a photo of one organist as Vanessa’s adviser Bernie, although she is listed under a different name. She thanks Greville in the program. And a news story shows that she fell from the balcony during the performance.

Frankie thinks Bernie was the talented “Theos” but tried to escape Greville’s cruelty by jumping from the balcony, a fall that ended her career by causing nerve damage. 

Bernie booked the York Minster organ for the morning, and Vanessa failed to show up to a meeting, so the detectives rush there, where they find both women. Bernie has revealed that she was also a student of Greville’s and killed him to protect more students from his cruelty. He ruined her concert at the York Minster all those years ago by disparaging her right before she played, and she couldn’t recover. Bernie didn’t mean to kill Helen, too. But now she will kill herself.

As she kneels at the altar with a gun, Frankie tries to talk to her and then rushes and tackles her, saving her life as she raises the gun to her head. The errant gunshot is amplified by the echoey acoustic of the Minster, shocking Patience. But Patience later tells Douglas that she is alright.

She meets with Elliot again, apologizing for leaving his concert. He understands, and tells her she doesn’t need to surprise him. He brings her to a silent disco, where everyone dances while listening to the same music on headphones. She loves it, letting loose while he steps back and watches, smiling.