'Patience' Recap: Season 2 Episode 4

Patience airs Sundays at 7:00 pm and is available to stream. Recap the previous episode.
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Patience and Elliot are taking a ghost tour of some old ruins along with Elliot’s friends and bandmates, whose company Patience is surprised to enjoy, when Elliot asks to meet Patience’s friends. She’s saved from having to plan anything by a call from work: a man has been found dead at the train museum. Philip Braxton worked as a mechanic there, and his wife Clare dropped off their nearly non-verbal, 11-year-old autistic daughter Lola to stay with him every Wednesday, so she should have been there. But she’s missing, as is Clare. Clare’s phone is found in a trash can at the museum.

Frankie offends Patience by asking her to find Lola, assuming every autistic person is the same – but Patience helps nevertheless, finding Lola hidden inside a compartment on one of the museum’s trains. She would sit there while her dad worked, imagining a train journey. She’s reciting a list of stations and arrival times.

Lola’s 19-year-old sister Evie works at a nearby kebab shop. With her father dead and mother missing, she wants to take care of Lola, but a social worker has to be brought in to stay with them at home. Evie says the wear of caring for Lola could have made her mom run away. The Braxtons took Lola out of school a few years ago and she now benefits from at-home support – but it’s expensive.

As Frankie drops the girls off at their home with the social worker, a woman who identifies herself as a neighbor and family friend introduces herself and asks what happened. 

Patience pores through surveillance footage of the museum at home with her friend Billy, who leads her autism support group. (There aren’t cameras in the back room where Philip works and was found dead.) She notices that Lola entered the museum with a backpack but left without it. 

The police search the museum and find the backpack stashed on top of some staff lockers. Inside is some money and marijuana. Frankie eventually recognizes one of the bags inside it as the same as those used at the kebab shop where Evie works. Evie admits to selling drugs to fellow college students with a friend, but says she did it to help her family; Lola’s care is expensive, and Clare had to give up her job to care for Lola. Philip caught Evie selling drugs, and she then included him in the scheme, since the family needed extra money. They used Lola to carry money and drugs without her knowing. 

Patience has managed to befriend Lola with the help of Billy, who brings the girl a model train. But while Lola plays with it by the window, she suddenly starts reciting the train schedule again. Patience manages to calm her by withdrawing into her enclosed bed, a safe space where Lola gives Patience a photo box that she uses as a security blanket. A photo of a train schedule inside makes Patience realize Lola is trying to tell them something. Lola is including a station in her recitation that doesn’t exist.

What does exist there is a specialized school – and Lola used to attend it. Frankie also recognizes a woman in one of the photos on the school’s website as the neighbor she met outside the Braxton house.

Except Nadia Ward is not a neighbor, nor a family friend. Her daughter Kelly was in Lola’s class but died last year from a seizure. Nadia suffered a breakdown and blamed the school, stalking one of its workers. Patience also recognizes the jacket Nadia is wearing in the photo on the school’s website – she saw it in the surveillance footage from the museum. Lola must have seen Nadia outside her window when Patience was at the Braxtons’ house, and set to reciting to the train schedule out of fear.

The Braxton house is now empty, with only the social worker tied up in Lola’s room. Nadia doesn’t have a permanent address, but she did inherit her mother’s country house, so the police rush there. Inside, Evie has woken up groggy from being drugged and tried to sneak away with Lola, whom Nadia is calling “Kelly.” The girls’ passports are on the table. They find their mother tied up in the attic.

Freed, Clare tries to lead her daughters to safety. When they run into a knife-wielding Nadia, Clare pins Nadia against the wall while Lola and Evie run outside, where the police are just arriving. They enter to find Nadia holding a knife to Evie’s throat at the top of the stairs. Frankie tries to talk Nadia down, while Patience wanders and finds a back staircase. She startles Nadia when she appears off to her side, and Clare takes the chance to throw Nadia off her. Nadia tumbles down the stairs but survives and is arrested.

Clare explains that Nadia harassed the family for some time, wanting to turn Lola into her own lost daughter. They didn’t go to the police because they felt bad for her. Philip tried to tell her off. But then Nadia showed up at the museum and hit him with a wrench, seemingly surprising even herself. Clare saw it and tried to help Philip. In her panic at the accidental murder, Nadia drugged Clare, threw away her phone, and brought her to the country house. Lola witnessed it.

Patience sees Clare tell her daughters that she could never stop loving them. Patience has also heard from an administrator of Lola’s former school that Clare initially wanted to “cure” Lola’s autism – there is no cure – but eventually came to love how Lola saw the world, despite Evie’s comments about how difficult caring for Lola was for her mom. Whether Patience is reassured that she’s not the reason her own mother left is unclear.

She does take the big step of having Elliot and Billy meet at a pub. The conversation is incredibly awkward, leading Patience to flee to the bathroom. But the men share how much they like Patience and things begin to thaw – helped in particular by the fact that there’s a trivia night at the pub in which they can all partake. Patience returns to a happier table. She’s wearing the locket her mother left for her.