'Professor T' Recap: Season 5 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 episode.
Keep up with your favorite dramas and mysteries by signing up for our newsletter, Dramalogue.

Dr. Goldberg and Professor T are test-driving a romantic relationship. Her test is to see how a stay at a hotel and spa goes; his is a compatibility checklist. But the vacation immediately goes awry. The hotel accidentally booked the couple into separate beds, and when they arrive a man is being carried out of the dining room by EMTs. Clive Bairstow was older and died of a heart attack, the nosy Muldersons tell their newly arrived fellow guests, Dr. Goldberg and Professor T. This was his fourth cardiac incident.

The sudden death closes part of the dining room, meaning guests have to share tables at dinner. The professor and Dr. Goldberg are seated with Kit and Naomi. He works in finance; she is a doctor divorced from the owner of the hotel, Finley, who called her to help last night when Clive died, since she works nearby. 

Kit suddenly collapses and Naomi desperately calls for a spray from his jacket pocket – he has a heart condition. She administers it, but he dies nonetheless. The professor tells Finley to secure the served food for inspection, since two people have now died in a row at the restaurant. 

Although the police are not yet treating the deaths as suspicious, Maiya sends Dan and Chloe to the hotel to make inquiries, knowing that the professor is staying there and will want to investigate. Both Maiya and Dr. Goldberg want to keep him from doing so. Dan urges the professor to spend time with Dr. Goldberg rather than on an investigation.

He has already started. He googled Kit’s business and learned that Kit declared bankruptcy three months ago. 

Labs show that Clive died of natural causes but that Kit may have been poisoned by cyanide. Nevertheless, cyanide naturally occurs in some foods, so it may not have been a murder. The food from dinner was stored for the detectives to examine – but someone threw it away.

As a doctor, Naomi is upset that she didn’t recognize the signs of cyanide: she could have saved Kit if she did. She says her divorce from Finley was mutual, but when the detectives speak to him, he says she left him – at a time when he thought the hotel was going to close, no less. She also took their dog, who was recently killed when he was hit by a car.

Dr. Goldberg is disappointed to find the professor reading the autopsy reports of Kit and Clive, so he tells her he’ll delete them from his phone and spend time relaxing with her. She tells him to go ahead and read them – but he has to drop the matter if the police believe the deaths were accidental.

Slices of raw cassava, which contains cyanide, are found in Kit’s stomach. The hotel chef used cassava flour on a recent menu, but it’s not at the restaurant now. Nevertheless, the restaurant is closed for the time being. The chef lied to the detectives that he left early the night of Kit’s death; his staff say he was the last to leave. When Chloe and Dan begin to question him with suspicion while he is chopping ingredients, he holds up his knife and reaches into his pocket. Chloe pepper-sprays him. He was reaching into his pocket for a card stating that he has severe claustrophobia and will react badly if people get too close.

Finley offers his guests a refund since the restaurant is closed, and Dr. Goldberg wants to take it and go to another hotel. The police have decided the deaths were due to negligence on the part of the kitchen, not intentional murder. The chef’s previous job was at a hotel that had an outbreak of food poisoning, and a trace of cassava is found in Clive’s esophagus, though not enough to cause choking. But the professor can’t tear himself away, especially once he sees Naomi accusing Finley of murdering Kit out of jealousy.

Dr. Goldberg decides to check out of the hotel on her own – then remembers as she’s leaving that the Muldersons were filming in the dining room just before Kit died, for a birthday. She asks them for the video. It shows Naomi’s hand over Kit’s plate soon before he died. 

The professor thinks Naomi poisoned her husband because he was failing in business, and that the same reason is why she left Finley when his hotel nearly closed. She has a pathological need for a successful partner. Kit increased his life insurance two days before he filed for bankruptcy, so that could be a motive. But Naomi says she doesn’t need the money, as a doctor, and that he increased it because he had a heart condition and was under increased stress. 

While at Naomi’s house, Chloe notices a fresh pile of soil and wonders if it could have been a cassava plot – but Naomi defensively explains it’s where she buried her dog. 

Under questioning, Naomi brings up Clive, suggesting that the kitchen was negligent in both deaths. The detectives realize that she is the one who put cassava in Clive’s esophagus, while checking him after his stroke, as an alibi. By doing so, she could then poison Kit at the restaurant the next day and make it seem as though the kitchen had negligently been feeding its guests raw cassava. Even better, she could then sue Finley. Clive’s accidental death presented the perfect opportunity for her.

The professor guesses that her dog was not killed by a car but rather by her: she tested the cassava on it to see if it would actually kill someone. The detectives unearth her dog and test it and find evidence of cyanide poisoning. Naomi is arrested. 

The professor’s mother, Adelaide, is finally returning to England from a world tour. But she is struck ill on the plane home and rushed to the hospital. Dr. Goldberg joins the professor for support while he visits the unconscious Adelaide there.

Dan is going on his own date. While at a pub with his dad, he intervenes when a man becomes threatening towards his date. Later, he runs into the woman at the grocery store and she thanks him, asking to buy him a drink in gratitude. He refuses, but she gives him her card just in case – she owns a gym. Eventually he decides to call her and cash in that drink – and date.