In the second episode of ITV’s new psychological mystery thriller “The Suspect,” doubts are being more grounded on renowned psychologist Dr. Joe O’Loughlin (Aidan Turner) for murdering his former patient and alleged extra-marital partner, Catherine McCain. Previously, we have witnessed how a nationwide superman, Dr. Joe, suddenly came under the police radar after a chain of coincidences connected him with the murder of a young nurse. Among a lot of queries that arose in the last episode of “The Suspect”, we were most curious about this one: “Is Dr. Joe hiding something? What mystery is he trying to conceal? “So sit back and relax, because this episode will teach us a little more than we had bargained for.
Spoilers Ahead
Why Did the Police Call Dr. Joe? What Secrets Is He Yet To Confess?
The previous episode of “The Suspect” bids us goodbye when we saw Dr. Joe being summoned for a statement by the police. Despite concealing several details from the police, the doctor never stopped questioning Bobby Moran about the murder of Catherine McCain (Tara Lee), the nurse who once accused Dr. Joe of sexually harassing her. The first scene of episode 2 shows Dr. Joe and his solicitor in front of DI Vince Ruiz (Shaun Parkes) and DS Riya Devi (Anjli Mohindra), explaining his previous interactions with the late Catherine. He describes a flashback to Liverpool, five years prior, when nurse Catherine visited Dr. Joe with a lacerated wrist. She had received first aid from the doctor, who also gave her a warning against self-harming frequently. Despite Catherine’s justification of her actions, Dr. Joe was concerned and had advised her to visit him professionally as this was the only way he could assist her. After a lengthy ten-month session, Joe claims, she was gradually getting better, and her tendency of self-harm had decreased. He consistently refutes Ruiz’s claim that he had sexually assaulted her while she was hypnotized, claiming that her allegations are false. But he was indeed going to lose the respect he had acquired in both his personal and professional life as a result of this bogus accusation and the subsequent investigation.
Dr. Joe still doesn’t know why she had made these claims, but he assumes that it was probably because she was in love with her therapist and kept getting turned down despite her repeated attempts to go beyond a doctor-patient relationship. Dr. Joe highlights how she had made numerous attempts to impress him, including attempts to kiss him or be naked in front of him, but he was never interested. According to him, she had complained out of resentment at being rejected. Upon asking, he lists Friday, the same day Catherine vanished, as one of the worst days of his life. His friend Dr. Gerald Owen (Adam James) later that day confirmed that he had Parkinson’s disease. Dr. Joe was extremely upset and had a difficult time coming to terms with the situation. He wandered around the streets like a homeless person, ended up drinking at Soho’s bars, and arrived at his house before midnight. Ruiz considers Joe’s justification as false because he was unable to recall the names of the bars he had visited. Everyone is shocked, though, when Dr. Joe admits that he knew Catherine had applied for a position as a receptionist at his clinic but was unable to call the police because his mind was so overloaded with other concerns. He believed it to be extremely surreal and out of place. He claims he felt the same earlier in the mortuary when he discovered Catherine’s body. The police had to release him even if they did not trust his defense. Even though Dr. Joe told them that Mr. Simon, his solicitor, had a strong suspicion about one of his patients, they did not like the way Dr. Joe tried to keep things from them.
Is Bobby Really A Good Suspect?
Dr. Joe is clearly convinced that his patient, Bobby Moran (Bobby Schofield), must know something. Bobby discusses his positive relationship with his father during the ensuing therapy session, but he also expresses how much he despises his mother for lying to them and leaving them. Joe is shocked to know his irrational wish to witness his gross mother’s slow, agonizing death “by a thousand cuts.” Bobby is obviously Dr. Joe’s top suspect, so it goes without saying that he wants to hear the number 21 from him. He asks Bobby how many incisions he wants to be performed on his mother’s body, but Bobby aggressively refuses. He gave his doctor a wooden whale as a token of gratitude. He said it helped him to remain composed under duress. Dr. Owen listens to Dr. Joe’s worries about Bobby and cautions Dr. Joe to check his developing obsession with Bobby before going too far. In the meantime, police are meticulously inspecting the canal close to the cemetery. DS Devi tells Ruiz that Catherine and Joe were never seen together in any of the CCTV recordings from that day. Dr. Joe was in the Soho nightlife areas, while Catherine was seen close to Euston station. At that moment, the police pulled a brown woman’s purse out of the canal. Yes, we guessed it right; it belonged to Catherine McCain.
Once more, Dr. Joe is astounded to find that his daughter Charlie (Uma Warner) has drawn a whale for the school auction. A whale, again? When her husband becomes overly touched by all these unsettling coincidences, Jullianne (Camilla Beeput), his wife, tries to distress him. Joe eventually receives a call from East Middlesex Accident and Emergency stating that they found Bobby, his patient, lying beneath a bridge and that this distressed kid is requesting his doctor. When Dr. Joe arrives, it is told to him that by asking the other patients to assist him in washing his hands, he was disturbing them. When Dr. Joe approaches him, he has just babbled crazily and spoken about a mysterious woman he had intense hatred for. Bobby leaves without providing a fair response. Ruiz was asked by Dr. Joe whether the body’s toxicological findings had included chloroform or not. Joe called him after smelling it on Bobby’s body. Joe even meets with Bobby Moran’s attorney, Eddie Barton (Gary Oliver), to find out whether Bobby is hiding anything, but Eddie seems uninterested in speaking with him. However, the school auction was in the evening. Charlie’s painting of the whale is bought by some anonymous person, which leaves Joe curious. Even though he compelled the anchor to reveal the buyer’s name, he did not violate the sealed bid requirement. Jullianne tackles the embarrassment and requests his agitated husband to take a month’s leave to cope with his fate, the awful illness. But little did she know, this goes much beyond Parkinson’s.
According to the CCTV, Dr. Joe left the bar at 10:18 pm, and DS Devi informs DI Ruiz about two guys who were with Catherine at the bar, who had informed her that Catherine had departed the bar as well between 10.30 and 10.45 pm. In the interim, Ruiz is informed that the toxicological reports confirm the presence of chloroform in Catherine’s body. How would Joe know that if he was not the murderer? The following day, they meet Dr. Joe, who unwillingly tells them about Bobby and the reasons for his doubts after first hesitating about doctor-patient etiquette. He also provides an explanation for his dislike of his mother, his fascination with the number 21, and his preoccupation with the scent of chloroform. On the way to his meeting with Dr. Joe, the police stop him, but the doctor seems to be guilty of tipping them off. Later, we find him in the cemetery, thinking about Catherine. She always made an effort to charm him during their sessions. Did Dr. Joe actually reject her, or was he just enjoying the flirtations? His facial expressions leave us baffled.
‘The Suspect’ Episode 2: Ending, Explained: Why Is Dr. Joe Arrested? Why Is He Not Confessing His Alibi?
Dr. Joe eventually told his daughter about his diagnosis. His worry regarding the murder is undoubtedly having an impact on his health, and Jullianne fears that it might be growing worse as a result of extreme stress. But that evening, out of nowhere, he was taken into custody. In this difficult period, the reporters attempted to invade their privacy, and in the police station, Joe was charged with murdering McCain and framing Bobby for the crime Joe himself had committed. They inform Dr. Joe that all his assertions concerning Bobby are false. He is unemployed and unengaged. He was not raised in London; he had no recollection of going to watch football matches with his father, and most crucially, the victim of his assault had no children. Joe asks why Bobby kept lying to him. But it is Joe who is accused of lies by Ruiz. He claims that Bobby confessed to his fixation on the number 21 months before the murder. Rather, Bobby claimed that Dr. Joe wanted to hear about some woman named Catherine who self-harmed. Joe forced him to talk about this. Ruiz also says that Joe had exactly carried out Bobby’s specifications, stabbing Catherine to death with 21 stabs while playing with them on purpose to divert attention away from him to the deranged Bobby, who even has a solid alibi. Numerous witnesses are present to demonstrate that Bobby is not the murderer. Joe’s evil scheme also includes discovering the chloroform residue in Bobby’s clothes, Ruiz continues. The police show him Catherine McCain’s recovered handbag and cellphone, along with evidence that his clinic was the recipient of her last call. Additionally, the cyber experts fixed a bit of her phone’s calendar and discovered that she had a scheduled appointment with someone named J. O., which is simply Dr. Joe’s initials. Despite Joe’s numerous denials, Ruiz persists in his claim that Joe had planned to meet Catherine that day, that he had killed her under the stress of his newly diagnosed malady, and then falsely accused Bobby of the crime. However, coincidences alone cannot produce results. Dr. Joe is allowed to leave because the police do not have any concrete evidence against him yet. In order to determine if Dr. Joe has ever harmed anyone or if anyone has gone missing, Devi and Ruiz aim to obtain his patient records from the prior 15 years.
Things are not going well in Joe’s house. He is released due to a lack of proof, but Jullianne still has significant concerns about her husband. She did not witness him moving spades or digging in the cemetery. She doesn’t even know exactly when Joe had returned home that very day. When she awoke, she looked at her clock at 4.30 am and found him in the shower. Jullianne did not reveal all of them to the police because she feared her husband was having an affair, and she did not want that to turn into reality. She made up her mind that perhaps he woke up at night and took a shower in the early morning. But Joe is definitely not someone who would only drink to relax, that too for an entire night, so Jullianne enquires as to where he was. He is asked by Julliane if he was with Catherine or not. To our amazement, Joe admits he was with Cara (Bronagh Waugh), a sex worker and one of his previous clients, but not with Catherine. He explains that he did not want to come home because Julliane’s sympathy would not work for him that time. Instead, he went to Cara, spent the night with her, cheated on her wife, and returned home at dawn. The couple had a nasty fight. Julliane could not believe her beloved husband made love to her after mating with some other woman. She throws him out of the house. Dr. Joe comes to his friend Jack or Dr. Owen and tells him everything. Though Jack wants him to go to the police and disclose his alibi, Joe thinks no one will believe a sex worker like Cara. Even worse, his entire public image will be smashed to dust if his unethical behavior comes to light. From this point onward, Joe begins to think that there is a deliberate conspiracy against him to drag him to the bottom so that he may never rise again. When Bobby Moran returns to Dr. Joe’s clinic to warn him that he will be sued for breaching confidential information about him, the episode comes to a close.
Final Words: A Flood of Guesses, So Far So Good
Our list of queries is undoubtedly expanded by this episode, but only a fraction of them is satisfied. However, it also leaves us with tumultuous doubts and forces us to consider the gray areas in the characters. We find that the same Dr. Joe, who had saved the patient’s life in earlier episodes, is now being accused of framing the patient to get out of facing manslaughter charges. In addition, he is shown to betray his professional and ethical principles and cheat on his wife. We witness Julliane, a loving spouse who had even lied to the police to protect her unwell husband, finally banishing him from the house. We won’t be shocked if the director plans a tit-for-tat with Julliane and DJ (Tom McKay), the newly introduced plumber. However, the moments between Dr. Joe and Catherine are still blurry, and his motive for killing her is unpredictable too. This episode seriously makes us question the accuracy of two people. First is Bobby, and then Dr. Owen. Possibly, Bobby was set up to harm Dr. Joe. He may have been instructed to ramble about the indirect points of the murder in order to make Joe suspicious and confused. Secondly, in the first episode, Dr. Owen is seen to be a little envious of Joe. He also believes that Joe got the best girl in the university, and, by some miracle, his books are still the best-selling titles in the publishing industry. So, it’s plausible that Dr. Owen is behind all of this. Furthermore, he is the one who referred Bobby to Dr. Joe. We also ponder the identity of the purchaser who bought Charlie’s drawing of the whale. Is this some form of a message the masked man was trying to give him? Why are there so many coincidences involving Dr. Joe? Okay, enough guessing for now; let’s talk about it when the next episode airs.
