The Business of Boys (Season 4, Episode 3)
Premise: When a fired high school teacher is pushed off a footbridge in a festival crowd, Bateman and Darcy trace the killing to a bullied boy and the podcaster he idolizes.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 4, Episode 3
- Starring
- DS John Darcy (Luke Kirby), DS Frankie Bateman (Kathleen Munroe), Insp. Vivienne Holness (Karen Robinson), DCA Theo Forrester (K.C. Collins), Mark Yohannes (Araya Mengesha)
- Guest stars
- Aaron Abrams as Bill Diamond, Erika Prevost as Delia Ferrera, Jamie Mayers as Colin Hobarth, Isaac Kragten as Luke, Cameron Daly as Jaxxon Font
- Director
- Chloé Robichaud
- Writers
- Steve Cochrane
Summary
The Case
“The Business of Boys” begins at Grace Goode Secondary, where a class debate about Catherine and Heathcliff turns into a scuffle: a student, Luke, calls English teacher Delia Ferrera a crazy, out-of-control woman and asks if she wants him to be her naughty little boy. Weeks after she is fired for slapping him, someone dressed as a plague doctor pushes her off the Wallace Avenue Pedestrian Bridge during the Anime North festival, near a red silk scarf tied to the railing. CCTV shows Luke following her minutes earlier; he says he wanted to apologize and picked up the insult from podcasts played in the locker room.
A video of the killing, uploaded from a school library computer, leads to Jaxxon Font, a student caught filming in a reflection. He says an anonymous contact paid him 22,000 Robux to film at the bridge at noon, and that the killer had a spider web on one sneaker, apparently a shoe leveller. After the costume turns up in Delia’s classroom chair, they reach Colin Hobarth, who has anisomelia and switched to remote learning after Shawna and her friends lured him to a meeting and beat him. Colin quotes Bill Diamond, a former professor turned podcaster; his phone places him at physiotherapy nine minutes by bike from the bridge and holds selfies from seven of Diamond’s live tapings.
Diamond denies knowing Delia or Colin, then privately tells Colin to stay quiet. Delia’s deleted work email holds an intimate video of her and Diamond from 2019, when he was a professor and she was an undergraduate, and 160 harassing emails sent over three months. A Botanical Gardens staffer recalls Diamond pressing Delia to hold his hand and finds footage of a quarrel on May 3, after which she stopped coming. Diamond later returned with her therapist, who admits Diamond asked him about the following Sunday.
The Interrogation
With his lawyer present, Diamond calls Colin a delusional fan. The detectives argue that he used the video to keep Delia in his life for six years, lost that hold when she was fired, and turned a hurt, lonely boy into his weapon, giving him her scarf. Colin, who has been watching, joins them and says Diamond told him Delia would destroy him and that all he had to do was push. Diamond shouts that he never told Colin to film it or leave the costume in her classroom; Colin says he wanted others to feel as scared as he has.
The ending
Spoiler: Colin is handcuffed while his mother pleads that he has cooperated, and she is told he helped the wrong man. No arrest or charge of Diamond is mentioned in the dialogue.
Suspects’ fates: Colin Hobarth, arrested; Bill Diamond, other or unclear.
Why it stands out
- Dialogue recalls the Polytechnique shooting, in which 14 women were killed, when a member of the unit is asked why they know so much about the manosphere; the answer is a nephew who has been listening to it.
- Real commentators are named in dialogue alongside the fictional Bill Diamond, and Colin’s speech about lobsters is identified in the episode as coming from “12 Rules for Life”.