'Miss Scarlet' Recap: Season 5 Episode 1
Daniel Hautzinger
January 12, 2025

Miss Scarlet airs Sundays at 7:00 pm on WTTW and is available to stream. Recap the previous and following episodes.
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Eliza’s business is going well enough that she has hired an employee: Clarence, her associate Nash’s old accountant. Nash himself is in jail for trying to enact vigilante justice on his brother’s killer, but he has bribed a prison warden and so is living large, enjoying the office and whiskey of the prison governor after hours. There’s only one piece of bad news – and it’s significant. William “the Duke” Wellington, Eliza’s old friend and almost lover, has been offered the job of superintendent of police in New York City. He’s taking it, and not returning to London.
He did ask Eliza to come join him as his wife – but she has refused, because that would mean her career as a private detective would be over. She at least has the support and sympathy of her friends; Clarence cancels his day off work to join her in her office for company after she finds out, thanks to some urging by her housekeeper Ivy.
Eliza tries to bravely look ahead, and asks Nash – who always has insider knowledge – who is likely to replace William as detective inspector at Scotland Yard. She needs that person’s support so that she can continue getting contracts with the police.
The replacement is Alexander Blake, an admired ex-Army man who halved the crime rate in Bristol. Fitzroy finds him impressive – he speaks fluent Mandarin from his time in Hong Kong. Unfortunately for Eliza, he doesn’t use private detectives.
Nevertheless, Eliza decides to go meet Blake on his first day in the job. She gives him an overview of the exemplary work she has done with the police, but he ignores it. She will be paid for any work she has done up to the moment, but that’s the end of her collaboration with the police.
So Eliza sets off to prove her worth to Blake. Detective Phelps had taken William’s job on an interim basis until Blake arrived and given Eliza a contract to investigate the reported reappearance of Lord Spencer Bowden of Cheshire, who went missing twelve years ago after reportedly killing his lover, who also happened to be his maid.
Phelps thinks Bowden won’t be found, but Eliza goes to speak to Bowden’s daughter, Amelia, who is the one who reported seeing him. She believes her father is guilty of the murder, and also blames him for her mother’s early death, since he ruined the family’s reputation. She now only has one servant, and even that maid refuses to live on the property. Amelia insists that she saw her father across the street from her home last Sunday morning.
Eliza had only gotten this far in the case when Blake arrived and dismissed her from it, but she returns to see Amelia, determined to find a lead. Amelia’s home has just been burgled; the police haven’t even arrived yet. Amelia believes her father is responsible – a safe in his old study was opened using the combination that he knew.
Presumably the thief will try to sell the valuable goods taken from Amelia’s home, so Clarence suggests visiting an underground auction he knows of from his time working for Nash. Eliza and Clarence don the required masks and enter, watching for goods that could have come from Amelia’s house.
Finally, a lot comes up that could be hers. A man enters and seems to follow the bids closely; Eliza bids high to see his reaction and is satisfied by his evident pleasure that he’s the thief. But the gambit leads Eliza to win the auction. Luckily, the police arrive to raid the illegal gathering just then. Eliza follows the thief as everyone scatters and glimpses his face when he takes his mask off outside. But she is apprehended by policemen and he escapes.
Eliza tries to explain herself to Blake, telling him that she has information on the case. He refuses to work with her, until she mentions that she saw the thief and he was not Amelia’s father, but seemed familiar. Blake allows her to look at mugshots, explaining in the meantime that he doesn’t trust private detectives; he’s only had bad experiences with them – and can tell Eliza frequently lies to forward her aims. He perceptively analyzes her and she returns the favor, but their slowly warming relationship turns frosty again when she comments upon a well-loved copy of Treasure Island amongst his things. He dismisses her.
His testiness is probably because he is protective of his daughter, and Treasure Island is a favorite of hers.
The next time Blake runs into Eliza, she is with a dead body. Blake and the police are searching an abandoned house. He hears creaking in the ceiling and notices from dust marks that a poker has been moved from the fireplace. He uses it to open a hidden door that leads to an attic, where the thief Eliza saw at the auction is stabbed dead – and Eliza is hiding. She tries to offer deductions in order to get Blake to allow her to help with the case, but he already knows them all. He doesn’t know the dead man’s identity, however – and she does.
Blake reluctantly listens as Eliza explains. He thinks she’s stalling for time, but lets her talk. She eventually reveals the dead man as Jonathan Harbourne, Bowden’s onetime valet. She recognized him from the Bowden case files. Clarence had escaped the police raid on the auction and followed Harbourne; he and Eliza later searched his home and found out that he uses the abandoned property they’re now in.
And Harbourne’s killer was Amelia Bowden, as evidenced in part by the silver knife used to stab him – it was stolen from Amelia’s house by Harbourne and he tried to sell it at the auction, but the police returned it to Amelia after their raid. Amelia arranged for Harbourne to burgle her home in order to raise some funds – she recently upped her insurance by three times. Reporting a sighting of her father was a distraction. But after the police raided the auction and returned everything to Amelia, Harbourne stole it again and wanted to keep the profits of selling it himself this time. So Amelia killed him.
Eliza is stalling Blake so that Clarence and some associates can apprehend Amelia and bring her to Scotland Yard.
But she’s already there. Blake has beaten Eliza to the arrest. He got one of the men apprehended at the auction to find out who Harbourne was. The informant met Harbourne and then witnessed an argument between him and Amelia, which he reported to Blake.
The police raided Amelia’s house in the morning and found bloody gloves, plus learned that she had been out late and agitated when she came home. The driver of a carriage at a stand around the corner from her home showed the police the abandoned house, where he had taken her the previous night. Blake figured everything out on his own – except Harbourne’s identity.
Dejected by her failure to impress Blake into letting her continue to work for the police, Eliza visits Nash in prison. If she’s going to stay single and not join William, it needs to be worth it, she tells her friend – she needs to excel as a detective. He comforts her with a drink and a game of poker.