'Miss Scarlet' Recap: Season 5 Episode 3

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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Ivy has thrown herself into her new job in the clerical office at Scotland Yard. Eliza is doing her best to support Ivy by attempting to complete some of the housework Ivy would normally do. Ivy’s new busyness also affects Mr. Potts, who is used to having breakfast with her and is instead stuck with Eliza. She leaves him to do the dishes while she follows an intriguing lead from his morning newspaper.

The Thames Reaper is a serial killer who committed four murders in three months but has been inactive for months now. However, a letter has just been received by The Morning Herald warning that the Reaper is going to kill again. Eliza offers the Herald’s editor, Sydney Barnes, help in solving the mystery of the Reaper’s identity. He’s skeptical, but agrees to consider hiring her if she brings him new information.

Eliza approaches Mr. Bailey, the reporter who first broke the Thames Reaper story and has received the latest message from the killer. He agrees to share his insights with her.

On a slow news day, he wrote about an apparently drowned young man found on the banks of the Thames. But then he received a letter that “Edward sleeps by London Bridge,” correctly identifying both the name of the man and the location of his body, before either had been released to the public. The letter had been posted the day before his story was published.

Three more incidents occurred in the same way over the following weeks, with bodies appearing and letters identifying them and their locations. Someone at the Herald eventually christened the killer the Thames Reaper, and Barnes ran with the moniker and the stories. The paper was close to going out of business, but the Thames Reaper stories revived it.

Then the Thames Reaper went silent for some six months – until the latest letter reached Bailey, with the message, “I have returned.”

Bailey soon receives another message, “Caleb sleeps by Limehouse Docks,” and goes with Eliza to the docks – where a body is indeed found. Detective Inspector Blake is already there, noting an open wound to the back of the body’s head. He dismisses Eliza’s offer of help, so she heads to Mr. Potts to try to receive information that will ingratiate her with Barnes at the Herald and win her a commission from him.

Bribing Mr. Potts with an offer to do the dishes and cook breakfast for him for a month in place of Ivy, Eliza learns that four or five bodies are fished out of the Thames each month. All of the Thames Reaper’s previous victims died by drowning, and had no obvious defense wounds despite being healthy and hearty enough to fight back against an assailant.

Eliza tries to tap another source for further information – but Ivy refuses to share police files with her. So she approaches Blake and offers him a deal. The Thames Reaper case precedes his time at Scotland Yard and is complicated because each body was found in a different police jurisdiction. She can help him by offering him a concise summary of the case. He agrees to hire her – if she stops working for the Herald. Eliza agrees, and informs Bailey, who is thinking of leaving journalism himself anyway.

The latest Reaper victim arrives at the mortuary and is identified by Mr. Potts as one of his employees, the junior clerk Caleb Hunt. Unlike the other victims, he died of a blow to his head instead of drowning, and scuff marks on his boots suggest he was dragged to the river after death. Furthermore, the letter announcing his death to the Herald arrived the same day as the body was found, when all the previous ones came the day after.

Hunt lived near where his body was found – and his room is filled with clippings about the Thames Reaper case. Despite his apparent lack of money, he has a key to a safe deposit box.

Blake gets a warrant to search the box at a secretive Swiss bank, but it’s empty. The clerk reluctantly reveals that two clients had keys to the box. But their identities are kept at the head office in Switzerland, and will take time to retrieve because Blake has to get a warrant for another country to do so.

During the wait, Eliza receives a visit from Bailey: now that she is working with Scotland Yard, Barnes wants to hire her. She refuses, but is less quick to say no to a dinner date with Bailey. He leaves her to consider his offer.

Eliza’s failure to cook something edible at home might make her more receptive to Bailey’s offer. Ivy continually takes on more tasks at Scotland Yard, including for Blake personally, and is now the first in and the last to leave. Mr. Potts decides to teach Eliza to cook, in his methodical, scientific way. While doing so, he shares that Hunt, the Reaper’s latest victim, often made errors – including on one of the Reaper’s other victim’s reports: he misspelled the victim’s name.

That error was also present in the letter sent to the Herald about the victim. Hunt must have been passing on information about the victims to someone at the Herald before it was public, posing as the Reaper.

Indeed, another search of Hunt’s room turns up a blackmail letter addressed to the Herald’s editor, Barnes. It threatens to expose the truth: that the Reaper was made up in order to drive up sales of the paper. All the victims were in fact random drownings, made to seem like the victims of a sensational serial killer through Hunt’s letters to the Herald about their identities and locations. When Hunt threatened to reveal the scam, he was killed.

The names on the safe deposit box come back from Switzerland and confirm this: Barnes was one of the owners. The box was how Hunt was paid for sending information to the paper. But Barnes denies everything.

Eliza decides to join Bailey for dinner, meeting him at the Herald office to tell him. She notices a familiar key on his keyring as he locks his desk. Pretending to visit the powder room at the restaurant, she searches his coat and recognizes the key as one for the bank safe deposit box. Bailey was the one coordinating with Hunt to make up the Reaper, not Barnes - but he used Barnes’ name on the safe deposit box to frame him. And Bailey is also the one who killed Hunt to prevent him from revealing the scam.

Blake arrives at the restaurant to arrest Bailey. He lets Eliza sit in on his interrogation.

He also promotes Ivy to be his personal assistant, thus saving her some tasks and allowing her to work normal hours. She meets Potts as he’s leaving his own job, to his delight. They both say they have missed each other. But Ivy doesn’t want to talk about scheduling their wedding yet.