'Miss Scarlet' Recap: Season 6 Episode 1

Miss Scarlet airs Sundays at 7:00 pm and is available to stream. Recap the previous and following episodes and other seasons.
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As is her wont, Eliza turns to what might be termed unconventional tactics on behalf of a client, drugging a group of thieves in order to recover an artifact for a museum – for a fee, of course. As is typical, when Scotland Yard finds out, they dispatch someone to chastise her. Unusually, however, Alexander Blake isn’t too worried about her transgression. He uses the excuse for a visit as a chance to spend time with Eliza – and engage in some clandestine kissing.

Blake and Eliza have begun a relationship, but Eliza doesn’t want to tell anyone, not even her loyal Ivy. She’s even turning down cases – and the fee they offer – offered by Blake, out of fear of what it will be like to work together now that they’re romantically involved. But her desire to be discreet is making her especially obvious. Clarence misreads the situation and thinks she has offended Blake, but Ivy has her suspicions. She’s never seen Eliza so happy.

Eliza struggles to find an excuse to give Clarence for turning down another job when Blake sends for her, so she reluctantly agrees to Blake’s request to sit with a traumatized woman who found a dead body. Sarah Mason, having refused to talk to male detectives, eventually opens up to Eliza. She’s a secretary for Dr. Isambard Cole, who was treating the dead woman for neuroses. Dr. Cole sent Sarah to visit the woman at home when she failed to show up for an appointment, and Sarah found her dead. A bottle of potassium bromide pills is nearby.

Another woman also suddenly died, in an alley; a witness saw her having a fit prior to her death. She, too, was found holding a bottle of potassium bromide. 

Having gotten answers from Sarah, Eliza is eager to end her engagement with the police – but can’t resist the case when she hears that both women were being treated by Dr. Cole. 

The doctor explains that both women were being treated for melancholia with the pills and electrotherapy, as was his secretary Sarah, who also suffers from a nervous condition – she’s an orphan and had a difficult life until Cole took her in as a maid and taught her to read and write so she could be his secretary. The pills come sealed from a supplier.

When Eliza goes to visit Sarah at her room, she is startled to find the door open and a man with a gun inside. He rushes out when Sarah herself appears. Sarah recognizes him as one of Cole’s patients, who recently showed up at the doctor’s office in a state of agitation. 

From Eliza’s description, Cole believes the man is Zebediah Sawyer, who hears voices in his head that urge him to do harm. He showed up last week complaining that the electrotherapy had made him worse. He once worked as a clerk at a pharmacy.

Both of the dead women’s pill bottles were labeled with a dose five times what it should have been, which could be lethal. But postmortems on them are slow in coming, because the chief coroner Wormsley has lately been late, absent, and drunk, as Mr. Potts complains to Ivy. Potts finally decides to go against his nature and confront Wormsley when Wormsley finally arrives at the office at 5:00 pm – and is rudely thrown out and dismissed from his job in return. 

The detectives believe Sawyer killed the two women in revenge for a treatment he disliked from Cole. They split up to visit the many former addresses of Sawyer, and Eliza only convinces Blake to allow her to take part in the dangerous search by committing to bringing hired muscle along. The clerk Clarence is hardly that – and she sends him off to look for information in nearby pubs while she visits some of the addresses anyway. 

She is followed as she leaves one and tries to run but finds herself at a dead end. When Blake appears, she rushes to him in relief – and George Willows, a new detective, sees. Blake assures her it’s fine, but she decides that she can no longer work the case lest she reveal her relationship with Blake. Ivy overhears Eliza tell Blake this through a closed door at home, and is upset that Eliza has not confided in her.

But then a body is pulled out of the river with a gunshot wound to the head, and Cole confirms that the dead man is Sawyer. He suggests Sawyer might have died by suicide.

Clarence, however, has learned – through lots of rough drink and lost money in pubs – that Sawyer is very much alive: he’s in prison awaiting sentencing.

Eliza visits the morgue and finds the door open and no one there, thanks to Wormsley’s laxness. Potts stops by to pick up his belongings after his firing, and Eliza enlists his help. She realizes that Sawyer’s body doesn’t show signs of electrotherapy on his wrists, as the dead women and Sarah do. 

That’s because the dead man is not Sawyer. Eliza goes to Cole’s office and hears a gunshot. She enters to find Cole bleeding on the ground and Sarah pointing a pistol at him. Blake arrives and disarms Sarah. 

Everything is explained. Sarah is Cole’s daughter. Her mother was an inmate at an asylum where Cole worked, and he left the position, knowing the relationship was wrong, before he knew she was pregnant. Only years later did he find out that she had had his child, and died in childbirth. He tracked Sarah down with the help of a private detective named Franklin Sloan and took Sarah in.

Sloan is the man found in the river with a gunshot to the head. He appeared at Cole’s office recently, trying to blackmail the doctor with news of Sarah’s identity in order to cover gambling and drinking debts. When the two women were found dead, Cole decided to pretend Sloan was Sawyer and use the patient’s past as a pharmaceutical clerk to frame him for the deaths. Cole then killed Sloan to prevent the ruse from being found out – or the blackmail to be successful.

But Sloan had already slipped a note under Sarah’s door – that’s also why he was in her room when Eliza visited, to tell her about her parentage. The revelation of the truth led Sarah to shoot Cole for his lies. She’s also the one responsible for the women’s deaths, having accidentally messed up their dosages – she only recently learned to read and write. 

Having worked their first case together since they began a romance, Blake advises Eliza to confide in someone other than him. While Potts enthusiastically cooks – he will take over the housework until Wormsley apologizes and gives him his job back – Eliza tells Ivy about her relationship. Ivy of course already knows, and is happy both about the romance and also to be in on it.

Another relationship is sparking at Scotland Yard. Willows, the detective recently transferred there because Fitzroy has left and Phelps has been transferred, meets a young woman, Isabel Summers, who’s starting as a clerk on his first day. They run into each other throughout the day, and she pushes him to ask her on a date as she’s leaving. He can’t that evening because he has to pick up the baby – his sister’s, not his. His sister lives with him. He and Summers set a date for the next day.