Miss Scarlet and The Duke Episode 1 recap: Scarlet inherits her father’s business

In Miss Scarlet and The Duke Episode 1, Scarlet inherits her father’s business and gets in over her head with her very first case.

Fog shrouds the dark, gaslit early morning streets of Victorian London as our protagonist Eliza Scarlet (Kate Phillips) traverses the shadows to meet up with a young boy who assures her he has a dead body for her to investigate. As we’ll hear multiple times through Miss Scarlet and The Duke Episode 1, the dingy, crime-filled streets of London are no place for a lady — or an aspiring female detective.

To chase her career aspirations, Scarlet must get inventive. She does so by turning to stablehands and working children to tip her off whenever they stumble across a dead body. As evidenced by the opening scene, her plan doesn’t always work. The first “body” she finds is just a drunken woman who doesn’t take kindly to Scarlet nicking her glass eye or investigating her in her stupor.

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Scarlet’s day doesn’t get much better as she returns home to find a nervous man named Rupert and his overbearing mother waiting for her. They want to see her father, which soon becomes a trend. Everyone is searching for Mr. Henry Scarlet, an actual private investigator, and the Scarlet household provider. Although I believe Rupert and his mom are hoping to ask for Eliza’s hand in marriage rather than request his services.

Fearing that her father has fallen into a drunken stupor somewhere in town, Eliza visits his offices and then Scotland Yard, where she crosses paths with William Wellington (Stuart Martin), also known as the Duke. It’s immediately apparent that the pair have a combative relationship often filled with bickering. William is fully aware of what Eliza does in the cloak of darkness. He calls it her little “hobby” but remains firm that no lady should be trying to worm her way into a man’s world of playing detective.

Despite his misgivings, he shows her images from his current caseload and is chagrined when Scarlet seemingly solves one case without so much as batting a lash. She notices a man with his throat slit from ear-to-ear and takes notice of several key characteristics, including signs of syphilis. She advises William to question the wife.

However, the jaunty tone of the episode comes to a halt when Scarlet returns home and learns her father has passed away after succumbing to cardiac arrest. At his funeral, we see another side to her relationship with William. Despite his misgivings about Scarlet, he appears to care for her genuinely and comforts her in the wake of her father’s passing. He tries to help her see that her father has been in misery since her mother died, and now they are reunited on the other side.

Miss Scarlet and The Duke Episode 1 recap: An opportunity presents itself.

An ornery man named Alfred Winters (Aidan McArdle) visits the Scarlet household to meet with Henry after he failed to show up to their meeting (since he’s dead and all). Sensing an opportunity, Eliza neglects to mention that little fact and instead assures Mr. Winters that she will pass on the case’s details to her father.

Alfred hopes to find his estranged niece Clara Simms because he is in poor health and thinks he might not be long for this world. The last he heard, she was working in SoHo. They had a falling out over her elopement to a man Alfred deemed a “scoundrel.”

As the episode title is “Inheritance,” it makes sense that this scene sets up what we’ll likely see from the show moving forward. If Eliza can hide her father’s death from the general public, she can take on his cases without anyone knowing that a lady is doing the detecting. Her first chance to do so is to help Mr. Winters, although that might prove tricky since he demands to see Henry in person to further discuss the case the next day at 10 a.m. sharp.

Eliza’s search for Clara leads her to a seedy, vaudevillian brothel where she runs into her first significant conflict with the owner, a gruff man named Moses (Ansu Kabia). Luckily for Eliza, her father taught her a thing or two as a young girl about chemicals, poisons, and the like. She manages to handcuff Moses and threatens to kill him with a turpentine fire if he doesn’t give her the information she wants on Clara. Hey, if men aren’t going to listen to you, a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do, right?

Clara (Ellise Chappell) is in the middle of serving as a target girl for a drunk buffoon throwing knives at her when Eliza tracks her down. Eliza offers to reunite her with her uncle, but before they can make any plans, they’re interrupted by an impromptu shakedown by the police who are rounding up prostitutes to check for venereal diseases. Mistaking Eliza for a woman of the night, she is forced to come up with a quick excuse to get free. She tells them she is William’s favored wh*re at Scotland Yard, and he would not be pleased to find out these men had touched her.

Hoping to further deter Eliza from her ambitions, William locks her in a cell overnight,  much to her frustration. Their continued banter is a highlight of the episode, and we learn they once shared a kiss when they were teenagers.

Miss Scarlet and The Duke Episode 1 recap: Eliza falls prey to a con man.

Undeterred by her brief imprisonment, Eliza sets about reuniting niece and uncle. Unfortunately, things take a turn for the worse when it is revealed that “Alfred Winters” is none other than Joseph Simms, Clara’s manipulative husband, who she had hoped to leave behind. Clara’s real uncle passed, leaving Clara a large estate and inheritance behind. Since Joseph is her husband, he has Clara judged mentally unfit for running away and turning to a life of prostitution (though she never was one) and subsequently escorted to an asylum, thus taking control of Clara’s inheritance.

Eliza is shocked and devastated by this turn of events and promises Clara to get her out of the asylum. William is not pleased with Eliza’s actions, especially because Joseph is a prodigious criminal. But Eliza manages to steal his file by playing the part of a silly, faint woman in William’s presence, requesting he fetch her some salts so she can be alone in his office.

After perusing Joseph’s files, she discovers that his first wife, Beatrice Simms, did not die in a shipwreck on the Thames as he claimed. Beatrice survived, meaning Joseph is a bigamist and his marriage to Clara was never legally binding. Joseph doesn’t take lightly to Eliza’s prying and prepares to strangle her. Thankfully Eliza thinks quickly on her feet and prepared for the confrontation by poisoning Joseph’s coffee with laudanum, knocking him unconscious before he can lay a finger on her.

William arrests Joseph, begrudgingly giving Eliza some props for her scheme, and Clara is released from the asylum—now a wealthy young woman.

In the final moments of Miss Scarlet and The Duke Episode 1, Rupert returns to see Scarlet. He doesn’t actually want to get married. It’s his mother who has been trying to force their union. Scarlet assures Rupert he can tell his mom that she is the one who turned him down. In return, Rupert invests some money in fixing up Henry Scarlet’s private detective office so that Scarlet can settle in.

Even William is impressed with her new digs, although he remains apprehensive about her efforts to get involved with “men’s business.” I have a feeling he’ll come around. After all, Eliza was right about his murder victim. It was the wife.

New episodes of Miss Scarlet and The Duke air Sunday nights at 8:00 p.m. ET on Masterpiece PBS.