'Miss Scarlet' Knows We've Got "Bad Blood"

Sadly, Miss Scarlet's fourth episode, "Bad Blood," has nothing to do with the Taylor Swift song that shares its name, a pop bop from her 1989 album that at least hints at a more interesting crime than this episode ultimately deals with. An hour that wrestles with family connections, personal obligations, and where our duties as parents and partners lie, it's the kind of story that's more interesting on paper than in actuality, if only because some of its biggest emotional beats run the gamut from "paper-thin" to "completely unearned."

Given how annoying this character has been in previous seasons of the show, it's downright painful to admit that the return of Tim Chipping's Charlie Phelps, now a Detective Inspector at the London City precinct, is the true bright spot in this episode. Perhaps it's because Phelps and Eliza still have a delightfully frenemies-esque chemistry. Maybe it's because almost everything else about this show has become so surface-level this season that it's a relief to be confronted by a messy, genuinely morally complicated character. (Even if Miss Scarlet does sort of handwave Phelps's alcoholism like it never existed.)

For those who don't remember, Phelps is also the nephew of a notorious London crime boss named Dylan Cooper (Steven Hartley), a secret which should have immediately derailed his career. Instead, it has just followed him into his new job. (Promoted, let's remember! White Men Fail Up.) Making a vague gesture at self-awareness, Phelps hires Eliza to help him investigate a missing showgirl who he believes to have been murdered. Her rented rooms are covered in blood, and there were reports of a shooting.

The girl, Natalia Lorenzo, had only two regular callers: Phelps's uncle and a rival crime boss named Philip Galanis. Phelps believes his uncle is innocent; to him, the crime scene is too sloppy to point at Cooper. And because now is the precise moment the show has chosen to acknowledge realities like "professional conflict of interest" exist, the investigation is Eliza's to manage.

But when Galanis turns up dead, Blake and Scotland Yard are drawn into the investigation, and everyone starts to butt heads. Trapped between the two investigations — and Phelps and Blake's posturing — Eliza is torn between her duty to protect her client's confidentiality, her boyfriend's job, and their collective need to solve a murder. But the case itself isn't all that exciting, and there's little urgency to any of it, despite how worked up Blake gets about the thought of Phelps somehow stepping on his toes professionally.

The episode ends with Dylan Cooper's arrest — not for anything he did this week, but for an apparent lifetime's worth of illegal activities. Phelps, who has secretly been building a case against him in his downtime, turns it all over to the Yard as soon as his mother dies and his last real tie to Cooper is severed. Natalia, the person who actually committed the hour's only real crime, fully escapes justice, but since she shot a drunk gang lord who was trying to assault her, no one really seems to mind all that much.

The tension that's been simmering between Blake and Eliza finally comes to a head on multiple fronts. He's still jealous of Patrick Nash; she's mad that he's not respecting her client relationships. She also manages to be two hours late bringing his daughter home from a trip to the zoo, and is generally unrepentant about it. (She apologizes, of course, but seems a bit lost as to why the whole thing is such a big deal. Seriously.) She's also the inspiration behind Sophia's impromptu trip to the British Museum, a disappearance that immediately activates half the cops and clerical secretaries in London to track her down.

It would be one thing if this were just an episode in which Eliza put her own interests ahead of her responsibility to her boyfriend's daughter, or in which Sophia went missing while trying to recreate an experience the woman she admires told her about from her youth. Instead, it's both, which means neither gets adequate attention. This is one of those episodes where the relationship subplot needed to be about Blake having a dangerous job or Eliza not being very used to considering others' needs.

More importantly, Miss Scarlet essentially fast-forwarded past the key moments in Blake and Eliza's romance; we never saw them negotiate anything about these obvious pitfalls. We assume they discuss the inevitable conflicts of interest that would arise from them essentially doing the same job for other people, which makes the first issue awkward at best. But we have no idea what they told Sophia. These may be Victorian times when "children's mental health" wasn't exactly something people thought mattered, but one still feels like the two adults would talk about these things before one lets the other wander off with their child.

What's worse, in all honesty, is that we're watching Eliza and Blake have relationship problems, without ever having the chance to see them have relationship joy. This hour ends with the threat of a breakup or, at the very least, "a break." But we've seen so little of their relationship — and so much of what we have seen has been them bickering or having professional misunderstandings to work through —is it really that big of a deal if you threaten to take it away?

Forgive me for cribbing a page from superhero fiction, but stories need a balance of darkness and light. We've barely gotten the chance to see Eliza and Blake be happy (and witnessing a couple of dinner dates really does not count), so why should we be all that invested in seeing them miserable? If you want me to be invested in their romance, I need to be able to tell what Blake is risking by threatening to walk away. We, as viewers, deserve to know what he might be sacrificing in the name of protecting his daughter. We need to have a good reason to want them to work it out, beyond the fact that we've all kind of decided it's time for Eliza to have a man in her life.

Don't get me wrong, I'm as happy as anyone else that Blake has finally expressed an emotion outside of his generally perfect internal equilibrium. But as Miss Scarlet once again defaults to telling rather than showing, it's hard not to wonder if this episode — and the threat of a break-up we all already know isn't going to stick — would have landed harder if we had a better grasp of why they should be together in the first place.

Miss Scarlet Season 6 continues with new episodes airing and streaming on local PBS stations and the PBS app on Sundays at 8 p.m. ET through mid-February 2026. All episodes are available to stream on PBS Passport for members and on the PBS Masterpiece Prime Video Channel.