"The Heir" Offers Eliza a Life Changing Payment on 'Miss Scarlet & the Duke'

What a strange ride Miss Scarlet & the Duke Season 3 has been. Thankfully, after a pair of lackluster installments in "Hotel St. Marc" and "Bloodline," —in which half of the series' titular duo was almost entirely absent — the show returns to excellent form with "The Heir," a story that (finally!) sees the Duke return and gets back to the basics of what makes this drama so good in the first place. Miss Scarlet is a mystery series primarily about its leading lady's attempt to carve out a space for herself in both a profession and world dominated by men, and it's at its best when it allows its case of the week stories to dovetail with Eliza's own larger personal journey.

That we've had so many episodes of late that haven't done this is part of the reason why this season (and, if we're honest, a big chunk of Season 2 as well) has felt so off. However, "The Heir" neatly ties together several of Season 3's larger themes and stories into a satisfyingly cohesive whole. All season, Eliza has longed for a more stable financial situation, not just so she can hire staff to help compete with bigger agencies like Nash & Sons but so she can finally put her own name on her business instead of relying on her dead father's to get clients in the door.

It's the primary reason she takes the Martin Crabtree case to begin with, in the hopes of partly cashing in herself on his surprise inheritance from the father he supposedly never knew. (Heir hunters, by the way, still exist today, usually as part of a larger probate firm, and aim to locate people who are entitled to inherit from a deceased relative’s estate but are unaware of their legal claim. There's even a popular BBC series about them.)