'Miss Scarlet's Season 5 Finale Encapsulates the Good & Bad of This New Era

The fifth season of Miss Scarlet — the show's first with a new truncated title and without former leading man Stuart Martin — is over, and several things are true. One: Season 5 improved as it went along. Sure, the mysteries have run the gamut from "completely forgettable" to "insultingly bad," but the show became more cohesive and watchable as the episode count ran on. The finale, "Dangerous Liaisons," is probably the best episode of the season (if you don't count "The Deal," an hour that felt like it somehow wandered in from mid-Season 3). We'd all be better off if we just looked at this new incarnation of the show like a straight reboot because Miss Scarlet itself sure is.

Maybe "Dangerous Liaisons" is trying to tell us we're in a new timeline because its primary mystery revolves around a character who is technically dead. (In Season 2's "Angel of the Inferno," when we first met Fitzroy's father, the commissioner remarks how happy he was that his wife wasn't alive to see their son performing something as stupid as administrative tasks at Scotland Yard. I guess the joke is on Fitzroy, Sr., though, because according to this episode, Oliver's mom is very much alive and upset about her husband's infidelity!

Maybe we shouldn't be surprised that Miss Scarlet seemed to forget one of the few facts we know about Fitzroy as a character, but whew, it's just so darn sloppy. Not to mention unnecessary, since we never even see Mrs. Fitzroy learn the truth about what her husband's been involved in! What was the point? But hey, we're in a new world now, where Fitzroy's mom is resurrected from the dead, and Phelps turns out to be the nephew of London's most notorious underworld leader (a fact he has somehow never mentioned to anyone else). Welcome to the multiverse!