'Miss Scarlet & the Duke': Eliza's Trip to "Hotel St. Marc" Is a Bust

Miss Scarlet & the Duke giveth, and Miss Scarlet & the Duke taketh away. After dropping one of the series' best episodes in recent memory last week with "Arabella's," Season 3 inexplicably follows it up with "Hotel St. Marc," an hour that is...not terrible, necessarily, but not something viewers wanted. Having an hour that dealt with the series' foundational themes — the ways women trying to make it in a man's world are so often underestimated and belittled — and meaningful things to say about Eliza's emotional insecurities, following it up with an hour like "Hotel St. Marc" is baffling.

Rather than dig further into some of the rich emotional angles the series just unearthed, this one chooses to separate Eliza from her entire support system, send her abroad, and pair her in what is essentially a two-hander with one of the series' least interesting characters, investigator Patrick Nash. This isn't meant as an insult or slight toward Felix Scott, who does his best to make a character who often feels like the weakest sort of caricature appear as if he has actual layers.

But Miss Scarlet still can't decide the role Nash is meant to play on the show, making it really difficult to know how we, as the audience, are meant to feel about him.