I don't think Clyde died. (Clyde is played by two different turtles, so even if one died there's a back-up.) I think CBS wanted to make a video.
As for "Miss Understood"...
It's the final season, so let's introduce the hitherto unknown children of our main characters! I think that's a television cliche.
I'm not sure if Cassie is really Sherlock's daughter genetically or if Cassie wants to be Sherlock's daughter in an emotional sense because she sees in him the only person who even gets close to understanding her. It's ambiguous, it depends on how much weight one puts on a conversation in which Cassie may have been bullshitting Joan. In any event, Sherlock takes a paternal interest in Cassie, much as he did with Kitty and, as far as I could tell, for his own unvoiced reasons,
It's odd to introduce this to the series with just five episodes to go.
Cassie struck me as having some very Arsene Lupin-like qualities. Lupin, far more than his literary contemporary A.J. Raffles, lives by a code of honor -- Lupin is a thief and won't hesitate to break the law to reach his ends, but he's also motivated by fairness and justice and is as likely to help someone as he is to rob them blind. In Maurice LeBlanc's
Arsene Lupin vs. Herlock Sholmes (the name changed for copyright reasons), Lupin and Holmes aren't that different and, under different circumstances, could have been friends. (A concept used a series of young adult novels titled
Sherlock, Lupin & I, originally published in Italy, which imagine Holmes, Lupin, and Irene Adler as childhood friends.) Cassie becoming Mina Davenport back in the day, then extorting the supermarket CEO in order to flush out the killer are things that Lupin would have done.
Honestly, I was expecting the CEO to discover it was
Sherlock in his mansion. Seeing Cassie there kinda threw me.
As for the story, baby formula is stupid expensive! Fifteen years ago, I asked one of my employees if he wanted anything for Christmas. His girlfriend had had a baby two months before, and he said, "Get me some baby formula." He wrote down what he wanted. I went to the local warehouse club, and I think I spent sixty dollars. Sixty dollars! So I would totally believe that 1) there's a black market in baby formula and 2) there are people with a vested interest in keeping the price high who would kill for to keep things that way.
All in all, I liked it. "Miss Understood" wasn't the episode I wanted with only five left -- like last week, I don't see this advancing the Reichenbach plot any -- but the character work, and seeing Sherlock get another human being open up, was nice. There are reasons I'm going to miss Jonny Lee Miller's Sherlock Holmes, and it's scenes like Sherlock and Cassie at the table and the scene of them at the end that are the reason why -- Miller's Sherlock is, deep down, a sentimental man who, with time and effort, has learned how to be a human being.
