When Detective Carl Morck (Matthew Goode) takes charge of a brand new cold-case unit in Scotland, he is not planning on solving much. The new show’s title, Dept. Q, feels like a public relations move for Edinburgh’s struggling police department. Morck, the unlikely leader, is a sharp cop. He is recovering from a terrible shooting. He acts pretty rough. Constable Moira Jacobson (Kate Dickie) sees her job mostly as babysitting him. But fate has other plans for Carl Morck. In just a few moments, the first episode pulls us right into the mystery.
As Matthew Goode himself explained, Morck walks into his new basement office and finds a four-year-old case. Someone fell off a ferry years ago and nobody figured out why. That someone is Merritt Lingard (Chloe Pirrie), a local lawyer. Her story is mixed in with Morck’s early investigation in the first episode. Soon, Morck finds himself digging into Merritt’s disappearance. He puts together a team of unlikely people and tries to deal with his own collapsing personal life. Just a normal day in Department Q.
The show starts with a shocking scene. Carl Morck and his partner, James Hardy (Jamie Sives), are shot while checking out a crime scene. Both survive. But a rookie cop dies and Hardy becomes paralyzed. As Morck begins the Lingard case, he keeps going back to that morning. He struggles with the mental aftermath and feeling guilty for surviving. Regular talks with Dr. Rachel Irving (Kelly Macdonald) do not seem to help him much. The series never directly tells us who shot Morck or why. But Morck puts together a theory. He thinks the shooting was meant to distract from the real crime. The real crime was the killing of the young police officer. Morck believes the police were tricked into coming to the scene. He tells this theory to others and finds a bit of peace. By the end, Constable Jacobson assigns Hardy to check the facts on this. It gives us a hopeful ending for Morck’s emotional state.
The Twists And Turns Of Merritt Lingard's Disappearance And Her Dark History
How Detective Carl Morck's Unlikely Team Unravels A Complicated And Personal Crime
Merritt Lingard’s disappearance initially seems simple. She went missing during a ferry trip with her disabled brother, William (Tom Bulpett). Did she fall overboard? Was she pushed? People saw Lingard arguing with William before she vanished. Could he be involved somehow? Morck and his new assistant, Akram (Alexej Manvelov), look into all these possibilities. Akram is an IT expert sent to Department Q to keep him out of Jacobson’s way. He is also a Syrian immigrant with a mysterious past. This past actually makes him a great asset to the new department. He strongly supports the Lingard case. He argues that something is wrong. Merritt’s body never showed up and she was a powerful lawyer who could have easily made enemies.
Morck and his group soon find some important clues. First, William Lingard, who cannot speak, draws a man wearing a strange hat with a bird on it. After talking with the Lingards’ housekeeper, Claire (Shirley Henderson), and Merritt’s boss, Lord Advocate Stephen Burns (Mark Bonnar), the Department Q team believes Merritt was kidnapped, not pushed overboard. They also find themselves following some false leads. Detective Constable Rose Dickson (Leah Byrne) misidentifies the bird William draws. She thinks it is a boobrie, the name of Merritt and William’s father Jamie’s boat. But the bird is actually a cormorant. This small mistake shows how easy it is to get things wrong.
The team also traces a connection between Stephen Burns and a rich businessman Graham Finch (Douglas Russell). Before Lingard vanished, she was the lead prosecutor on the case of Finch allegedly murdering his wife. Lingard failed to get a conviction. Morck and Akram find proof that Burns pressured his subordinate not to call a witness. This witness could have helped Lingard win the case. Finch does not like the team poking around. He sends men to threaten Morck’s stepson, Jasper (Aaron McVeigh). But this is a red herring. Finch is a murderer, and Burns is certainly corrupt, but they had nothing to do with Lingard’s disappearance. The real answer is much darker.
Morck and Dickson find another key clue. Lingard was having a relationship with a journalist, Sam Haig (Steven Miller), who had since died. Haig approached her about corruption in her department. But the detectives quickly hit a problem. They struggled to figure out Haig’s movements before his death in a climbing accident. They realized Haig was having another affair at the same time as his relationship with Lingard. This meant he could not be in two places at once. The Haig that Lingard was seeing was a fake. This ties back to an earlier mystery: how Merritt’s brother, William, became disabled. In flashbacks, we see young Merritt’s relationship with Harry Jennings (Fraser Saunders), a local teen who was later accused of beating William into a nonverbal state during a robbery. But in the final episodes of Dept. Q, we learn that Harry’s anti-social brother Lyle was the one who beat William. Merritt even helped plan the robbery in an attempt to steal her own mother’s jewelry and get away from her boring island home. Harry died trying to escape from the police. Lyle and his mother blamed Merritt for Harry’s death.
As Department Q soon figures out, everything about the case centers on Sam Haig’s relationship with Lyle Jennings. The two knew each other as children in a place for troubled boys. Jennings became very attached to Haig, even calling him by his brother’s name. They reconnected as adults. Jennings killed Haig and threw him off his local climbing spot. After taking Haig’s identity, Jennings started a relationship with Lingard. He then kidnapped her. In a twisted move that reminds us of Lyle’s father’s abuse, Lingard has been kept trapped and hurt in a hyperbaric chamber for four years. She is held on the grounds of the Jennings’ shipping company, Shorebird Ocean Systems, whose logo is, you guessed it, a cormorant.
After finding the address of Lyle’s mother, Morck and Akram face a problem. How do they safely get Lingard out of the chamber without killing her? A recovering Hardy guides them over the phone. They are surprised by Jennings. The series comes full circle as Morck takes a bullet in the shoulder for Akram. Akram then deals with Jennings using his own mysterious combat skills. Mrs. Jennings runs away and shoots herself when police surround her. Lingard is safely brought out of the chamber.
Merritt and William are reunited. She starts putting her life back together. She never actually meets Morck. They pass each other like strangers at police headquarters. Morck has other plans. He uses what he learned about Burns’ bad behavior. He convinces the lord advocate to increase Department Q’s budget, quickly promote Akram to full detective, and get Morck a nicer car. The final scene is simple. Morck is back at work in the gloomy Department Q basement. He smiles softly as Hardy returns to work on crutches. It is a good ending, as these things go. Case closed.
Will There Be More Mysteries for Dept. Q to Solve and What We Know About Season 2?
The Show's Cast and The Original Books Give Us Hope for Future Episodes
Dept. Q has not yet been officially renewed for a second season. Netflix usually waits to see how many people watch a series in its first few weeks before deciding. But the show has received mostly good reviews. Critics called it a "grimy, gothic treat" and an "emotionally fraught crime thriller that never lets up." This positive feedback is a good sign for its future.
Matthew Goode, who plays Carl Morck, has openly said he wants a second season. He told Yahoo UK that they "really need to do" another season. He even suggested the show could have more fight scenes. Chloe Pirrie, who plays Merritt Lingard, agreed. She said she would love to see more. She found the characters enjoyable to watch. This shows the cast is eager to keep telling these stories.
Luckily, there is plenty of source material for Netflix to adapt. The series is based on books by Danish author Jussi Adler-Olsen. There are 10 books in his series. This means there are many more mysteries to choose from if Dept. Q gets the green light for season two. Six of these books have already been made into movies in Denmark. The other four are planned for between 2026 and 2032. This means a rich world of stories is ready to be brought to the screen. For fans of dark crime thrillers, this is very promising.
One funny moment worth noting is that for a few hours after its premiere, all nine episodes of Dept. Q mysteriously disappeared from Netflix. This led to many frustrated viewers on social media. Luckily, the show quickly reappeared. TVLine confirmed the glitch and that other Netflix titles were working fine. It was a strange hiccup for a show about cold cases. But it was quickly fixed. I hope the show continues to deliver gripping mysteries without any more streaming disappearances.