Review by C.J. Bunce
In our preview for Netflix’s new streaming series Dept. Q we asked one question: Will it be the next great TV mystery series? The unfortunate short answer is no, but it still has some promise–if it gets picked up for a second season. In fact half to two-thirds of the first season is great, brilliant even, thanks mainly to the top-notch cast. It begins with Oscar-nominated writer-director Scott Frank in the director’s chair, writer of the best superhero movie ever (Logan) and the best TV series of 2020 (The Queen’s Gambit). It stars Matthew Goode, who has been brilliant in everything, perfect in The Offer, the best series of 2022, and he proves again he’s still at the top. He plays Detective Carl Morck, just off a bad encounter and tapped to work cold cases for an experimental new Edinburgh task force. The problem is the first cold case they choose, which covers the entire season, is flat-out preposterous, and the actors in the season finale even seem to notice.
Goode is brilliant as Morck, not quite Dr. Gregory House, not quite Adrian Monk or Sherlock Holmes, but good at sleuthing. The story includes a little too much personal story, yet it would have been fine had other bits leveled out. During a routine police call, he is involved in a shooting that leaves a rookie cop dead and his partner and best friend, Jamie Sives’ James Hardy, left in the hospital paralyzed. Instead he is partnered with Syrian IT expert Akram Salim, played by Alexej Manvelov, who turns out to be a brilliant enforcer with his own secrets and skills back in Syria. As fun as Morck and Salim are as unlikely partners, it always feels like we’re missing out on even more fun with the very idea of a dream team partnership of Goode and Sives–which is only one of many elements queued up to go the way you may want if a Season 2 happens.
Morck is sidelined by the force, including boss Moira Jacobson, played by Kate Dickie, who ultimately selects him to lead a new oddball project handed down by the powers that be, including the Lord Advocate, played by an icy Mark Bonnar. That’s the Department Q of the title, which is never used on screen, but glimpsed at as part of a worn windor door of the department’s new digs–a crusty, unused basement in police headquarters, with exposed urinals. The parallel between Morck’s plight in his new work location and the kidnapped lawyer’s tomb should not go unnoticed.
Morck is disinterested, distracted by too much, including required visits to a psychiatrist played by an under-utilized Kelly Macdonald. So Salim selects the first cold case for the new squad. The selection of the case blindsides the viewer with a sweet twist, in a masterclass on how to draft a TV series pilot. It even has its own parallels to the celebrated pilot for the cult favorite series Lost.
Filling in the blanks are more than minor roles for Harry Potter franchise and Doctor Who’s Shirley Henderson, and Leah Byrne as an administrative assistant with her own ambitions (and past).
Back in the days when a TV season had 23 episodes, this story may have worked better for the first season. Unfortunately TV audiences today don’t get much from the series they love. Nine episodes here is certainly better than the frequent six episode British TV mystery season, but this story could have been pared down into three episodes so viewers could really get into watching what this flavor of a Scotland crime squad could do. It has all the framework of the X-Files–an oddball detective relegated to the dark corner of the building with minimal duties, maximum cold cases, and a few people to help.
The half of the story that doesn’t work? The crime written for Chloe Pirrie’s ace resolute lawyer, Merritt Lingard. After a stressful case that she loses under suspicious circumstances, she takes her disabled brother William, played by Tom Bulpett (Father Brown), on holiday–and promptly vanishes from a ferry. Viewers learn she’s been imprisoned in a derelict hyperbaric chamber by unhinged villains–for four years. For unexplained reasons, Lingard never suspects the most obvious culprits in her kidnapping, even after four years of thinking pretty much only about that. Even if you can get past the fact that the female lead is basically a “woman in a refrigerator” all season, it’s still difficult to accept the preposterous scenario. Worse, Lingard knew and had an ongoing relationship with one of the kidnappers, who the writers shifted from brilliant deceiver to incompetent moron in the final hours of the series. The first episode also hints that the new cold case team could tap an advocate for help–once the idea that this anti-social Merritt Lingard could be paired with anti-social Carl Morck, it’s difficult to wash that away. Another “maybe next season”? The crime and the criminality doesn’t work at any level and it’s a waste of a Season 1 plot for such a good cast and setting.
All nine episodes of Dept. Q are now streaming on Netflix.
