Netflix’s newest whodunnit, Dept. Q, tells the story of Detective Carl Morck (Downton Abbey’s Matthew Goode), a reckless-but-ingenious investigator who has recently returned to work after being shot by an unknown assailant.
The nine-episode series, which debuted on the platform on May 29, tells the story of Detective Morck in the wake of his attack being assigned to lead a newly-assembled cold case unit. With a Mötley Crüe of unlikely peers, Detective Morck is tasked with his unit's first investigation: the mysterious disappearance of prosecutor Merritt Lingard (Chloe Pirrie) several years earlier.
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But what actually happened to Merritt Lingard? And what exactly does the ending of Dept. Q tell us about the potential for a second season?
Why was Detective Morck shot in Dept. Q?
The first season of Dept. Q opens with Morck having been shot while investigating a crime, and while the series never directly answers the question of who shot Morck or why they did, he does begin to piece together a theory of his own as the series progresses. Morck believes that the shooting was committed by two criminals who were working to distract from the real crime, the killing of the young police officer.
Morck hypotheses that the killer had no reason to return to the scene of the crime nor to flee while Morck and Hardy (Jamie Sives) were still alive — unless it was all a ruse to cloak their real motive. The police, per Morck's suspicions, were lured to the scene of the crime as a trap, acting on a report from a nonexistent daughter of the victim. When Morck poses this theory to his team, he finds it's not met with total disdain and instead, at the end of the series, we see Constable Jacobson (Kate Dickie) assign Hardy to run down the facts, paving the way perhaps for a potential second season.
What happened to Merritt Lingard in Dept. Q?
When we first learn of Merritt Lingard's disappearance, we learn that while on a ferry with her disabled brother William (Tom Bulpett), she went missing. What what remains unclear is whether she fell overboard or whether she was pushed. Lingard was spotted having some sort of disagreement with her brother before she vanished; is he somehow involved in her disappearance?
Morck instructs his new assistant Akram (Alexej Manvelov) to investigate every possible eventuality. Akram is an IT expert assigned to Department Q to keep him out of Jacobson’s hair, but he’s also a Syrian expat with a mysterious past — one that makes him a serious asset to the newly formed department. Akram argues the facts from the beginning; that Lingard’s body never washed up on any shore, and that she was a high-powered solicitor who could have easily made enemies.
Morck then begins uncovering clues: the first being a man wearing a mysterious hat with a bird emblazoned on it, drawn by William Lingard. Through conversations with the Lingards’ housekeeper, Claire (Shirley Henderson), and Merritt’s boss, Lord Advocate Stephen Burns (Mark Bonnar), the Department Q team becomes convinced that Merritt Lingard was, in actual fact, kidnapped, not knocked overboard.
Who is Sam Haig in Dept. Q?
In the hunt for Lingard, Morck and Dickson uncover a crucial clue — she was having a relationship with a now-deceased journalist, Sam Haig (Steven Miller), who approached her about corruption in her department. But the detectives quickly hit a snag, struggling to pin down Haig’s movements in the days before his death. They then discover that Haig was having a separate affair at the same time as his dalliance with Lingard (with his friend's wife, no less), which leads them to conclude that he couldn’t have been in two places at once, and therefore the 'Haig' that Lingard was seeing was a actually some sort of catfish.
Yet all of this somehow manages to tie into the question of how Merritt’s brother, William, suffered his life-changing injury. In flashbacks, throughout the series we see young Merritt’s relationship with Harry Jennings (Fraser Saunders), the local teenager who would later be accused of beating William into a nonverbal state during a robbery gone wrong. But in the final episodes of Dept. Q, we learn that Harry’s antisocial brother Lyle was actually the one who beat William after following him that night. Merritt had sewn the seed for Harry and Lyle’s aborted robbery-turned-assault after telling her boyfriend about her mother’s jewellery and how it could be the key to them escaping the island. Harry died trying to escape from the police — a death that Lyle and his mother blamed on Merritt.
Department Q eventually discovers a relationship between Sam Haig and Lyle Jennings. The pair knew each other as children at an institution for troubled boys, and Jennings latched onto Haig, even calling him by his brother’s name. The pair reconnected as adults — and Jennings killed Haig by throwing him from his favourite climbing spot. Jennings then assumed Haig's identity, started a relationship with Lingard and, ultimately, kidnapped her, holding her on the grounds of the Jennings’ shipping company, Shorebird Ocean Systems.
How does Department Q save Merritt Lingard?
In a beautiful full-circle way, Department Q comes to the salvation of Merritt Lingard. Morck and Akram then run into a problem: after finding Lyle's mother's address, they realise that they don't know how to depressurise the chamber without killing Lingard. As Hardy explains over the phone how to use the controls, the pair are surprised by Jennings.
Morck takes a bullet in the shoulder for Akram, who then dispatches Lyle Jennings with the help of his own mysterious combat training. Ailsa Jennings flees the scene and shoots herself after being confronted by a police cordon, before Lingard is safely removed from the chamber.
We might close the series with Morck returning to work — case closed — but there's plenty more where that came from. We still don't know who shot Morck, and with his partner gaining in strength every day, the Department has a full team assembled and ready to solve more mysteries. Dept. Q was based on a book series by Danish crime fiction author Jussi Adler-Olsen. There are actually 10 books in the series, which follows former homicide detective Carl Mørck, who is put in charge of a cold case unit called Department Q, which suggests that there's plenty more where this came from...
Dept. Q is now streaming on Netflix.
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Naomi May is a seasoned culture journalist and editor with over ten years’ worth of experience in shaping stories and building digital communities. After graduating with a First Class Honours from City University's prestigious Journalism course, Naomi joined the Evening Standard, where she worked across both the newspaper and website. She is now the Digital Editor at ELLE Magazine and has written features for the likes of The Guardian, Vogue, Vice and Refinery29, among many others. Naomi is also the host of the ELLE Collective book club.
