Dept. Q Episode 1 Recap: The Disappearance Of Merritt Lingard

Crime drama has become a comfort genre for many—with its brooding ambience of gloom and enigmatic cues to chase, it guides your mind into an immersive world. A world where there are more grays than there are blacks and whites—especially for notable series like True Detective or Mindhunter–psychological gray spaces are the thing that really work for viewers trying to identify their own demons with on-screen examples, perhaps. Ones that are unspeakable but have to be reckoned with at the end of the day if you want to find acceptance, peace, and resolution. If we were to define these psychologically layered crime dramas as a standalone genre, with Adolescence being the latest, stunning addition to it, Dept. Q definitely feels like a show that carries the genre forward with its gripping tale of murders, missing people, and a moody mystery set against the backdrop of a gloomy Scotland. 

Based on Jussi Adler-Olsen’s Nordic noir series of ten novellas, Dept. Q is a Scottish adaptation that starts with The Keeper of Lost Causes and ends with Locked In. The original books were set in Copenhagen; however, the Netflix edition chooses Edinburgh (for the most part) to be the playground for Detective Agent Carl Morck, who is demoted to handle a department bogged down with years of cold cases after he drags himself and his colleague James Hardy into a shooting mishap at a crime scene. Brooding, somber, and ridden with survivor’s guilt after his friend was shot and paralyzed while he still walks this earth, struggling with the abandonment trauma from his wife, Victoria, leaving him, and dealing with a rookie teenage stepson called Jasper, Carl Morck is a soul that many would root for. He is rough at the edges but driven by his conscience. When he is assigned to a department in the basement of the office, he finds the case of Merritt Lingard, a prosecutor who went missing four years ago with no trace of a body. In Morck’s hands, the case is reopened, and the series becomes an inquest for many threads waiting to be tied together to form a legible tapestry. Let us take a look at what happens in the first episode.

Spoilers Ahead

Dept. Q episode 1 begins with footage from a bodycam on an investigative officer, filming DI Carl Morck and James Hardy at the crime scene. Carl looks pretty unperturbed by the violent scene of a man stabbed through his head, and asks the apprehensive officer to take a look around even before the team arrives. As they look around the place, a man fully dressed in black appears at the door and shoots the three of them point-blank. The man who was filming, P.C. Anderson is dead. The camera focuses on two fallen officers—Morck and Hardy. This is the case of the Leith Park Murder—one among the few mysteries that is waiting to be resolved in the show. Carl makes a recovery and is back in the department, but Moira, the department chief, has taken this case off his hands; it is now assigned to Clark. Carl has an unconventional way of working—and he still tries to pitch in with his clues, like identifying the McDonald’s in the locality and checking its footage because a McDonald’s box was found near the car at Leith Park. However, this isn’t sitting well in the department—and it is probably also Carl’s way of bargaining with his own guilt over Hardy’s paralytic injury that has kept him on a hospital bed. Carl is in mandatory therapy and proving to stonewall Dr. Irving, leading nowhere with his guilt. At the same time, Moira is told by her superiors from the Crown Office that they are planning to assign her a new department with years of cold cases that have laid untouched. With Carl’s erratic measures and unconventional ways of working, Moira decides to assign Carl to the department and sends Akram, a Syrian man from the IT department, to assist him. Initially, it feels like the show is dealing with the root causes and investigation of the Leith Park Murder, but its narrative moves in a tunnel-like way to the cold case of Merritt Lingard, whose parallel plot we were following subsequently.

We are introduced to Merritt Lingard in a courtroom—a Scottish prosecutor in the Graham Finch case who is questioning Graham Finch on trial. Merritt Lingard is fiery, does not care for the rules, and accuses Graham Finch of killing his wife by pushing her off a staircase. An allegation such as that is surely to be met with an objection from the defending lawyer, but Graham Finch gives a heart-wrenching monologue about how he loved his wife; the court is adjourned, and later outside, Lord Advocate Stephen Burns explains to Merritt why the lawyer did not step in: Merritt’s questioning gave Graham an opportunity to profess his love in front of the jury members, who now are very likely swayed to his side. Clearly, Merritt’s ways are unconventional—almost as if a counterpart to Carl’s ways. We are intrigued to see what could be the convergence point of the parallel plotlines.We take a closer look at Merritt’s personal life—her failure as a prosecutor troubles her—not because of a lack of fame, but for the hateful messages she receives in the mail. With the increasing hate mail in her inbox, she feels like she is being watched as she sits by the window and drinks, and the mail seems to describe it. Merritt lives with her brother William, who is neurodivergent, and has a dedicated caretaker called Claire who takes care of William in Merritt’s absence. Aggrieved by her recent failure, Merritt decides to go to Mohr with William to take her mind off things. As they are travelling in the ferry, Merritt throws her phone off the deck, and then William throws his hat in right after. He subsequently wants to jump in to fetch it back, and when Merritt tries to stop him, he smacks her in the face. Merritt, shocked, sad, and resigned, is seen to be walking away from her brother. That was the last time Merritt was seen—on the ferry, walking away—before she disappeared from the face of the earth. 

Among the thousands of unopened cases, Akram spots Merritt’s case and pitches it to Carl. It is probably the law of attraction—what you want to find finds you. Hesitant at first, Carl Morck decides to reopen the case. Up until the point that Akram peeps in the archives, it looked like Merritt’s story was happening real-time, alongside the Leith Murder timeline; however, the show is crafty in its way of seamlessly alternating between two timelines until one is introduced in the other, wrapped in the form of a perfectly unresolved case file. At the end of Dept. Q episode 1, almost a symbolic view of a tunnel comes into view—we get a glimpse of Merritt, in today’s timeline, living in an industrial-looking metal tunnel enclosure under a glaring red light. The walls of the tunnel are covered with crayon scribbles of Merritt’s failures that she has left on the metal walls of the enclosure; it is almost as if her conscience is suffocating under the weight of all the people she could not bring justice to, except that it is imprisoning her not only metaphorically, but in a pretty literal sense. Merritt routinely wakes up as the camera zooms out, and we see a control room with two shady figures sitting and waiting for her to wake up. 

The first episode of Dept. Q is heavy in its themes and keeps you hooked despite its many characters and alternating plotline. The tunnel in the end feels like how the narrative treats its plotlines—worming its way into one another. While you are rooting for Carl or Merritt, or both of them, you are eager to find out what happens when Detective Carl starts on his journey to get to the bottom of Merritt Lingard’s disappearance. Carl Morck and Merritt Lingard emerge as parallel figures who are haunted by guilt, failure, and unresolved trauma. By the end of episode one, the past and present converge like the intersecting beams of two flashlights in the dark, setting up a moody, melancholic world in the show that places Merritt Lingard’s disappearance at its center.