Dept Q Episode 2 Recap: Merritt’s Brother, William, Has Aphasia

While we are exposed to the unresolved disappearance of Merritt Lingard in the first episode of Dept. Q, the second episode picks up right from where it left us, except that our DCI, Carl Morck, has now decided to dive deeper into Merritt Lingard’s case. Carl and Akram try to piece together the puzzle of the moment of her disappearance, and both head off in different directions. Carl goes to a church to meet his old colleague, Furgus Dunbar, who was working with the department at the time Merritt disappeared, and he tells Carl that William, Merritt’s brother, is the best person alive to approach for information, since he was the one who last saw Merritt before she disappeared off the face of the earth. Carl and Hardy are also warming up to one another, and we see Carl drop Merritt Lingard’s case files at the hospital with Hardy.

Akram visits Rose at the desk, asking for old files on the case, and Rose is surprised that, as a civilian, Akram is assisting Carl. We get a hint as to Carl’s reputation in the department from Rose’s words; she thinks that Carl only lets people assist him when he has some use for them. However, Akram is unfazed by her comment, and he gets a lead on Merritt Lingard’s case files. Together, they embark on a journey to Egley House—a mental health facility where William resides now.

Spoilers Ahead

The welcome at Egley House is not warm. The detectives meet Dr. Wallace, who seems to be William’s local guardian, as she is for many “hopeless” patients, and she refuses to let the detectives meet with William without a warrant. She adds that William would not be of much help because of his condition called “Aphasia”–because of which he has become non-verbal and communicates only through sketches and paintings. Akram, who initially seemed to be just a perfunctory presence, is exceptionally useful—he talks to the receptionist, Maggie, and figures out the address of the caretaker, Claire Marshall, who seems to still drop by the facility with baked goods and jumpers from time to time.

From what we have seen of her before and what we see of her as she meets with the detective, Claire seems to be hyper fixated on William. In the first episode, Merritt asks her not to treat William as her “baby boy”. Claire Marsh suffers from a maternal void that she filled up with William. She is jaded towards Merritt, perhaps because she feels that Merritt got in the way of her and William’s bond—she also seems to be disappointed that, on the day of the disappearance, Merritt did not inform her that they were going away to Mhor. Quite uncanny? It leaves us contemplating the reasons for her not informing Claire, who has to travel for an hour to reach the place. Surely, Merritt was not that heartless. Claire also adds that Merritt and William have had no other surviving kin for as long as she’s known them. Perhaps our detectives have to look deeper into Merritt’s past to know what caused her to turn up at Mhor without informing Claire.

We do not see William at the Egley House when Carl visits; however, towards the end of the episode, the control of Egley House over William’s life is dramatically broken by William himself. William runs away from the facility, breaking the window and jumping out. We are left to wonder about his path and what it may mean for the bigger picture. 

The second episode deals a lot with how Carl is coping with his personal and professional lives. Carl lives in an apartment with his stepson, Jasper, and his flatmate, Martin—there is no indication that Jasper is his ward until he gets a call from Jasper’s headmistress informing him that Jasper hasn’t attended school. Carl goes home to find Jasper with a girl and is bewildered by the teen-parenting responsibilities on top of all that is going on with his life. We see him drop a voicemail to his ex-wife, Victoria, hopeful, exasperated, and drained. Carl also visits Hardy at the hospital with beer, with whom he has a lukewarm chat, partially because Carl feels responsible for Hardy’s condition. 

Ideally, the best way to know what’s psychologically haunting a person is in therapy. So, let us attempt (and fail) to unpack this at Dr. Irving’s office. Dr. Irving is more incisive in her second appointment with Carl—she wants to put things bluntly, as she says that Carl prefers while communicating. When being asked if Carl feels guilty for dragging Hardy to the crime scene, while he acted unserious, perhaps a little casual with all that was happening, Carl resorts to classic deflection: he says that they were partners. When Irving says that he was the senior officer, we see that Carl is unable to look her eye to eye, probably trying to escape the guilt once again. The second conversation becomes personal—when asked why he came back to her office, Carl says that he wanted to see Irving again, with an implied romantic implication. This is Carl’s attempt to break out of the loneliness that he has resided in ever since Victoria left; when he is spurned by Irving, who indicates her marital status by tapping on her wedding ring, Carl abruptly leaves the office. We can assume that Carl does not handle rejection very well.At the office, he meets Stephen Burns—Merritt’s supervisor, who visits him and fills him in about Merritt’s last case with Graham Finch. With Merritt’s history as a celebrated prosecutor, Carl wonders if losing the case tarnished Merritt’s career. Stephen informs him that Merritt wanted to charge Graham again with a charge for culpable homicide; we wonder if this may be a probable cause related to her disappearance. There is also a sly suggestion of Stephen’s own competition with Merritt; as Stephen says that if Merritt hadn’t disappeared, she would have had Stephen’s position by now.

With spiraling anxieties and his guilt, Carl loses his composure during the press conference where he announces the inauguration of the department and Merritt’s case being reopened as visuals of the murder site and the shootings come back to him. This is triggered by a journalist’s question as to whether he and Hardy knew the victim, Archie Allen, as a paid, confidential informer. This may play a role in resolving the Leith Park Murder Mystery, as Carl’s reaction seems to be extremely vulnerable and triggered by this question alone. 

We still do not know where Merritt is, or who she is being held captive by, or how she got there. However, we get to peek into her daily routine within the tunnel—she showers, she eats, she has a toilet paper supply. We see that Merritt is constantly monitored through cameras, and an older woman speaks to her through the speakers, assisted by a guy whose face we do not see yet. The woman tells her it is that day of the month where she gets to “eat cake”—which is probably a code for a mental turmoil they put her through every month by making her revisit her older cases where she thinks she has not done justice. On the specific day, we see her revisiting Kirsty Atkinson’s drug possession incident—where Merritt acts unempathetic and ruthless with Kirsty. She seems to be too engrossed by the Graham Finch case and wants to extract information out of her, and her dismissal of Kirsty’s state is relentless. Merritt wants Kirsty to testify in court against Graham but will not agree to suspend her sentence or believe that she is clean. In real time, Merritt admits to the guilt of putting Kirsty in prison and states that it may be the reason she is in the tunnel. However, the onlookers seem to hold this test as a kind of polygraph—they are not convinced; they think Merritt’s guilt is performative, her tears are fake and scripted, which leaves us to wonder what kind of a person Merritt is. There is a strange ambiguity that intensifies around Merritt’s motives, her character, and why she ended up in the tunnel. The “cake day” interrogation ritual hints at a twisted moral reckoning that her captors aren’t just punishing her; they are trying to rewire her conscience. Whether Merritt’s guilt is genuine or performative remains in question, but what becomes increasingly clear is that someone believes she has committed a moral crime that the law couldn’t touch.

Episode 2 of Dept. Q intensifies the enigma surrounding Merritt Lingard’s disappearance, not through dramatic revelations, but by thickening the psychological fog around its central characters. What began as a procedural case has now evolved into a layered narrative of repression, guilt, and obsession. We can only wade through the mystery and see what Episode 3 brings for us.