TV Pick of the Week: Department Q - review by Yvette Huddleston
Department Q Netflix, review by Yvette Huddleston
Adapted from the Danish crime writer Jussi Adler-Olsen’s bestselling novels, this gritty psychological thriller, relocated to Edinburgh, provides an excellent opportunity for Matthew Goode to take on a role that’s quite different to those we are used to seeing him in.
He plays arrogant, self-centred detective Carl Morck, an Englishman living in Scotland, extremely good at his job but very bad at getting along with people, whose life and career take a sudden sharp downturn. Following a disastrous incident involving a shooting at a crime scene which has left a young uniformed officer dead, Carl with a gunshot wound in the neck and his partner paralysed from the waist down, his boss (Kate Dickie) assigns him to head up a new cold case department. Known as Department Q, it is located in a disused basement area of the police HQ and at first Carl is the only member of the department. He is then given two assistants – young detective Rose (Leah Byrne), who is recovering from a breakdown, and Syrian refugee and former police officer Akram Salim (Alexej Manvelov).
Their first case is to look into the disappearance of ambitious young advocate Merritt Linguard (Chloe Pirrie) who has been missing for four years. Linguard was last seen on a ferry to the island of Mohr with her disabled brother William (Tom Bulpett) who is non-verbal and now lives in an institution. It is assumed that Merrit either fell off the boat or was pushed but her body has never been found. Morck and his team, which also includes his former partner DI James Hardy (Jamie Sives) contributing from his hospital bed, start following various leads including a possible link to a high profile case she had been working on when she disappeared and which she may have talked about to a journalist she was seeing at the time – he can’t help them as he died in a climbing accident at around the same time she went missing.
While the investigation progresses slowly, Morck has other things to deal with including keeping mandated appointments with police therapist Dr Rachel Irving (Kelly Macdonald). His home life is no less complicated. He has custody of his teenage stepson Jasper (Aaron McVeigh) after the breakdown of his marriage to the boy’s mother. The relationship is tense and not helped by the fact that Carl is barely able to look after himself, let alone anyone else. Totally compelling viewing.