By: Alex Tilton

The goal of a detective story is to keep the audience engaged without giving away whodunnit. It can’t be impossible to figure out, and it can’t be too easy either. Department Q somehow manages to do a good job of this and still disappointed me with the ending. The acting, writing, locations, production value and pacing are all excellent. No complaints there. My complaint, as per usual, is with character motivations. Spoilers ahead.

Department Q is the story of Detective Chief Inspector Carl Mork (played by Matthew Goode). He’s an Englishman working in Scotland to solve a cold case of a missing prosecutor named Merrit Lingard who vanished while on a ferry boat traveling from the Scottish mainland to the island where she grew up, in the company of her mentally handicapped brother William. Mork is recovering from an attempt on his life that got his partner paralyzed and a young patrolman killed. His boss, superintendent Moira Jacobson (played by Kate Dickie), is eager for a larger budget and accepts a proposal from the Lord Advocate (Scotland’s Attorney General) to investigate cold cases which provide good optics for public relations. 

Jacobson wants to use the budget money for current cases and so assigns Mork to work on the cold cases by himself with minimal resources. Mork extracts more assets from Jacobson and sets to work picking a case with the help of his new assistant, a refugee named Akram, who may or may not have been a Syrian secret police agent before emigrating to Scotland. Akram is highly capable and intelligent and badly wants more challenging work. Mork subsequently acquires the help of Rose, a detective on light duty while recovering from a traumatic incident of her own. Mork’s disabled former partner James, desperate for a way to contribute, rounds out the team by doing research from his hospital bed. We learn that Merrit was a very successful, and somewhat ruthless prosecutor. Not an innocent or sympathetic person by any means.

The detectives assume the most likely motive was revenge and begin accordingly, but they also investigate her reasons for making the trip where she vanished and who she might’ve been going to visit. We learn that her brother wasn’t born disabled, he was injured during a break-in where Merrit’s high school boyfriend tried to rob the house. And that the boyfriend died trying to escape from the police. We also learn that when she disappeared, Merrit was secretly dating an investigative reporter. Later we learn that Merrit herself planted the idea for the robbery in her boyfriend’s head. Although she was quick to tell him to not actually do it, she first told him when he could expect the building to be empty and the precise location of the jewels. She also told him they could run away together.

Throughout the series we are occasionally shown Merrit being held captive in a large old decompression chamber. Her captors occasionally make her guess why she’s there, and after four years she still hasn’t figured it out. But like the detectives trying to find her, Merrit assumes it’s work related. We are shown that one of the villains is an older woman, whose face we get to see. The other is a man who’s face we never see. From this we know two things: we’ve never seen the woman in any other context, or we would recognize her. And we have seen the man before, or else they would show us his face. 

The team uncovers a lot of intrigue and conspiracy related to cases she was working on, but ultimately none of this has anything to do with her kidnapping. We are also shown flashbacks of Merrit growing up on her small Scottish island and desperately wishing she could move away from that dead-end life and from her father with whom she has never gotten along. 

This is where I got frustrated.

The villains turn out to be the mother and brother of Merrit’s dead high school boyfriend. The brother is a psychopath who’d been in and out of trouble his whole life and the mother is almost as bad. He killed and assumed the identity of the investigative reporter in order to get close to Merrit, because he and his equally disturbed mother both blame Merrit for his death.

On one hand, this would only make sense as motive for violently crazy people (which they are). On the other hand I can kinda see it. When they tell her, Merrit angrily denies any responsibility, which is consistent with her personality. But the problem with that reaction is that it completely killed my sympathy for her. Yes, Merrit did tell her boyfriend not to rob the house…right after she told him in great detail exactly how to rob the house. She definitely has some responsibility here. And it’s especially hypocritical coming from a prosecutor of all people.

I appreciate complex characters; a pure and innocent Merrit would’ve been boring. But she takes zero ownership of a problem she helped create so she’s impossible to like. She’s only innocent in the most technical sense, but in her mind that’s all that matters.

There’s also a B plot involving the members of Mork’s team coming to terms with their own traumas. It’s well done, and, importantly, it’s relatively brief. It’s used to make the protagonists more interesting and to give the audience a break from the relentless pursuit of the case, which is the correct way of using a B plot. At no point does it get dull or plodding. Indeed, the B plot seems to know exactly what it is and stays in its lane at all times. Well done.

Overall the show was very good. I intend to watch the upcoming second season. But I really, really wish they’d found a way to stick the ending.