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Nobody likes DCI Carl Morck. Not his family, not strangers and certainly not his colleagues at the Edinburgh police force. On his first day back from work after surviving a bullet to the neck, he’s greeted with heavy sighs rather than cake and a card. “Do you ever stop and wonder why people hate you?” someone asks him on his return. “No,” comes the response.
Honest to a fault, Morck (Matthew Goode) is also wilfully antagonistic — a trait exacerbated by his trauma from an ambush that left his partner paralysed. So when the chief is tasked with setting up a new department dedicated to cracking unsolved cases, she’s all too happy to stick him in a basement with boxes of paperwork and a few of the station’s oddballs and rejects for company.
So begins Dept Q, a serviceable new Netflix crime thriller with a title that’s evocative of James Bond, and a premise more than a little reminiscent of Slow Horses. Created by The Queen’s Gambit showrunner Scott Frank, the nine-parter based on a series of bestselling mid-2000s Nordic noir novels. The tone is gloomy, the mood foreboding; Edinburgh’s grey gothic streets a suitably atmospheric substitute for Copenhagen.
The file that Morck eventually agrees to reopen takes him to a small island via a ferry on which a high-profile lawyer named Merritt Lingard (Chloe Pirrie) went missing and is presumed to have died four years earlier. Yet the more Morck and detective Akram (a quietly impressive Alexej Manvelov) look into the disappearance, the more they become convinced that this isn’t a cold case after all.
It is, however, a chilling one. Running in tandem with the investigation are scenes that reveal Merritt’s grim fate early on, and then gradually unravel the events that led there. Merritt, we learn, had a habit of getting on the wrong side of people — not unlike the man searching for her.
While it’s satisfying to watch an intriguing case be methodically picked apart and the life of a mysterious victim be pieced together, the show becomes increasingly overrun with backstories, flashback timelines and subplots that clutter the narrative and inhibit momentum. Dept Q might have felt less disjointed if it had a more compelling central character to hold it all together.
Morck may be the latest in a long line of brilliant bastards on TV, but he has neither the rakish charm of, say, Dr House, or the searing wit of Malcolm Tucker to redeem him. Scenes from his private life and mandated therapy sessions (featuring an underutilised Kelly Macdonald) give a sense of his vulnerability. But it doesn’t make his incessant snarkiness any less tiresome.
★★★☆☆
On Netflix now
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