Cosy crime receives a gritty do-over in the thumpingly bingable new Netflix cold-case procedural, Dept. Q. Relocating a bestselling Scandi-noir book series to overcast Edinburgh, the show suggests a big-budget take on ITV forensic thriller Unforgotten, with Matthew Goode excelling as an eccentric detective investigating the disappearance four years earlier of a criminal lawyer.
The mystery has multiple layers. When finally revealed, the truth about what happened to Merritt Lingard (Chloe Pirrie) is full of satisfying swerves, red herrings and shock revelations (your jaw will clatter open more than once). The story doubles as a redemption arc for Goode’s enthusiastically curmudgeonly DCI Morck (his name a holdover from the Danish novels). If there is a deal breaker, it is the idea that the unpleasant Morck would receive a second chance after his bad judgement results in the death of one officer and the paralysing of another – a calamity that plays out in a nerve-shredding opening scene.
In real life, so disastrous a fumble would surely spell the end of a career. But Morck remains convinced that he is a sleuthing genius even after he is busted down to a new cold case unit – the eponymous Dept. Q. Here, his first mission is to work out what happened to Merritt four years previously.
There are parallels in Goode’s performance with Gary Oldman as a mordant spook in Apple TV+’s Slow Horses. Yet where that series gives James Bond a caustic, kitchen-sink makeover, Dept. Q is in the more formulaic tradition of a downbeat cop caper, the characters are both uniformly world-weary and fuelled by mordant wit.
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Goode brings a chipper anti-charm to the mark of the ghastly Morck – it’s a distinct improvement on his appalling “Irish” rogue in 2010 hellscape romcom Leap Year. He bounces nicely off Kelly Macdonald, playing the psychologist trying to jolt him out of the guilt he feels over the maiming of his best pal in that initial shooting (the friend is now helping solve crimes from his hospital bed).
He has the perfect distraction in the form of the Lingard’s file, through which clues are scattered like confetti at a Coldplay concert. In his new basement office, Morck teams up with a Doctor Watson-esque Syrian IT expert, Akram (Alexej Manvelov), and it is when they join forces that Dept. Q achieves liftoff.
Nothing about Dept. Q is original. Morck, moreover, is such a piece of work that you initially wonder if the show might be unbearable. But the mystery threaded through the story of a cantankerous copper is deftly drawn and, episode by episode (nine in total) reels you in.
