We do tend to lose our patience with shows that take time to set up its characters and situation. But there are times where the wait was worth it. A new crime thriller from Scotland is one of those shows.
Opening Shot: Body cam footage from a patrol cop following two detectives as they examine a man who was stabbed in the head. One of the detectives is a complete jerk. Then the patrol cop turns around, sees a man in a ski mask and is shot in the neck. The detectives are also hit by the bullet exiting the patrol officer’s neck.
The Gist: The shooting killed the patrol cop, PC Anderson (Angus Yellowlees); one of the detectives, DI James Hardy (Jamie Sives), was left paralyzed. The other detective, DCI Carl Morck (Matthew Goode), seems to have survived the shooting mostly intact, even though the bullet went through his neck. Months later, he’s ready to come back to work, but as we see in a therapy session with Dr. Rachel Irving (Kelly Macdonald), the shooting hasn’t exactly made him any less of a jerk.
Morck’s boss, Moira Jacobson (Kate Dickie), finds out from the higher ups at the Scottish police that the cabinet secretary wants to establish a new department that solves cold cases, citing the optics of a previous case that was recently solved. It comes with a huge budget. But Jacobson thinks the news serves two purposes: It gives her department some much-needed money and it gets Morck out of her hair. She puts him in charge of this one-man cold case department, putting him in a dingy basement office on Level Q.
In the meantime, Merritt Lingard (Chloe Pirrie) is representing the Crown on a high-profile murder case, and it isn’t going well. Her colleagues think she’s not experienced enough for the case, and the faith of her boss, Stephen Burns (Mark Bonnar), is wavering. She’s also getting anonymous threats via text message. She also tries to shield all of this from her developmentally disabled brother William (Tom Bulpett).
Back at the police headquarters in Edinburgh, DC Rose Dickson (Leah Byrne) brings down boxes of evidence for Morck to go through; all he needs to do is pick one to investigate. When he complains to Jacobson that he needs help, Akram Salim (Alexej Manveldv), a part-time IT contractor from Syria, is sent to the basement. Morck eventually figures out that Salim is adept at going through the files, and allows him to pick the first case, which is of a woman who went missing four years prior.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Dept. Q, written by Scott Frank (The Queen’s Gambit) and Chandni Lakhani, gave us strong Slow Horses vibes.
Our Take: The first episode of Dept. Q is over an hour long, and it takes that time to establish what it really is by showing us what it won’t be. Sure, Morck is an asshole; his coworkers think he’s an asshole, his boss thinks he’s an asshole, and his son thinks he’s an asshole. His therapist is on the fence. The only one who doesn’t is his former partner Hardy, but he has his own difficulties to deal with.
During the first half of the first episode, you think that Morck is going to be involved in solving the shooting that killed Anderson and left Hardy paralyzed. There is still going to be an element of that, but for the most part Morck and his ragtag crew are going to be involved in solving this woman’s disappearance. And, while there is a bit of a procedural aspect to this story, it’ll likely lean on the disparate personalities involved.
Goode sets the tone as Morck, who seems to be happiest in one of two situations: When he’s making other people’s lives miserable and when he’s arguing about old soccer matches. But Goode shows that Morck is also self-aware about how shitty he is to people, and he’s either accepted this fact about himself or just doesn’t care. He’s not turning a new leaf after being shot. But there’s a humanity to Morck’s shittiness that makes him get deeply involved in his cases.
We also get the feeling that, given Salim’s history, he will not be all that fazed by Morck’s dismissive nature, which of course makes him the perfect complement to the grouchy detective.
The last few minutes of the episode is when we get the inevitable tie between Morck’s and Merritt’s stories, and it included a genuine twist we didn’t see coming. But that twist seemed to be earned, for the most part, and we’re looking forward to seeing how that plays out.
Sex and Skin: Nothing in the first episode.
Parting Shot: We see the missing woman in a bunker, and that bunker is in a warehouse, being overseen by a mysterious figure.
Sleeper Star: We genuinely laughed when Kelly Macdonald’s character, Dr. Irving, sits at her desk and opens her lunch, exasperated with Morck’s stonewalling. The scenes between the two will be fun to watch.
Most Pilot-y Line: When Morck sees Jacobson directing her squad to unpack all new computers and flat-screen TVs, it’s interesting that he snarks about how his boss is using the budget, but doesn’t completely call her out on it.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Dept. Q spends a lot of its first episode in misdirection mode, but by the end it has set up an intriguing case that’s being followed by an interesting-to-watch group of cops.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.