The New Netflix Show From the Writer-Director of <em>The Queen's Gambit</em> Is Gorgeous, Well Acted, and Stupid
This article contains spoilers for Netflix's Dept. Q.
Thrillers and murder mysteries often get knocked for neglecting character and style in favor of plot, but the opposite is the case with the new Netflix series Dept. Q, based on a series of books by the Danish crime novelist Jussi Adler-Olsen. Created by Scott Frank—whose adaptation of Walter Tevis' The Queen's Gambit applied the same elegant attention to a far superior novel — Dept. Q is beautifully shot, smartly written, and replete with fine performances, all in service of a rather stupid story.
Adler-Olsen's bestselling but decidedly mid novel series, beginning with 2007's The Keeper of Lost Causes , features a surely Copenhagen police detective, Carl Mørck, who is assigned to a new cold case department after he instigates a raid that leaves one policeman dead and his partner disabled. The Netflix series transposes the setting to Edinburgh, with Matthew Goode cast as Morck, now an Englishman among a sea of Scots, who seems to further sully his mood. In the first episode, Carl sulks through a mandatory consultation with psychologist Rachel Irving (Kelly Macdonald), who notes that his “superiority complex” has been recorded in his official file. While there ought to be a moratorium on the shopworn detective show trope of the forced therapy session, Rachel gives as good as she gets, at one point decamping to her desk to eat a sandwich after her patient insists that he's perfectly fine.
A pair of police department misfits is assigned to support Carl in his basement office—Rose (the irresistible Leah Byrne) and Akram (Alexej Manvelov), a Syrian refugee whose manifold and sometimes disturbing skills provide one of the series' running jokes: Just what did the unflappable Akram do back in his homeland? Carl has a tough boss, played by Kate Dickie, who berates him for his bad attitude but keeps him on because he's so good at the job, and a messy domestic situation that, as is so often the case with detective shows, provides an occasional and unwelcome diversion from the main investigation. Carl's assholery would be more irritating if the series took him at all seriously, as a nobly brooding crusader for justice, say. Instead, everyone around him shrugs his snits off as if he were a misbehaving teenager.
The first episode intercuts Carl's story with that of Merritt Lingard (Chloe Pirrie), a driven prosecutor who loses a big case when she fails to convince a jury that a local crime lord murdered his wife. This suggests that Merritt, too, will soon be joining Department Q. The twist comes when Merritt disappears while taking a ferry with her mentally disabled brother, and viewers learn that this event occurred four years prior to the formation of the cold case department. Merritt's missing-person case, it turns out, is the first mystery the department will set out to solve. Although she is widely presumed to be dead, the episode's final scene reveals Merritt to be imprisoned in a metal cylinder, a hyperbaric oxygen chamber, controlled by shadowy figures who address her with processed voices over a loudspeaker.
It's with this bizarre form of torture—Merritt's tormenters keep turning up the air pressure while grilling her about all the people she's wronged—that Dept. Q morphs from a somewhat clichéd but well-mounted detective story to something more baroque and silly. It soon becomes obvious who has kidnapped Merritt, so watching the detectives chase down red herrings feels pointless. Adler-Olsen, who likes to sketch out his female characters by describing their breasts, partakes of the sadism of a serial-killer thriller without deploying an actual serial killer. The Netflix series doesn't linger as lovingly over Merritt's suffering as the novel does, but this only makes the preposterous nature of her captivity more glaring.
Meanwhile, the rest of Dept. Q gets richer and more enjoyable. Even Carl's sessions with Rachel can be fun. “Aren't you always pissed off at everyone,” she asks him, then adds with the theatrically exasperated sigh of a 13-year-old, “because you're so much smarter?” Bubbly Rose and the enigmatic Akram brighten every scene they appear in. Carl's old partner (Jamie Sives) takes it upon himself to mentor Rose from his hospital bed. “We don't know what happened to Merritt,” he tells her, “but she existed in the world. She caused ripples with people, institutions, and these ripples in turn caused patterns in her life. It can be useful to see if these patterns change after one ceases to exist.” It's not often that a detective series pays much attention to any actual theory of detection, let alone expresses it so eloquently.
The more authentic the rest of Dept. Q comes to feel, the more ludicrous and rudimentary the central “mystery” appears. How is a nasty old lady living in a trailer on a derelict waterfront able to afford to run a hyperbaric chamber all day every day for four years, without anyone noticing? Who holds a person captive for that long—four years of feeding, washing, disposing of waste, etc.—solely for revenge? Even the Count of Monte Cristo would draw from that routine. How does Merritt not go mad in what's essentially solitary confinement? This element of the plot feels as if it belongs to an entirely different show, the kind of show that couldn't care less about making Carl and his colleagues plausible people living believable and engaging lives.
A great amount of talent went into Dept. Q, and the best parts of the series—the fresh supporting characters, the humor, the damp stony streets of Edinburgh—would naturally carry over to a second season. To make the series unmissable, Frank needs only Jettison Adler-Olsen's crude and creepy plots and come up with some of his own. He's certainly clever enough to do better.
