Dept. Q Is a Chamber Play Wearing a Procedural's Coat

The most consequential decision in Dept. Q is made in its first episode, and it is a decision about information rather than plot. Merritt Lingard, a Crown solicitor last seen on a ferry in 2020, is not dead. The show says so plainly. She is being held inside a hyperbaric chamber at an unknown location, has been for more than four years, and every scene of detective work that follows is watched by an audience that already knows the one thing the detectives do not.

That is not how a mystery is built. It is how a play is built.

Scott Frank and Chandni Lakhani created the series for Netflix from Jussi Adler-Olsen’s novel The Keeper of Lost Causes, moved the story from Copenhagen to Edinburgh, and released all nine episodes on 29 May 2025. They run between 42 and 71 minutes. Frank directed six of them; Elisa Amoruso took the middle stretch, episodes three to five. The reception was warm and mostly filed the show as a superior, Scandinavian-derived procedural with a sardonic lead, which describes the coat accurately and says nothing about what is wearing it.

Two rooms

Strip the series to its architecture and there are two rooms. The first is the basement where DCI Carl Morck, played by Matthew Goode, is assigned to run a newly created cold-case unit after an ambush at a crime scene killed a constable and left his colleague, DI James Hardy, paralysed. The second is Merritt’s chamber. Frank cuts between them for nine episodes, and the rhyme is exact: two people put out of sight by institutions that would prefer not to look at them.

What makes the rhyme productive rather than decorative is that both rooms contain an investigation into the same case. Carl works Merritt’s disappearance from the files. Merritt works it from inside the chamber, trying to deduce on whose behalf her captors might be taking revenge, testing names from her own career against what little she can observe. Merritt is running the same investigation as Carl, from the other end, with no files.

Chloe Pirrie plays those scenes as procedure rather than suffering, and that is the right call. A woman alone in a sealed space, talking, reasoning, keeping herself organised against time: the closest relative is not any other crime series. It is Beckett’s Winnie in Happy Days, buried in her mound and running through her routine because the routine is what stands between her and the fact of the mound. Pirrie finds the same discipline, and the show is patient enough to allow it.

The answer was on the wall

The best evidence that Frank built the series as architecture rather than as a trail of clues is where the answer is hidden. It is in the room. In the third episode Merritt finds an old message carved into the chamber wall, a sign that she is not its first occupant. In the ninth, youth counselling records establish that Ailsa Jennings used to lock her sons inside the same chamber. The procedural half of the show spends six episodes circling the case; the chamber half had the solution scratched into its wall.

That is also why the middle of the season sags. Episodes five to seven lean heavily on a Crown Office thread (the Lord Advocate, Stephen Burns, played by Mark Bonnar, blocking a witness’s testimony under pressure from a criminal named Finch), and every minute spent there is a minute in which the show pretends the answer might be institutional. It is not. The answer is a family. The corruption material is decently played and structurally beside the point, and in the eighth episode the plot has to reach for a confusion between two men named Sam Haig to get itself back on course, which is the one moment the machinery shows.

The other two-hander

The series has a second chamber play, and it is set in a therapist’s office. Kelly Macdonald’s Dr Rachel Irving handles Carl’s mandatory post-shooting sessions, and these scenes do something rare in television crime drama: they refuse to advance anything. Goode plays Carl as a man whose rudeness is a filing system, a way of holding every person at a fixed and manageable distance, and Macdonald plays Irving as someone who has seen that system before and is prepared to wait it out. Neither actor pushes. The sessions are staged as a contest of patience, and Macdonald wins most of them by doing less.

The unit itself is where the show is warmest. Alexej Manvelov’s Akram Salim, a Syrian former policeman who joins as a civilian employee, is the department’s most capable detective well before anyone says so, and the finale’s decision to make that official lands because the series has shown its working. Leah Byrne’s DC Rose Dickson, returning to work after a breakdown, is written a little thinly and played with real nerve.

David Ungaro’s photography and Carlos Rafael Rivera’s score (Rivera wrote the music for Frank’s Godless and The Queen’s Gambit) keep Edinburgh cold and legible rather than moody. Burntisland Docks in Fife stands in for the island of Mhòr, where the chamber is finally found.

The claim

The finale resolves the case, gets Carl shot, lets Akram end the threat, and then, three months on, has Carl blackmail Burns into funding the department properly. It is a sardonic ending and a pointed one: the institution only invests in its basement once the basement has something on it.

The season’s real achievement is formal. Dept. Q is proof that dramatic irony can drive a crime series more reliably than suspense can, and that the oldest device in theatre, letting the audience know what the characters do not, holds up over nine hours better than any twist. Netflix renewed the show in August 2025 and a second season is scheduled to shoot through the back half of this year. The risk is plain. The first season was two rooms in conversation. A second season with only the basement would be a procedural, and this show was never really one of those.