Dept. Q

The Echoes in the Architecture

Scott Frank shoots cities like they’re mindsets. In *The Queen's Gambit*, hotel rooms and hallways became hard little boxes that squeezed the life out of people. With *Dept. Q*, his Netflix adaptation of Jussi Adler-Olsen’s Danish thrillers, made with co-creator Chandni Lakhani, he shifts the misery from Copenhagen to Edinburgh and barely has to force the metaphor. The city already looks like a haunted thought. Those Gothic spires, the underground vaults, the heavy stone everywhere—it all suggests a place where things get buried and stay buried. Frank wisely avoids bathing everything in fake noir blue. He just lets the natural, slate-grey Scottish light do its job. Edinburgh always looks like it’s waiting for rain.



At the bottom of that architecture sits Detective Chief Inspector Carl Morck, shoved into a basement office to front a new cold case unit after a disastrous raid left his partner paralyzed and another officer dead. Matthew Goode is a pretty startling piece of casting here. He usually plays polished men whose collars might as well be part of their skeletons. In *Dept. Q*, he turns himself inside out. The beard is rough, the posture worse. He looks like his own skin is bothering him. Morck is vain, sharp, and permanently angry, but the anger mostly reads as a crude brace strapped over survivor’s guilt. Watch what Goode does with something as simple as holding a coffee cup early on—fingers clamped too tightly, shoulders up near his ears, body waiting for another bullet that isn’t coming. The script says he’s difficult. Goode makes him look scared.



Of course the show invites *Slow Horses* comparisons. Put one disgraced investigator in a shabby office with an oddball team and people are going to reach for the nearest reference point. Jonathan Glazier of Jonathan Glazier Media wasn’t wrong when he wrote that, even without the savage comic edge of the Gary Oldman series, "it has a distinct voice, compelling cold cases, and a beautifully bleak style." A lot of that voice comes from Alexej Manvelov as Akram Salim, a former Syrian policeman who more or less muscles his way into becoming Morck’s civilian partner. Manvelov gives Akram a calm, observant steadiness that keeps puncturing Morck’s self-mythology. He doesn’t push back loudly. He just refuses to be managed. Their chemistry is the real hook here.

There’s one small, sad scene from the first half of the season that stuck with me more than any twist. Morck and Akram stand in front of the inevitable murder board, working through the four-year-old disappearance of Crown prosecutor Merritt Lingard. Chloe Pirrie plays Merritt in flashbacks with a brittle, almost weaponized poise. Morck doesn’t speak much in the moment. He just stares at her photograph while the building hums around him. Dust hangs in the fluorescent light. The whole scene feels drained of television glamour. These aren’t brilliant detectives theatrically cracking a case. They’re two damaged men spending their time inside the wreckage of another damaged life.



If you need constant momentum, *Dept. Q* may test your patience. It likes pauses. It likes silence. I did too. The show never pretends that solving a cold case repairs what was broken. It just finds some grace in the fact that, eventually, somebody bothered to go back and look.