Dept. Q, review: Netflix's Edinburgh-set answer to Slow Horses
New crime drama Dept. Q (Netflix), is based on a series of novels by the Danish author Jussi Adler-Olsen. Except it's not, not really. You don't have to watch more than about two minutes of it to realise that the TV adaptation is based, or at least heavily influenced by, Apple TV+'s Slow Horses.
The Dept. Q of the title is a new cold case unit in the Edinburgh police force that is really a PR exercise to drum up some funding for the real police there. It's not a department, it's a place to secrete washed-up misanthropes like DCI Carl Morck (Matthew Goode) in a literal grimy basement where no one has to look at them. For Dept. Q, read Slough House, the dumping ground for threadbare spies in Slow Horses. For Carl Morck, read Jackson Lamb.
Both are the epitome of damaged goods. In Morck's case, the damage appears to have come from being shot in the face, in an incident that claimed the life of a young sergeant and the legs of his friend and partner. His response has been to double down on his general loathing for all mankind. Morck hates everyone, and everyone hates Morck.
But not for long. The narrative path for both a Jackson Lamb and a Carl Morck involves a softening. Over nine hours and one really nasty case, and thanks to a mordant wit, we do, of course, come round to Morck as we learn why he is as he is and what happened in the past to make him so. Naturally, he's also kind of brilliant at what he does.
In all of the above, therefore, Dept. Q offers little that's new, but it has two things in its favour. Firstly, I'm still not sure how many people have seen Slow Horses, because it's on Apple TV+ and no one knows how many people watch that. There's every chance that Carl Morck and his team of ne'er-do-wells fighting evil, as well as a system that has cast them aside, will seem like the best idea ever committed to telly.
Secondly, and more importantly, Dept. Q is very well done. Goode, more often seen as a buttoned-up toff (in Downton Abbey and The Crown), plays wonderfully well against type as an unbuttoned scruff. His team of misfits are well cast and well-used, with Alexej Manvelov as Akram Malik particularly impressive – he's a former Syrian policeman who fled to the UK and somehow wends his way from the IT department to Morck's sidekick.
And then there's the case that runs throughout the series, or rather the multiple cases. There's the mystery of the missing prosecutor, the mystery of who shot Morck and his buddy, and the mystery of why police departments have such large, unused basements going spare for office space.
As you'd expect, writer Scott Frank, who made The Queen's Gambit for Netflix, marshals the whole thing like a maestro, zooming in on dabs of Morck's home life (not good), jumping over to his PTSD sessions with a psychiatrist played by Kelly Macdonald, then coming back to warm up the show's central cold case.
If you'd been wondering what happened to Scandi noir, all brutal and gloomy, well, here it is – it just went away, popped into Slough House for some tips and was next seen alive and well in Scotland.
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