Dept. Q: Chloe Pirrie on the intense research behind Merritt Lingard’s haunting story

Dept. Q is a crime show that involves unsolvable cases and a brilliant but ruthless detective. This crime show, however, stands apart from the rest in this genre because of how it investigates cold cases. It does not let emotions take a back seat and so it's not afraid to ask the uncomfortable questions.

It touches upon the failure of justice and the reality of trauma. It also touches upon truths that are burried but not forgotten. And that's how Dept. Q does something out of the box.

At the heart of all this bleakness is a beauty. And that's humanity. Everyone in Dept. Q is hurting. Everyone’s carrying something they’ve buried deep. The reasons vary from survival to revenge. And sometimes they are burried just because the world never gave them a space to grieve.

Amidst all this is Merritt Lingard.

She is a brilliant lawyer who deals in logic more than emotion. She's the kind of woman who walks into a room and already knows how she'd dismantle the argument. Her love for her brother knows no bounds. And that gives her a soft touch.

Chloe Pirrie plays the role of Merritt Lingard in Dept. Q. She shared in an interview with RadioTimes.com that she had to "research about the pressure chambers" to bring her character to life.

Let’s get right into it.

Dept. Q: Chloe Pirrie had to do some intense research to become Merritt Lingard

Merritt Lingard is kidnapped and her sudden disappearance is assumed to be her death in Dept. Q.

Detective Chief Inspector Carl Morck needs to revive his career after being shot at while investigating a case. He ends up heading a special branch with just one person other than him. That's Akram, who seems to be pretty interesting with his skills but is also quite mysterious. Akram picks up Merritt Lingard's case to be the first one they'd work on.

Nobody is certain if Merritt is even alive. Akram wants to believe she is. Soon, it is revealed that he was right. She is, indeed, alive but trapped in a gas chamber by an old lady and a boy.

Chloe Pirrie in Dept. Q carries the descent of a person built on control and clarity fall into darkness with a kind of grace that's almost terrifying because of how well she portrays it.

But she knew that playing Merritt Langard in Dept. Q was not going to be easy. She knew she had to get it right. She was stepping into the mind of someone who had been through a psychological war. And to do that authentically, she immersed herself in a world that most of us would rather look away from.

In her own words to RadioTimes.com, she said:

"I did a lot of research about the pressure chambers and stuff like that. I also did a lot of research about solitary confinement and just reading accounts of it, which were obviously quite affecting. There's a few websites that are dedicated to voices of people who are in captivity currently or have experienced it in various different ways, whether they're in prison or whether they're being held in some other way. So I read a lot of accounts of what starts to happen to both your mind and body and the two in tandem, and how one affects the other. And that was all really rich, because then the specificity of what type of pain you're in and whether your sense of reality and what types of things start to happen and become unbearable. What becomes unbearable is sometimes not the obvious things. So that was fascinating and quite awful to read in many ways."

Chloe internalized those stories and the pain in Dept. Q. She combed through voices of survivors, people who’ve lived through solitary confinement or captivity, trying to understand how their bodies betrayed them, how their minds tried to protect them, and how the two sometimes clashed.

And that’s what makes her portrayal of Merritt so real.

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