Dept. Q is just getting started—here’s where the story goes next

The first season of Dept. Q drew to a breathlessly tense close when DCI Carl Morck finally located Merritt Lingard, the long-lost man still listed as missing on police bulletins. For the viewers, the rescue felt like closure — for Morck and his team, the weighty final scene signalled only the start of another long hunt. Cold files never really freeze, and a bruised conscience often hides its own skeletons even deeper than the ones pressed into newspaper clippings.

Jussi Adler-Olsen wrote a series that coils into your mind, and Netflix stayed close, moving the frost-bitten police work to a damp Scottish coast where every scream feels half-drowned.

The script has traces of salt in the dialogue-mike crackles, rain-black asphalt, word choices that sting like a long sigh at the end of a shift. Carl, shoulder-rolled by Matthew Goode with equal parts ache and stubborn courage, refuses the redemptive soundtrack TV detectives usually claim. If the first run was a briefing, the second looks determined to riffle through the darkest file folders still stuck to the station floor.

Netflix has stayed quiet about a second season, yet the steady climb in both ratings and social-media chatter practically dares the network to say yes. If the script sticks to the Dept. Q books, the next batch of episodes will plunge into territory that feels more intimate and considerably darker than anything audiences have seen so far.

A secret that could destroy the elite

Season two will probably borrow from Disgrace, the second Adler-Olsen book. In that yarn, a brother and sister are butchered in a lonelier-than-usual summer cottage. The original headlines pointed a smug finger at a clutch of gilded boarding-school seniors, and the file was zipped shut.

A flick of bureaucracy later, the dust lid is pulled and everything wobbles. One suspected teenager, Kimmie Lassen, opted for low-wattage living long ago and now sits on a secret that could turn the whole charade upside-down.

She is not crouched in the bushes out of terror, she stays quiet because the answer costs too much. As Carl opens the drawer again, he steps into a money-drenched cat-and-mouse, watching proof-and occasionally witnesses-skip off into the dark.

The Dept. Q team’s own pasts begin to surface

A murder case sets the main wheels in motion, yet the real cliffhanger might spring from Dept. Q's own fraying nerves. Carl's growing alliance with the police shrinks. Dr. Rachel Irving lit up the first run of episodes, and casual flashes of romance now tease a subplot borrowed almost blow-for-blow from the Dept. Q books. Desire offers no guarantee, however — older wounds are still oozing, and sooner or later they'll yank him under.

Trending

Akram Salim's quick leap to Detective Inspector looks like a straight-up victory, yet the rank can carry its own entanglements. Back in season one, nobody really peeled back his history, and the printed version of the character still drapes heavy shadows over a refugee past he refuses to talk about.

Rose lives in lighter pixels. Her code can crack anything in minutes, and rumor has it a twin sister sits trapped at the other end of that algorithm. Some late chapters even start whispering about a mind that sometimes forgets which of the two is in charge. The harder the squad pushes into other people's lives, the faster their own skeletons appear in the rear-view.

×

Was this article helpful?

Thank You for feedback