Dept. Q, the new Netflix crime series that crawled into my basement office, knocked over my trauma binder, and whispered,
“he’s not healing, he’s compartmentalizing.”
So picture this: Matthew Goode, a man of mystery and cheekbones honed like a Doric column, stars as DCI Carl Mørck, an emotionally repressed detective exiled to a damp Edinburgh storage closet for having the audacity to feel guilt. He’s been shot, his partner’s paralyzed, and he’s one passive-aggressive eye twitch away from exploding into a cloud of sarcasm and unresolved grief. In short: my favorite genre of man.
He gets dumped into Department Q, aka “cold case hell,” aka the bureaucratic oubliette where dreams go to die. Enter:
🌀 Akram Salim, the Syrian ex-cop with the quiet competence of a haunted falcon
🌀 Rose, a Gen-Z goth admin who’s either 10 seconds from quitting or founding a cult
🌀 Rachel, his therapist, who is VERY tired of his deflection tactics
🌀 Jamie Sives in a wheelchair giving the performance of a lifetime from a living room
It’s bleak. It’s beautiful. It’s marinated in saltwater trauma and the distant cry of seagulls judging your life choices. Edinburgh doesn’t just rain, it broods. Every alley looks like a Victorian ghost crime happened there. The show is soaked in political rot, vanished women, metaphor-heavy grief, and enough emotional repression to power the National Grid. The lighting? Bisexual. The mood? Scandinavian noir but dragged through Scottish Calvinism and left to simmer in a Tupperware of guilt.
The writing? Sharp enough to leave a scar.
The pacing? Deliciously slow and unsettling like it’s daring you to pay attention.
The cases? Grim as hell and coiled like barbed wire. The dialogue? Absolutely feral, half cryptic muttering, half emotional shrapnel. And the acting?? So devastatingly precise I had to keep pausing just to *recover* from a single eyebrow twitch or a haunted inhale.
And Matthew Goode?? I did not expect this man to hit me with “dismantled ex-detective who keeps a metaphorical graveyard in his chest cavity” energy but HERE WE ARE. He’s not just sad. He’s SAD in a way that screams “I don’t deserve closure.” And the show lets him sit in it.
Akram, meanwhile, is the only adult in the room and barely holding it together. Their partnership? Full of tension and cautious loyalty and so many unspoken feelings that I’m going to need the two of them to go out for emotionally repressed pints and maybe a rooftop shouting match.
Some critics are like “Hmm the pacing is slow” and I’m like GOOD. LET ME MARINATE IN THIS MAN’S BURNING GUILT. I want my mysteries with trauma and unresolved father issues. I want “redemption is a myth and closure is earned.” I want the visual metaphor of a man dragging boxes of dead girls up the stairs.
💀 Verdict: 9/10 emotionally stunted detectives in a trench coat.
🖤 Watch it if: you like Broadchurch, Mindhunter, Dark Academia detective edition, or yelling “OH YOU POOR THING” at your screen.
🚬 Watch it if: you believe in the healing power of trauma bonding, old case files, and emotional repression.
GO WATCH IT. Just don’t expect to come out emotionally unscathed.
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