SNAPSHOT
DCI Carl Morck is a brilliant cop but terrible colleague. His razor-sharp sarcasm has made him no friends in Edinburgh police. After a shooting leaves a young pc dead, and his partner paralysed, he finds himself exiled to the basement & sole member of Department Q; a newly formed cold case unit. The department is a PR stunt, there to distract the public from the failures of an under-resourced, failing police force that is glad to see the back of him. But more by accident than design, Carl starts to build a gang of waifs & strays who have everything to prove. So, when the stone-cold trail of a prominent civil servant who disappeared several years ago starts to heat up, Carl is back doing what he does best – rattling cages and refusing to take no for an answer. Dept. Q is a series created and written and directed by American writer / filmmaker Scott Frank, screenwriter of Out of Sight, Minority Report, The Interpreter, The Lookout, Marley & Me, The Wolverine, Logan; and creator of The Queen’s Gambit & Monsieur Spade series. Written by Stephen Greenhorn, Colette Kane, & Chandni Lakhani. Adapted from the novels written by Jussi Adler-Olsen. With episodes directed by Scott Frank. Made by Flitcraft and Left Bank Pictures. Exec produced by Rob Bullock, Scott Frank, & Andy Harries. (courtesy First Showing)
The mainstream world often scorns those who don’t fit the very narrow of social acceptability.
March to the beat of your own idiosyncratic drum and you will find yourself, if not outright rejected, then at least treated as a curiosity, an oddity, an object of pitied condescension that is deemed to be irrelevant.
The thing is, and I write this as a gay nerd perpetually on the bullied outer growing up, it’s often those very misfits who can see what those more embedded in orthodoxy can’t see and it’s those unusual insights that can make the difference between something happening … and not.
Like solving a cold case for instance which is what happens in Dept. Q where a surly detective who’s fallen from grace ends up shepherding a disparate group of souls to solve long ignored crimes and I suspect they will do quite nicely because, while the world sees these kinds of people as surplus to requirements, they are, in fact, its beating heart.
Dept. Q premieres on Netflix on 29 May.