Dept. Q Episode 4 Explained: ‘S’

Dept. Q Season 1 Episode 4 Recap and Review

What happened in Dept. Q Episode 4?

A lot. This episode confirmed the accuracy of Morck and Akram’s recreation at the boat. Merritt was abducted at the parking space after she went down to retrieve William’s hat. The Q squad also uncovered some interesting things that pushed the investigation forward.

🔎Merritt had and used a credit card under her mother’s name, Lila Graham.

🔎The last man she was with at the hotel she used with her lovers was a Sam Haig. According to Merritt’s abductor, Sam Haig was dead, and it was because of her.

🔎The one time that Merritt returned to Mhòr after the attack on William was to attend Harry Jennings’s funeral, the same Harry Jennings who attacked William according to the police. 

Meanwhile, Morck had to walk Bruce and his team toward the slow realisation that there were two people involved in the Leith Park shooting. 

Case updates

Leith Park shooting

Bruce and his team followed Morck’s advice to check the McDonad’s CCTV and confirmed that there was indeed a man who bought the same food they found at the scene. Morck now had a firmer theory than he did before, that there were two men involved in the incident – the guy who waited outside with the McDonald’s takeout and the guy who waited inside. Given the time stamps, the guy outside would not have had enough time to go inside and wait to shoot before PC Anderson arrived. 

When Morck and Hardy got there, Morck noticed that there was a chair in front of the back door. His familiarity with the layout of the place told him there would have been bins piled out back. For someone to come in, they would have had to move the bins, open the door, and move the chair – Morck and Hardy would have heard that. But Bruce confirmed that the chair was moved and the bins were knocked over. This meant that the shooter went out, not in, after the shooting.

Something else that Bruce and his team did not consider – the witness saw someone get into the Ford. On which side of the car did that person get in? They have yet to ask her this.

Merritt Lingard’s Disappearance 

Please refer to the summary above or the detailed version below.

Graham Finch Murder Case

None in this episode.

Full recap and review

As good an investigator Morck was, as poetic and accurate that ripples and patterns lesson he taught Hardy, he was not always right. In this case, it was amongst evidence that he dismissed that Akram found their next important clue.

Boxes upon boxes of Merritt’s case work arrived last episode. Morck took one look at the massive paperwork and instructed his team to keep them for a week, then return them save for the last five cases she worked on. Akram wanted to go through them, and he did. Amongst the multitude of case files was a flower shop note, ostensibly from a lover with the initial ‘S’.

Now who were the people with the ‘S’ initials in Merritt’s life? There was Sabine, her assistant who seemed to be the only one outside of her brother that she got along with. There was Stephen Burns, the Lord Advocate, who continued to give squirrelly vibes. Then there was Sam Haig, whose name the Q squad found via Merritt’s old lover and colleague, Liam Taylor. 

Sam Haig was also the name Merritt gave on her monthly why are you here interrogation. Sam had been her lover. According to Merritt, she used him, she was unkind to him. Merritt’s captor said that was not the right name, but because of her, Sam Haig was dead. 

Taking note of these parallels between what was happening in the Q squad’s investigation and what Merritt was going through within her prison has been one of the joys of this slow watching of Dept. Q. In the same episode where Akram gently prodded Sabine about Merritt being a survivor, we saw Merritt with blood all over her sweater, likely from nosebleeds after her captors increased the pressure in the hyperbaric chamber. We saw her tortured with sound. We saw her male captor send her what looked like a thin nightie so she could change out of her bloody clothing. Merritt would shiver, she would scream, but she kept her defiance that had been the hallmark of her life. From the beginning, just from her case file, Akram thought she was alive. He indulged in a bit of confirmation bias with Sabine, but he read Merritt correctly. 

It was through a Sam Haig flashback that the reason behind Merritt’s decision to board that ferry to Mhòr became a bit murkier. Initially, it appeared to be a response to William crying and hitting his head against the wall after drawing their father’s boat and looking at a photo of Merritt and William in their teens. Here, however, we saw that Merritt had already decided to go see her father even before she came home and found her brother in that state. Claire’s text only read, ‘Please come home. William needs you.’ Did Merritt already know what that was about? Had William been asking to see their father?

Morck posited this same question to Rose in the last episode: If she didn’t speak to her father for 12 years, what would be the reason she’d come see him? Morck was already exploring the idea that the trip to Mhòr was to see someone other than her father. Perhaps she lied to Sam about the trip. Perhaps she only thought to bring William because he had an episode. 

As dismissive as Burns’ assessment of Merritt as a woman with secrets, Merritt’s very secretiveness made the investigation tougher. Fergus Dunbar would not have been able to cobble the name ‘Sam Haig’ from the flimsiest of threads that Morck and his team were able to follow – from Sabine’s description that Merritt viewed Liam as a challenge, to Morck leveraging their years of comradeship into getting him to admit the affair and promising he would keep it out of the file, to Liam feeling relieved enough to share that Merritt had and used a credit card under a different name in their hotel trysts (Lila Graham, her mother’s name), to Morck bullying the assistant manager of the Prince’s Garden into giving them hotel guest information, to Akram noticing that the last authorized guest under Merritt’s tab was not Liam but Sam Haig. Even having authorized guests to sign for the hotel charges was Merritt covering her tracks; there was a record of Liam and Sam Haig at the hotel, but none of Merritt, only Lila Graham. It was the financial records of Lila Graham that should have been investigated years ago.  

What caused this near paranoia, this routine insistence that parts of her life were carefully segregated to the point of committing what amounted to financial fraud? Burns had described Merritt as a woman who was in a hurry. It was ambition, but perhaps it was also a lack of comfort in her own skin, a need to keep moving because the threat of the pain of the past continuously threatened to overwhelm her. 

What else was in her past? Morck was again correct with his assessment that Cunningham was hiding something. Rose got along much better with him, but he still tensed when she turned the conversation, at Hardy’s sage advice, to Harry Jennings. Cunningham described Harry as born angry. There was no violence in the other robberies that month, presumably by Harry, because, according to Cunningham, no one was home during those robberies. William lucked out.

After the attack on William, Merritt returned to Mhòr only once, for Harry’s funeral, according to Cunningham’s son and deputy Colin. Rose immediately caught the strangeness of that. Why would Merritt return to the funeral of the man who viciously attacked her brother? Cunningham said they were close. So why rob her house then? Cunningham said the family was desperate. Harry’s father’s business went bust the year before. 

Rose wanted to go see Ailsa, Harry’s mother, and whilst Cunningham did not blatantly object outside of describing her as not a very social person, he insisted on Colin accompanying Rose. On the way, Rose played on the tension she caught between father and son. Colin said that after Morck requested the case files, Cunningham stayed up all night reading them and was upset. He got curious so he took a look at the files. Colin took note of a photo of the room where William was found; someone, presumably Cunningham, had circled a necklace that was lying on the floor with a black marker.

Rose and Colin’s trip to the Jennings home was a bust, Ailsa was not home, but Rose’s camaraderie with Colin paid off. Colin sent her a scan of the photo. Rose matched it to the insurance claim – a diamond pendant on a platinum chain. So Cunningham took this necklace and gave it to Jamie Lingard? Merritt came back for it on the day of Harry Jennings’ funeral. Jamie must have reported it to the insurance company, which must have needed confirmation of the theft from the police. Which came first, Jamie reporting it as stolen for the insurance, or Merritt taking it?

When Sabine expressed her skepticism over the investigation and asked Morck why he thought he’d do better, Morck coolly replied that it was because he was doing it.* Good though imperfect was still good, and it turned out that Morck and Akram’s recreation of Merritt’s abduction was accurate. Merritt did go down to the parking space to look for William’s hat. A woman’s voice called out her name. Someone came up to her from behind and placed what looked like a pillowcase over her head. The Q squad has been making solid progress in untangling the secrets of her life. Her captors were forcing her to look within for her sin. Without, the pursuit to find her continued.

Rating: A-

Strays:

🔎*Sabine casually remarked that Morck sounded like Merritt. Hmm.

🔎Dr. Irving: ‘You hate Scotland so much. Why’d you ever move here?’ Morck: ‘I married into it.’ Dr Irving: ‘Well now you can leave, finally. Give us our effing independence.’ Tell him! 

🔎We’re going to see that stress ball in every episode, aren’t we? I like the throughline it’s been providing so far. 

🔎Morck fought his ex-wife Victoria about leaving Jasper with him. However, when it came time to leave him at his grandmother’s place, he could not do it.

🔎Between Morck and Victoria, I’m on Morck’s side. She justified playing Morck’s message where he spoke of being better off alone to Jasper with some nonsense about the kid knowing that their strained relationship was all Morck and not his fault. Jasper probably already knew his stepfather was messed up, but this idea that Victoria came to drop some parenting wisdom after taking off and leaving her son without a mother is making the migraine I woke up with worse. If you knew that your ex-husband was that bad, what does it say about you as a parent that you would leave your child with him?

🔎Something nice about Victoria’s visit: She told Morck that when he was shot, Jasper did not leave his bedside until he was out of danger.

🔎Martin overheard their conversation and cooked Morck dinner so they could talk, because he felt that Morck needed to talk. He did. That outburst probably did him some good. Before the bullet hit him, it hit Hardy first. Hardy slowed down the bullet and saved his life, and now he was paralyzed from the waist down with one working arm and another with half mobility. PC Anderson died. This was the complex guilt Morck has been carrying around all this time.

🔎Martin the eternal student (he was now getting a doctorate in Philosophy) was a good roommate.

🔎Did Colin intentionally take Rose to the Jennings’ house knowing that Ailsa was not there, that she was probably at church where she had a part time job as a bookkeeper, and that Rose, who had a ferry to catch, would not have the time to go to a second location? The Jennings place was a large but desolate space, littered with hazardous waste signs and wreckage not just of their old house that was burnt for insurance, but whatever their business used to be (Colin said Clive Jennings fixed things). In a brief moment of profundity, Colin countered Rose’s observation that no wonder Merritt got away from this place by pointing out that Merritt died in the same water as Harry. 

🔎Rose’s theory that the man with the bird cap was Jamie Lingard did not pass Morck’s examination of it.

🔎Hardy was investigating Merritt’s life and taking note of her very expensive lifestyle. 

🔎Sabine’s description of Merritt clarified Burns’s comment that she was not one of them. Merritt had money, but she did not grow up with it, nor did she spend her youth with the posh boys who now worked in the Crown office. When Burns said she was not one of them, he probably at least partly meant this. She existed in the periphery of their posh world, she had no shared history with them, and would not have known their norms.

🔎Liam Taylor: ‘I heard you were dead.’ Morck: ‘Only on the inside.’ Lol.

You can access Recap Lab's full coverage of Dept. Q via this link.

Writers: Stephen Greenhorn & Scott Frank

Director: Elisa Amoruso

Original Air Date: May 29, 2025

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