Dept. Q Episode 5 Explained: Institutional Corruption

Recapper's Note: If you'd like to read the episode summary and case updates first, please scroll way down. I moved them as they were very spoiler-y.

Full recap and review

If you’re a fan of Line of Duty, then you’d long have noticed that institutional corruption made gripping TV. Dept. Q’s Episode 5 is now full throttle ahead in tackling institutional corruption in connection to the disappearance of prosecutor Merritt Lingard. Morck getting into Moira’s face about her reason for putting him in the basement and her choices regarding the initial investigation into Merritt’s disappearance was a study in things unsaid. Let’s parse it.

Why did Moira assign the cold case squad to Morck? Well, she meant for him to work it alone, which would have been perfect for someone like him who did not get along with anyone. Morck suspected that she knew she made a mistake four years ago, and she wanted him to clean it up, to solve the case. The weakness of this theory was that neither Morck nor Moira picked the Merritt Lingard case, Akram did. The Crown office sent over boxes upon boxes of cases to choose from. Merritt’s was just one of them. If Moira deliberately wanted Merritt’s case solved by Morck, if that were her reason for assigning Morck the cold case squad, then that would have meant that she anticipated that Morck would demand an assistant, picked the guy who has been begging her for a job and therefore owed her, and told Akram to pick the case. Akram did force Morck’s hand in taking on Merritt’s case.

What happened four years ago? Moira had answers to the Fergus Dunbar question of it all. She claimed Fergus got the case because he was up next (weak point, she could have assigned someone more experienced to a high profile case). She said she pulled Dunbar off the case because it went cold, there were no more leads, he was needed elsewhere (also weak, she could have re-assigned the case so it would have fresh eyes looking into it). She claimed it was Dunbar’s choice to leave the department. I guess we’ll have to wait to see if this were true. But again, no one thought to look further into the disappearance of a young prosecutor?

Morck outright told her his suspicion, that someone told her to shut it down. Moira did not deny this. The speech about being the first woman to hold down her high position in the police felt like a justification of the choices she made. But, Moira did spell it out that she wanted Morck to solve the case. When Morck asked her if she had his back, that exasperated roundabout answer she gave felt like yes. It has been hard for her to have his back, but yes.  

Dr. Irving raised an interesting point when Moira came to see her, that Moira relied on a loophole that working cold cases was not considered active duty. Did that mean Morck was not yet cleared for active duty? Was Moira giving Morck a break by allowing him back into her department to investigate cases though technically, he was not yet supposed to be back? Dr. Irving shook Moira enough that she raised the possibility of making Morck go to a different therapist. Now why would she think that mattered to Dr. Irving? Was she trying to rattle her professional pride, or had she noticed that the good therapist was attracted to her damaged cop?

What brought about all this attention toward Morck? Well, he assaulted a journalist and his offhand comment turned into a story in the press. During the course of the investigation into Sam Haig, and we will get to this later, Dennis Piper, the reporter at the press conference who asked if Archie Allen (the stabbing victim in the Leith Park shooting case) was a confidential informant, ambushed Morck and asked him if he had any comment regarding PC Anderson’s fiancée, who just had a baby. Morck initially tried to ignore him, but when Piper asked if Morck wanted to apologise, he shoved the reporter, hard, and he fell against a desk. Piper continued to badger him, saying that the fiancée blamed Morck and that she said it should have been him who died. ‘Well, maybe it should’ was Morck’s final comment that received front page attention.  

Like Dennis Piper, Sam Haig was a reporter for The Scottish Telegraph. Through the Q squad’s investigation and Merritt’s flashbacks, we learned much about the lover Merritt met up with before she disappeared, the lover who, mysteriously, was found dead just a day before her disappearance. Sam reached out to Merritt, ostensibly for a profile, but she looked him up, she knew that he covered organised crime. Merritt deduced that he thought there was something rotten in her department, and he was trying to get her to talk. She refused. However, when she learned that Kirsty Atkins, the witness to the Graham Finch case that her boss ordered her not to call, was horrifically attacked in prison and ended up in a coma, that the doctor who treated her thought it was a professional hit, she reached out to Sam and told him she would talk. 

What caused Merritt’s intense guilt toward Kirsty? It was through Rose’s diligence that the Q squad dug this up. Rose found a laundry receipt that led to the laundry shop owned by Kirsty’s family, which led to Kirsty, who now had one eye sewn shut. Akram correctly assessed that Kirsty’s injuries were not meant to scare her into not talking, they were meant to kill her. So what did she know? Well, we got more details about what happened to Andrea Finch, Graham’s wife. Andrea and Kirsty met at the women’s refuge, where Kirsty learned that Andrea’s husband had tried to kill her. She had black eyes, broken ribs, even a broken cheekbone. Andrea was convinced Graham would find her at the shelter so she left. Kirsty never saw her again until after she died, when her face was all over the news.

Kirsty’s deal with Merritt was early release in exchange for her testimony. At the last minute, Merritt changed her mind and said Kirsty could not testify because she was not credible. We know this was not Merritt’s decision but her boss’s, Lord Advocate Stephen Burns. But, word was already out in prison that Kirsty talked, that she angered someone big. She called Merritt using a smuggled phone and asked for help. Merritt hung up on her. Kirsty was nearly killed soon after.

Merritt may have been playing her captors when she cried about Kirsty, but her guilt was real. Burns told her the attack on Kirsty had nothing to do with her, but it was this incident that led to Merritt reaching out to Sam and telling him that she would cooperate with his investigation. Inside her cell, Merritt scrawled the following: Kirsty. Stephen Burns. Graham Finch. Sam Haig. Enemies of Sam.

And what of Sam? His editor was not even certain that was his real name. He worked under the radar for his safety. There were things about his death that did not make sense. Akram sagely noted, ‘Where I come from, when facts are being so clearly ignored, it’s never because of incompetence.’

Sam’s death was supposed to be an accident at the local climbing spot he frequented. But, there were anomalies. Why did Sam break the climbing instructor Paul Evans’s rule to never climb alone? Why did Sam climb knowing that the place was closing and that he did not have enough time to finish before his car got locked inside? Why were his keys never found, not on his body, his car, or his locker? Morck seemed ready to dismiss his death as an accident, but Akram continued to raise his questions. Dept. Q highlighting how the investigation benefited not just from Morck’s brilliance but from his dogged team is one of the show’s strengths. 

He was there from the beginning, but Hardy was now a full fledged member of the Q squad. Rose even gave him a virtual tour of the office, which turned out to be an excellent move, because Hardy identified the bird on the cap as a cormorant (Claire’s first guess) and not a boobrie. So Morck was right in dismissing Rose’s theory that Jamie Lingard was the man in the cap, which she based on her apparent misidentification of the bird.

When Morck came to his usual visit with Hardy, his theory on the motive for Merritt’s disappearance was that she and Sam Haig were ‘poking the wrong bear’. Hardy gave him a different motive, money. Jamie Lingard was broke, but Lila Lingard née Graham came from a wealthy family. Hardy traced the card Merritt used in the hotel to a trust account in the Channel Islands Bank in Jersey, where the trail vanished. What happened to the money, presumably now William’s, now that Merritt was gone and William was not in a fit state to manage it? Why, it would be handled by his legal guardian, of course.

Dept. Q dropped the clue early on, when it lingered on the symbols of wealth when Morck and Akram met Dr. Wallace. The doctor was coolly defiant at first, even when Morck was calmly dismantling her lies, but when he asked how many of her patients were children of old money, that hit a nerve. Akram and Rose found that all the patients were drugged. They took William to the one person who seemed to genuinely care for him, Claire. As for whether Dr. Wallace was involved in Merritt’s disappearance, Morck all but cleared her when he called her an embezzler. He said he did not think she planned her whole scheme, but it evolved as she looked after William and realised how easy it was to get the money.

What a packed episode. Dept. Q’s confident storytelling showed in how it would carefully lay out theories, then dismantle them, all whilst maintaining a compelling narrative. The performances were uniformly strong, the chemistry such that Hardy joining a meeting via video conference whilst lying on his bed felt both funny and right. Like the best shows, Dept. Q’s rewards were often on the subtlest of movements, like that small smile from Akram when Rose introduced him as DC Salim. What a good, packed episode. On to the next!

Rating: A+

Strays

🔎On the one photo Morck was able to get of Sam Haig from the climbing spot, his face was obscured by an obscene gesture. He had no recent photos online.

🔎Paul Evans’s wife Chloe described Sam Haig as a psycho and claimed she didn’t like him around. 

🔎Merritt exercising in her hyperbaric chamber/ cell was a good visual indicator of her as a survivor. Her captors have not broken her. 

🔎Dr. Irving came to the Q office because of course Morck was still missing his sessions. Apparently, Dr. Sonnenberg was Rose’s therapist. Her trauma stemmed from being a passenger in a pursuit that killed a pedestrian, a pensioner. Based on their conversation, it was obvious that Rose still needed help.

🔎Moira also visited the Q office and found Akram there alone. She made Akram give her a briefing (he wanted to wait for Morck) and dismissed what they had as not much. Apparently, the boy at Merritt’s house had to be admitted to a hospital due to a crushed windpipe. Akram said he bruised the boy’s windpipe but did not crush it. He calmly explained that could have crushed it but then the boy would not have been able to talk. When asked where he learned such techniques, he said he grew up in a very rough part of Syria. Moira reminded him that he was not in Syria and he was not a policeman. This conversation felt like a warning, but whether they have history outside of Moira previously rejecting his entreaty for a job, we do not yet know. 

🔎Morck found out what Hardy had kept secret until then, that his current doctor told him he could walk again. 

🔎Morck was making an effort to be a mentor to the team, and not in the way he was with PC Anderson.

🔎Moira has a spider phobia; they set this up in the first episode and only now subtly returned to it.

🔎Morck saw (the back of) Jasper just as he was leaving with his girl. Martin was worried about him, too, after the incident with the journalist. 

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

What happened in Dept. Q Episode 5?

Here are the key points:

🔎Dr. Wallace has been embezzling from William’s trust. The Q squad took William from Egley House and brought him to Claire. 

🔎Sam Haig’s apparent death from an accidental fall had many holes on it.

🔎Merritt agreed to cooperate with Sam Haig, an investigative reporter specialising in organised crime and ostensibly looking into Merritt’s department, after Kirsty Atkins was almost killed in prison. Somehow, it got out that Kirsty talked about what she knew regarding the Graham Finch case.

🔎Hardy identified the bird on the hat as a cormorant, not a boobrie as Rose initially thought.

Case updates

Leith Park shooting

Outside of PC Anderson's fiancée giving birth and blaming Morck for his death, nothing.

Merritt Lingard’s Disappearance 

The Q squad investigated the financial motive part, and concluded Dr. Wallace was an embezzler, not a kidnapper or murderer. They were now actively looking into Sam Haig, the dead reporter and Merritt’s lover. 

Graham Finch Murder Case

The attack on Kirsty Atkins, who could have testified that Graham Finch had previously tried to kill his wife Andrea, was an attempt to kill her, not just silence her. If Graham sent the would-be assassins, there remained the question on how he knew that Kirsty talked to Merritt.

Writers: Stephen Greenhorn & Scott Frank

Director: Elisa Amoruso

Original Air Date: May 29, 2025

Home