Dept. Q Episode 7 Explained: In Control

Dept. Q Episode 7 Recap and Review

What happened in Dept. Q Episode 7?

Here are the key points:

🔎Reporter Dennis Piper sent Morck a video of 17-year-old Sam Haig, where he talked about viciously assaulting another kid who kept following him around and thinking he was his brother. Recently, Sam found the kid he was talking about in the video. Piper suspected that Sam got Merritt involved in whatever was happening with this kid.

 🔎Rose, with Hardy’s help, found out through Paul Evans that his wife Chloe and Sam slept together the night before Sam’s death. Sam was staying at The Spivey Inn, not the Prince’s Garden, which was the hotel where Merritt used her credit card.  

🔎During Merritt’s escape attempt, she was able to dial 999 from the old lady’s phone before the male captor came and stopped her. 

Case updates

Leith Park shooting

None this episode. 

Merritt Lingard’s Disappearance 

Please refer to the key points above or the more detailed breakdown below.

Graham Finch Murder Case

We have pretty much established that Graham Finch murdered his wife and got away with it. Morck warned him against going after Kirsty Atkins upon her release from prison.  

Full recap and review

At some point in an elaborate mystery, the narrative starts to feel like what the eff is going on. Dept. Q reached that by Episode 7, as the team started to learn more about the mysterious Sam Haig. 

Sam Haig was a convenient character in a mystery. His personality was secretive, but he was also secretive as a matter of necessity. Any of his moves could be interpreted as Sam being his usual secretive self, or Sam working on a dangerous journalistic piece. At this point in the series, though we learned more about Sam, we also have more questions than answers about him.

Let’s go through the Sam connections one by one, through the characters the Q squad spoke to. First, there was Stephen Burns. Through a flashback we learned that Sam Haig came to the Graham Finch trial every day, and sat behind the Lord Advocate. Burns, however, denied knowing who he was. What Burns could no longer deny was his interference in the Finch trial by refusing to allow Kirsty Atkins to testify.

Morck and Akram conducted a flawless interrogation, right there in the Lord Advocate’s office. Initially, it was Morck who spoke, whilst Akram silently walked around the office, examining the personal effects of the Lord Advocate, zeroing in on a photograph of his daughter. ‘Does he ever speak?’ Burns asked, for Akram’s quiet inspection was unnerving. He probably regretted asking that, because when Akram spoke, he buried him.

‘A father never stops thinking of all the ways that harm can touch what he cares about. For any man, this is a weakness.’ Akram spoke with his usual calm, then asked Burns how he knew that Kirsty, whom he claimed he had no recollection of, was a drug offender. Burns blustered that that was how Morck described her. Akram smoothly pointed out that Morck said prolific offender not drug offender. There was no admission from Burns, but he was caught.

The next person Morck and Akram questioned was Graham Finch, who was golfing with his lawyer Robert. Finch was so confident in his impunity that he did not even deny sending a thug to threaten a 17-year-old kid. Morck laid their cards – that Solomon talked, that his phone had texts and voicemails from Finch where they discussed the attack on Kirsty, that Stephen Burns told him about Kirsty after either Solomon or Fritz (the jerk who threatened Jasper) ran his daughter’s car off the road. Morck wanted Finch to forget about Kirsty once she got out next month, or he could come after him. When outright asked if he had something to do with Merritt’s disappearance, Finch reasonably asked back why he would go after a prosecutor after he was acquitted.

Morck had tossed one of the expensive golf clubs out the window to get Robert out of the room. When he came back, he seemed to have settled on a story. He said that it was Sam Haig who told him about Kirsty. Had she testified, he would have filed a motion against it. 

Then there was Dennis Piper, who famously goaded Morck into shoving him against a desk for a story. He sent Morck a video of the then 17-year-old Sam, a post-offence interview with Terry Dundee who was the Corrections Counselor at a place called Godhaven. Apparently, young Sam once severely beat up another kid who kept following him around, staring at him and thinking he was his brother, to the point where this kid almost lost an eye. 

According to Piper, the last few months before he died, Sam kept going back and forth to Godhaven. He found the kid he was talking about in the video, but he called him X to protect his identity. Morck pointed out that they were not investigating Sam’s death, but Piper was insistent in his suspicion there was a possible connection there, especially regarding this kid from Sam’s past. Piper could not get the records from Godhaven because they were sealed. He only asked that Morck and Akram remember him once they figured this out. 

Rose, too, was uneasy about Sam's death, and she went to Hardy’s house to talk it out. Hardy was finally out of the hospital and was treating his carer as a gardener. He looked into the very thin Sam Haig file; there was not much there. The police saw the cliff and made the call; Hardy admitted he might have done the same thing. Hmm so there was nothing to Akram’s suspicion that Sam’s case was deliberately not investigated thoroughly?

Rose wanted to look into Paul Evans, the climbing instructor who sent Sam about a dozen text messages. Rose assumed the question, ‘Are you back at the hotel?’ referred to Merritt and the Prince’s Garden. There was an intimacy in the messages, and Rose and Hardy suspected Sam and Paul were lovers.

They were not. Rose perfectly executed her interrogation plan and got some frank answers from Paul. He and Sam became close, he was the one person Sam could say anything to. But, Sam never mentioned Merritt. The night of the texts, they had been drinking, and Sam and Chloe had a big row. Chloe later went to Sam’s hotel to apologise. Paul did not know this at the time, but Sam and Chloe ended up having sex. The hotel? The Spivey Inn, not the Prince’s Garden. 

So what was up with Sam Haig? Why all these convoluted stories about him? How come the one person who claimed he and Sam shared secrets was adamant that Sam never once mentioned Merritt, the woman he was sleeping with, the woman he was working on a major corruption case with? 

We got a few more glimpses of Merritt’s past. She and Harry Jennings were not just close as teenagers, they were lovers. Jamie Lingard did not like having Harry in the house when he was not around. He looked even less pleased with Harry’s younger brother Lyle, who seemed to have a reputation for burning things. As harsh as Jamie was toward his daughter when Morck and Akram came to speak to him, he did not seem too bad in these flashbacks. He was a deeply flawed father, not necessarily a bad one. 

Merritt also had a memory of her mother, back when she was very young and left her tooth that came off under her pillow. Her mother took off her diamond necklace and left it under Merritt’s pillow, the same diamond necklace that Merritt wore to this day. Young Merritt saw her mother leave, for the last time.

Both of Merritt’s parents made appearances inside the hyperbaric chamber that had been her hellish home for the past four years. Perhaps it was because she was in such pain, that her mind turned to her parents. Her tooth was infected, and instead of the antibiotics she asked for, her captor gave her what looked like a rusted pair of pliers. Like the survivor that she was, Merritt pulled her own tooth.

Merritt had been studying that hatch used for supplies. The next time the old lady in a wheelchair came to give her food and take her trash, Merritt was ready. When the old lady opened the hatch from her end, there was a huge blast of air that knocked her down. Merritt climbed out through the hatch. Remember that she has been in a hyperbaric chamber for the past four years, where she was routinely tortured. She was very weak. She managed to crawl to the lady’s phone and click for emergency services. Before she could speak, she screamed. The man, the old lady’s companion, was back, and Merritt was hurt once more.

Watching these scenes with Merritt was not easy, but these scenes underlined how this was a woman who simply refused to be broken. Just as the investigation into her disappearance sprouted more branches, there was Merritt with her single minded focus to survive and gain her freedom. 

Rating: B+

Strays

🔎Morck: ‘All this talk about me losing control, and you’re the one who’s crushing windpipes and chucking people down the effing stairs.’ Akram: ‘Yes, except when I do these things, I’m never out of control. I’m very much in control.’

🔎Dennis Piper hacked Sam’s computer after he died, this was how he got his information. He encouraged Morck to talk to Terry Dundee, who was still at Godhaven.

🔎Morck made a real effort to be a father to Jasper during that talk.

🔎Morck went to Dr. Irving’s house, which meant that we got another reminder that Matthew Goode was playing Morck and all the dreaminess that came with it. Martin did tell Morck he should pay more attention to his dreams. 

🔎The timeline prior to Sam Haig’s fall got a bit confusing because of the dialogue (by Rose) that referred to Paul Evans sending Sam about a dozen messages that night. Which night? So, Sam fell on Sunday. His body was found on Monday. The texts were, as best I could tell, sent on Saturday night, which was the same night Sam slept with Chloe. 

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

Writers: Colette Kane and Scott Frank

Director: Scott Frank

Original Air Date: May 29, 2025

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