- Explore the Dripping Hallways of Dept. Q’s EndingHere’s how DCI Morck and his team of misfits solve their first cold case.By John DiLilloNov. 26, 2025
This article contains major character or plot details.
When Detective Carl Morck (Matthew Goode) takes on management of a newly established cold-case unit in Scotland, he isn’t planning on solving any cases. The Department Q of the new show’s title is a PR opportunity for the embattled Edinburgh police department — and its unlikely leader, Morck, is a brash cop recovering in hectic fashion from a brutal shooting.
For Constable Moira Jacobson (Kate Dickie), the job is essentially a babysitting gig — but fate has other plans for Carl Morck. “He goes down there and there’s a case from four years ago,” Goode tells Tudum. “Someone’s fallen off a ferry four years previously, and they never really got to figure out why or how it was caused.”
That someone is Merritt Lingard (Chloe Pirrie), a local solicitor whose story is intercut with the beginning of Morck’s investigation in the show’s first episode. Soon, Morck is diving deep into the mystery of Merritt’s disappearance, assembling a task force of misfits, and juggling his crumbling personal life. All in a day’s work for Department Q.
Read on to uncover the truth about what happens to Merritt Lingard — and how Carl Morck builds a team capable of saving her.
Why was Morck shot?
Dept. Q begins with a shocking cold open: Carl Morck and his partner, James Hardy (Jamie Sives), are shot while investigating a crime scene. Both survive, but a rookie cop is killed and Hardy is paralyzed. As Morck takes on the Lingard case, he continues to return to the events of that morning, struggling to cope with PTSD and survivor’s guilt. Regular therapy sessions with Dr. Rachel Irving (Kelly Macdonald) don’t help.
The series never directly answers the question of who shot Morck and why (though a dream sequence does provide a few possibilities). But Morck manages to piece together a theory: The shooting was actually committed by two criminals who were working to distract from the real crime, the killing of the young police officer. By Morck’s logic, the killer had no reason to return to the scene and certainly not to flee while Morck and Hardy were still alive — unless it was all a ruse to cloak their real motive. The police were lured to the scene as a trap, acting on a report from a nonexistent daughter of the victim. When Morck passes this theory along, he finds at least some small portion of the peace he’s been seeking. At the end of the series, Constable Jacobson assigns Hardy to run down the facts.
Jamie Simpson/Netflix
What happened to Merritt Lingard?
The story of Merritt Lingard’s disappearance is seemingly simple: On a ferry cruise with her disabled brother, William (Tom Bulpett), Lingard went missing. Did she fall overboard? Was she pushed? Lingard was spotted having an altercation with a belligerent William before she vanished; is he somehow involved?
Morck and his new assistant, Akram (Alexej Manvelov), investigate all of these possibilities and more. Akram is an IT expert assigned to Department Q to keep him out of Jacobson’s hair, but he’s also a Syrian expat with a mysterious past — one that makes him quite the asset to the newly formed department. He champions the Lingard case, arguing that something is definitely out of place; Lingard’s body never washed up on shore, and she was a high-powered solicitor who could have easily made enemies.
Morck and co. soon uncover a few clues: first, a man wearing a mysterious hat with a bird emblazoned on it, drawn by the nonverbal William Lingard. Through conversations with the Lingards’ housekeeper, Claire (Shirley Henderson), and Merritt’s boss, Lord Advocate Stephen Burns (Mark Bonnar), the Department Q team becomes convinced that their missing person was kidnapped, not knocked overboard.
They also find themselves falling down a few rabbit holes that turn out to be unrelated. Detective Constable Rose Dickson (Leah Byrne) misidentifies the bird William draws as a boobrie: the name of Merritt and William’s father Jamie’s boat. The bird is actually a cormorant. Oops.
The team also tracks down the connection between Stephen Burns and wealthy businessman Graham Finch (Douglas Russell). Before Lingard’s disappearance, she was head prosecutor on the case of Finch’s alleged murder of his wife — and Lingard failed to win a conviction. Morck and Akram uncover evidence that Burns pressured his subordinate not to call a witness who could have won her the case.
Finch doesn’t take kindly to the team nosing around, and he sends men to intimidate Morck’s stepson, Jasper (Aaron McVeigh). But it’s a red herring; while Finch is certainly a murderer and Burns certainly corrupt, they had nothing to do with Lingard’s disappearance. The real answer is much more sordid.
Who is Sam Haig?
Morck and Dickson uncover a seemingly crucial clue in the hunt for Lingard — she was having a relationship with a now-deceased journalist, Sam Haig (Steven Miller), who approached her about corruption in her department. But the detectives quickly hit a snag, struggling to pin down Haig’s movements in the days before his climbing death. When they realize that Haig was having a separate affair at the same time as his tryst with Lingard, they conclude that he couldn’t have been in two places at once. The Haig Lingard was seeing was a fraud.
This ties back to an earlier mystery: how Merritt’s brother, William, became disabled. In flashbacks, we see young Merritt’s relationship with Harry Jennings (Fraser Saunders), the local teen who would later be accused of beating William into a nonverbal state during a robbery gone wrong. But in the final episodes of Dept. Q, we learn that Harry’s antisocial brother Lyle was actually the one who beat William — and that Merritt helped plan Harry and Lyle’s aborted robbery turned assault in an attempt to steal her own mother’s jewelry and fund an escape from her dull island home. Harry died trying to escape from the police — a death that Lyle and his mother blamed on Merritt.
As Department Q soon discovers, everything about the case revolves around Sam Haig’s relationship with Lyle Jennings. The pair knew each other as children at an institution for troubled boys, and Jennings latched onto Haig, even calling him by his brother’s name. The pair reconnected as adults — and Jennings killed Haig and tossed him off of his local climbing spot. After assuming his identity, Jennings started a relationship with Lingard and, ultimately, kidnapped her. In a twisted choice that recalls Lyle’s father’s own abuse, Lingard has been trapped and tortured in a hyperbaric chamber for the past four years. She’s trapped on the grounds of the Jennings’ shipping company, Shorebird Ocean Systems (whose logo is, you guessed it, a cormorant).
Justin Downing/Netflix
How does Department Q save Merritt Lingard?
After tracking down the address of Lyle’s mother, Morck and Akram run into a problem: how to depressurize the chamber without killing Lingard. As a recovering Hardy coaches them through the controls over the phone, the pair are surprised by Jennings. Bringing the series full circle, Morck takes a bullet in the shoulder for Akram, who then dispatches Jennings with the help of his own mysterious combat training. Mrs. Jennings flees the scene and shoots herself after being confronted by a police cordon, and Lingard is safely removed from the chamber.
Merritt and William are reunited, and she begins the process of piecing her life back together. She never meets Morck; the pair pass each other like ships in the night at police headquarters. Morck has other plans. He leverages his newfound knowledge of Burns’ corruption to convince the lord advocate to increase the Department Q budget, fast-track Akram’s promotion to full detective, and, of course, get Morck a nicer car.
The final scene of the show is simple: Morck, back to work in the dripping Department Q basement, smiling softly as Hardy returns to work on crutches — a happy ending, as far as these things go. Case closed.
Dept. Qis now streaming on Netflix.
What to know about Karen Read’s murder retrial in the death of her police officer boyfriend, John O’Keefe
The first trial ended in a hung jury. Jury selection in her retrial starts this week.
Karen Read with her attorneys in Norfolk Superior Court in Dedham, Mass., on Feb. 25. Greg Derr / The Patriot Ledger via AP Pool file
April 1, 2025, 4:50 AM GMT+7
By Tim Stelloh
During a long and widely watched trial last year, Karen Read was prosecuted for murder in the 2022 death of her boyfriend, Boston Police Officer John O’Keefe.
The trial, which included allegations of police misconduct and of a wide-ranging conspiracy among law enforcement officers to frame Read in the killing, ended in a hung jury.
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Jury selection in Read’s retrial on charges of second-degree murder, motor vehicle manslaughter while driving under the influence and leaving the scene of a collision causing death is set to begin Tuesday in a courtroom outside Boston.
Here’s what to know about the case.
How did John O’Keefe die?
O’Keefe, 46, had been a police officer for 16 years. He was found unresponsive on a snowy January morning outside the suburban home of Brian Albert, a now-retired Boston police sergeant.
O’Keefe was pronounced dead shortly after, and the medical examiner attributed the cause to blunt force trauma to the head and hypothermia. Read, then an equity analyst who had been dating O’Keefe for two years, was arrested in connection with his death days later.
When Read was tried in 2024, the Norfolk County District Attorney’s Office pointed to the couple’s troubled relationship as a possible motive in the killing and accused her of striking O’Keefe outside the sergeant’s home with her Lexus SUV after a night of heavy drinking.
The death was not captured on camera, and no eyewitnesses claimed to have seen what happened. But Assistant District Attorney Adam Lally told the jury that vehicle data from Read’s SUV showed her traveling backward for 60 feet at 24 mph outside Albert’s home around the time that she was dropping O’Keefe off at a party there.
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O’Keefe’s hair was found on the vehicle’s bumper, and his DNA was on the SUV’s broken taillight, Lally told the jury. The remnants of a cocktail he appeared to have left a bar with earlier that night were also found on the bumper, as were bits of what Lally described as a drinking glass.
What did the defense say?
Read asserted her innocence and her defense team accused Albert and others who’d been at the party — including an agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives whom Read had exchanged flirty texts with — of fatally assaulting O’Keefe and framing Read for the killing. (Albert testified that O’Keefe never came inside his home but that he would have been “welcomed with open arms” if he had.)
The defense also accused the lead investigator in the case, Massachusetts State Trooper Michael Proctor, of manipulating evidence and conducting a biased investigation. Text messages introduced at trial showed Proctor using offensive and derogatory language to describe Read to family, friends and supervisors.
Proctor had undisclosed ties to Albert and his family, Read’s lawyers said, and he shared investigative details with his sister, who was close friends with Albert’s sister-in-law.
Proctor acknowledged discussing the case with his sister, though he said he shared only “newsworthy stuff,” and he testified that his unprofessional language “dehumanized” Read. But he said his conduct did not compromise the integrity of the investigation into O’Keefe’s death.
After a nine-week trial and five days of deliberations, a jury was unable to reach a unanimous verdict, and Norfolk County Superior Court Judge Beverly Cannone declared a mistrial.
What happened next?
Days later, the Massachusetts State Police placed Proctor on unpaid leave over what the agency described as allegations of “serious misconduct” raised at trial. The trooper was fired last month after a state police trial board examined the allegations and found that he had violated agency rules by sending derogatory and defamatory texts about Read and shared sensitive investigative details with non-law enforcement personnel.
Proctor also drank while on duty and drove his cruiser, according to the trial board’s findings.
Proctor has not publicly commented on his termination, but his family said the text messages “prove one thing, and that Michael is human — not corrupt, not incompetent in his role as a homicide detective, and certainly not unfit to continue to be a Massachusetts State Trooper.”
“Despite the Massachusetts State Police’s dubious and relentless efforts to find more inculpatory evidence against Michael Proctor on his phones, computers and cruiser data, the messages on his personal phone — referring to the person who killed a fellow beloved Boston Police Officer — are all that they found,” the family said.
Separately, Read’s attorneys tried to have the case thrown out over claims that Read was the victim of “extraordinary governmental misconduct.” They also claimed her retrial amounted to double jeopardy because, after the mistrial, two jurors told the defense team that the panel would have acquitted Read of murder and leaving the scene of a collision causing death.
Prosecutors disputed those claims and judges have denied both claims.
What will be different in a second trial?
The prosecution tapped Hank Brennan, a former prosecutor and longtime criminal defense attorney who represented Boston gangster James “Whitey” Bulger, to retry the case as special counsel and lead prosecutor.
The defense team also added a lawyer — Victoria George, who served as an alternate juror during the first trial. “I waited for nearly a year after the mistrial, hoping the court system would work as intended to remedy some of the wrongs in this case,” she told Vanity Fair magazine.
It isn’t clear what role Proctor will play. He has appeared on witness lists filed by both the defense and prosecution, but legal experts said that his termination adds a level of uncertainty to the proceedings.
“At the time of his original testimony, he still had a job to rein him in,” Stara Roemer, a former Dallas County prosecutor who is now a criminal defense lawyer in Texas, told NBC News. “Now that he no longer has that job, who knows what could come out of his mouth.”
Also included on an amended witness list from the prosecution are three of Read’s attorneys — Alan Jackson, David Yanetti and Elizabeth Little.
“It may be necessary to call defense counsels to authenticate the defendant’s numerous public statements,” prosecutors said in the filing, according to NBC Boston.
