3 days ago
Netflix's Dept. Q ending, that left Matthew Goode in tears, explained
Dept. Q ends on an dramatic note, and one that is so emotional even lead star Matthew Goode found himself in tears, he tells Yahoo Netflix thriller follows detective Carl Morck (Matthew Goode) who returns to work after surviving an attack that left his partner paralysed and another officer dead. The grizzly English cop isn't well liked in the Edinburgh force, and to keep him out of the way he's assigned his own cold case department where he and a motley crew of outsiders decide to look into the mysterious disappearance of prosecutor Merritt Lingard (Chloe Pirrie) four years earlier.
Goode was moved to tears by the chain of events in the series, with the actor sharing: "Actually I found it really moving, I was quietly surprised at how it all sort of came together.
"I remember I was just doing some ADR where we re-record dialogue and Scott [Frank, the show's creator] was like, 'would you like to watch this?' And I was like, 'OK'. He doesn't normally do that so I think he was quietly proud of it. And, yeah, I shed a tear, I did."
The Downton Abbey star joked that he was emotional because he thought "'Thank God it works!'"
The story centres on Carl and his team trying to find out what happened to Merritt Lingard, who disappeared off a ferry four years earlier under mysterious circumstances. Most have written her off as having died by suicide after jumping of the boat, but Carl, Akram (Alexej Manvelov) and Rose (Leah Byrne) are convinced she could still be alive and want to piece together what happened.
The trio, it turns out, are right, and Merritt has been kidnapped and held in a pressurised container by two people who are determined to make her guess for herself why she was taken. Merritt is kept there for years as she counts all the people she wronged or hurt in her life, eventually landing on the answer as the clock begins to run out.
Merritt was taken by mother and son duo Ailsa and Lyle Jennings (Alison Peebles and Steven Miller), who committed the crime because they blame Merritt for the death of Lyle's older brother Harry. The teen died whilst trying to escape custody after he'd robbed Merritt's house and beaten her brother so badly he could no longer speak.
Ailsa believe it's Merritt who put Harry, her then boyfriend, up to committing the robbery, thus starting the chain of events that led to his death, but Merritt sees it differently and refuses to take the blame.
As time runs out on Merritt's survival, Carl and Akram put the pieces together successfully — realising that Lyle Jennings posed as journalist Sam Haig to seduce Merritt, gain her trust and kidnap her.
Carl and Akram manage to get to the location where Merritt is being kept just in time to stop her from being killed in the pressurised container. The pair kill Lyle in the process and save Merritt, and Ailsa dies by suicide when she realises what the police have done.
Goode adds that Pirrie deserved credit for such a "powerful" and "brave performance" as Merritt, to which his co-star Byrne said: "She was so incredible, I met Chloe on the first day when we were doing costume and makeup fittings, and met her in the green room and we had an hour to get to know each other, chat, and then I just didn't see her again. She was alone for the whole thing."
Goode joked: "Well I said to her 'it would be really nice to work with you someday!'"
"So it's so great to see what she's done," Byrne adds. "It's so incredible. She's done such an incredible job."
The series sees Merritt return to normal life, revealing she will return home with her brother and reconnect with her estranged father. In the meantime Dept. Q get back up and running, with James Hardy [Jamie Sives], Carl's partner, returning to the force in the very last scene.
This was another moment that left Goode emotional, as he said: "It's also Jamie's character, bless his little cotton socks."
Dept. Q is out now on Netflix.
