brendan halpin

I will watch just about anything set in Edinburgh, and I like dark mysteries, so I was pretty stoked about Dept. Q. The setup is that a cop who’s kind of a dick gets shot and then gets stuck solving cold cases and looks for a missing prosecutor who is also kind of a dick.

As you would expect from a British show, the cast is excellent, top to bottom. (Why can’t US shows do that? No, seriously. We’ve got a lot more people here! Surely we could also cast a show with no weak links!) Also the female characters are consequential and have agency and aren’t just there to give depth to the main male character. And fear not, Scottish TV fans—Mark Bonnar is on board, as it is apparently illegal to make a show set in Scotland without him. (I mean, also, he’s good, but this dude is in EVERYTHING).

I enjoyed the show and I’m glad I watched it, but the cop show cliches did put me off at some points. He’s a dick because he sees things no one should ever have to see, man! (I know it’s fiction, but I looked it up and found that Edinburgh is the seventh most dangerous municipality…in Scotland. Not even the whole UK!) So there’s that tired bullshit.

And then there’s the “dickhead cop reluctantly goes to therapy and eventually forms a bond with his female therapist” trope. I really never want to see another show in which a cop tells a therapist he thinks this is a waste of time. Seriously, though—aren’t you embarrassed to write shit like that? (Also it’s not at all necessary for the development of the plot. It’s like they felt like they had to throw this bullshit in just because they were making a cop show!)

Oh yeah, and then there’s the “well, sometimes cops just have to get violent with suspects, witnesses, or whoever.” Tired. It’s not even the danger of putting this false idea of cops out into the world that bugs me about this anymore. It’s just that it’s been done to death. Like, you could have a cop who never beats the shit out of anyone but solves crimes anyway. Wouldn’t that be innovative?

Sigh. Anyway, despite the flaws enumerated above, it is a satisfying mystery (albeit with maybe a wee bit more torture depicted than necessary), and when the team coalesces it is very satisfying, and it sure looks like they will be making a season 2 which I will absolutely be watching.