To Be Continued
The Bear: Season 4; Dept. Q: Season 1
 

Miles David Moore

Two excellent television series—one a well-established favorite, the other an exciting newcomer—streamed their latest seasons this summer, leaving audiences wanting more.  And audiences, in these two cases, will get what they want.  Hulu has announced that Christopher Storer and Joanne Calo’s The Bear, having just completed its fourth season, will be back for a fifth.  So will Scott Frank’s Dept. Q, which premiered on Netflix in May and was renewed for a second in August.

Season 4 of The Bear begins where Season 3 left off.  Chef Carmy Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White) and his employees at The Bear are still reeling from the Chicago Tribune’s severely mixed review, and financial backer Jimmy “Cicero” Malinowski (Oliver Platt) has given the restaurant 60 days (1,440 hours) to become self-supporting.  He even places a countdown clock in the kitchen, adding immeasurably to the already breakneck tension Carmy and his staff live with.

As always, the fate of The Bear is only the starting point of the problems of the people whose lives revolve around it. Manager Richie Jerimovich (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) and Carmy’s ex-girlfriend Claire “Claire Bear” Dunlap (Molly Gordon) are still furious with Carmy over his actions during the restaurant’s opening night a few months before.  Richie is suffering additional anguish because of the scheduled wedding of his ex-wife Tiff (Gillian Jacobs) to her new boyfriend Frank (Josh Hartnett).  Carmy’s sister Natalie, a/k/a Sugar (Abby Elliott), is dealing with both the restaurant’s faltering finances and with being a new mother.  Sous-chef Sydney Adamu (Ayo Edebiri) is still torn between taking a rising new chef’s offer of partnership and staying loyal to Carmy.  (In one of Season 4’s best episodes, written by Edebiri and co-star Lionel Boyce, Sydney confesses her dilemma to T.J. (Arion King), the 11-year-old daughter of her cousin Chantel [Danielle Deadwyler]).

Then there is Carmy himself.  The triple-whammy of losing
Claire, getting a bad review and seeing his mentor Andrea Terry (Olivia Colman) close her restaurant leaves him even more self-doubting than usual. 

Season 3 of The Bear was widely criticized for being static and boring.  Personally, I thought it was an effective meditation on chefs and why people are attracted to the profession, as well as a seamless prelude to Season 4, in which some of the characters start questioning their vocations.  The new season has some big, warmhearted episodes such as Episode 7, “Bears,” in which the guests at Tiff’s wedding rediscover their common bond.  But it saves its biggest emotional punch for Episode 9, “Tonnato,” in which Jamie Lee Curtis again gives an extraordinary performance as Donna, Carmy and Sugar’s crazed, remorseful mother.  Donna’s reappearance prepares us for the decisions revealed in the tenth and final episode, which qualify as a shock but not really a surprise if you’ve been paying attention.

The Bear, indeed, forces you to pay attention.  The dialogue has an elliptical, almost Pinteresque quality; we always seem to enter the middle of conversations, the meaning of which we must puzzle out. Eventually, we do; for example, we just about figure out why Luca (Will Poulter) is still at The Bear instead of back in Copenhagen.  We remain puzzled as to why fan favorites Marcus (Boyce) and Tina (Liza Colon-Zayas) are kept in the background this season.  But The Bear plays by its own rules.  All viewers can say in response is, “Yes, Chef,” and we are happy to do so as we await the fifth season.

You should also be happy to make the trek four thousand miles east from Chicago to Dept. Q, though don’t expect any of its characters to be happy to see you—especially not Detective Chief Inspector Carl Morck (Matthew Goode).

Frank and co-creator Chandni Lakhani adapted the nine-episode show from a series of thrillers by the Danish novelist Jussi Adler -Olsen, transposing the location from Copenhagen to Edinburgh.  Morck (insert “Morck from Orkney” jokes here) is a top detective in the Edinburgh police force, albeit widely disliked for his arrogance and misanthropy.  One day Morck and his partner James Hardy (Jamie Sives) arrive at a murder scene. Morck is busy chiding a uniformed police officer for his sloppy work when a masked gunman steps out of the shadows. The uniformed officer is killed, Hardy rendered paraplegic, and Morck severely wounded.

The action resumes four months later.  Morck comes back to work and gets a sour reception. Mostly to get Morck out of the way, his commander Moira Jacobson (Kate Dickie) places him in charge of Dept. Q, a new cold case operation.  Morck is the only detective assigned to the department, and his office is a disused basement bathroom.  Meanwhile, Moira appropriates most of the money allocated for Dept. Q to replace the antiquated equipment in the rest of the precinct.

The first episode intertwines Morck’s story with that of Merritt Lingard (Chloe Pirrie), a hard-charging prosecutor.  Merritt has much in common with Morck: she is brusque, headstrong, unpopular with her colleagues, close to no one except her brain -damaged brother William (Tom Bulpett).  Merritt has just suffered a humiliating loss in court in the case of Graham Finch (Douglas Russell), a wealthy businessman accused of murdering his wife. 

Before the episode ends, it is revealed that the events involving Merritt occurred four years before.  She disappeared, and she is Morck’s first cold case.

Dept. Q is a superb entry in the harder-edged tradition of
British whodunits, comparable with Prime Suspect and Broadchurch. Frank and Bakhani keep us riveted as they crisscross between mysteries.  There are the questions of what happened to Merritt, whether she is still alive, and who either kidnapped or killed her.  Was Graham Finch responsible, or did her disappearance have more to do with her tangled relationships on her home island?  (The audience learns the answers to these questions long before the investigators do.)  There are also the questions of who shot Morck and Hardy, and also who is trying to get at Morck by threatening his stepson Jasper (Aaron McVeigh). 

In Dept. Q, most of the characters, living in a world of constant high pressure and nearly constant danger, operate on a knife edge of frustration, anger, and hostility.  This is especially true of Morck, who is on the same character continuum as Hugh Laurie’s Gregory House and Kurt Russell’s Snake Plissken.  Matthew Goode made a memorable villain in one of Scott Frank’s previous projects, 2007’s The Lookout, and in Dept. Q he is unforgettable as a detective who blurs the line between good and bad.  So abrasive that even his therapist (Kelly Macdonald) can’t stand him, Morck is constantly embarrassing his superiors with his violent outbursts.  His lingering sense of guilt over Hardy exacerbates his anger; only his innate sense of decency keeps him from crossing the line irrevocably.

The co-workers who eventually assemble around him keep him focused, at least to a point, and they are complex and fascinating themselves.  Akram Salim (Alexej Manvelov) is a civilian employee of the force and a former policeman in Syria; he sees Dept. Q as his way back to real police work, and he is the one who chooses Merritt Lingard’s file from a daunting pile of cold cases.  Unfailingly polite and respectful, Akram serves as an antidote to Morck’s aggression, yet some of his actions indicate that he knows much more about police brutality than he lets on.  Detective Constable Rose Dickson (Leah Byrne) worked with Morck before the shooting and hated it.  However, facing her own demons which we discover in the course of the series, she realizes
Dept. Q is the only way she can continue as an active policewoman. Meanwhile, Hardy proves useful in helping crack the mysteries, even from his hospital bed.

There is far too much incident in Dept. Q to describe in a regular review, and also far too much that mustn’t be revealed. (There is one detail in the Merritt Lingard mystery that I personally found hard to believe, but mentioning it would give too much away.)  I will simply say that Dept. Q is a scintillating blend of the gritty and the atmospheric.  Some of the plot threads are not resolved at the end; we look forward to their resolution, and to whatever new things Scott Frank can pull from the cold case file.