Episode 1×01 Recap

Fair warning, this episode recap alludes to things that happen in later episodes and contains spoilers. Proceed with caution if you haven’t seen the full season yet.

I stumbled across this show in July, probably via a good old algorithm-driven recommendation because Netflix knows I love gritty, European crime shows. It looked like it would be right up my alley, and boy, was it ever! I was hooked pretty much right away and binge-watched the whole first season within a few days.

Bonus points for the show being set in Scotland, my all time favourite country to visit, and so I watched it, and rewatched it and rewatched it again. The writing and acting is smart and has so much depth — there’s always something new to discover.

Very quickly I became enamoured, and so I decided to dig into more detail and write up actual episode recaps. Let’s get into it!

Episode 1×01

I’ve seen a few reviews of the show that have said the first few minutes start it all off with a bang, and they certainly do! These three minutes very much set the scene for the nine episodes of unabashed, gritty candidness and honesty. And we learn right away that, well, Carl is kind of a prick.

This is very evident in how Carl communicates with the young officer who is first on the murder scene: DC Anderson—a rookie who tells Carl and Hardy that this is just a routine wellness check after the daughter of the murder victim made the call to the police.

What they stumble into is a pretty brutal scene. The victim was stabbed in the head with a knife, and from the stench this already happened a day or two ago. This is flat no. 226 in one of the affordable housing districts of Edinburgh, clearly an air of low social class around the place – not just from the outside.

Carl and Hardy look around, Carl immediately rebuking Anderson about how he’s handling the scene, swearing at him to tell him all the things he’s missing and doing wrong. We get a first inkling that Carl isn’t just abrasive, he’s also the kind of guy who is convinced he is the smartest person in the room.

The atmosphere is almost jovial. Carl and Hardy are exchanging quips like it’s their daily routine (or rather way of coping). Both seem to be in their element in trying to figure out what happened here, a new case to dig their claws into. And then, in an instant, it all changes.

A dark figure in a ski mask suddenly steps into view, holding out a gun, firing three precise shots. The first hits Anderson point-blank in the throat. He goes down. He’s already dead.

The second hits Hardy in the shoulder, the third goes through him and then hits Carl in the side of the neck. Both go down, Hardy out cold and ironically still with his hands in his coat pockets.

Carl is holding on to the last shreds of consciousness. Enough to see the shooter stepping into view over him, a pair of eyes surveying him critically before he’s gone from view. Interesting. Why didn’t he finish Carl off with another well-placed shot to the skull? Carl’s vision fades. Cue the title theme where I notice and very much like the subtle integration of bagpipes to round off the Scottish setting.

Things to take note of because they will become important later on or because they are subtle moments easily missed that have a certain relevance:

DC Anderson never mentions the name of the daughter or the name of the victim. He only ever speaks about “the daughter” and “the victim”.

Note how different the 4-months-ago version of Carl looks. He’s wearing a nice pair of trousers and leather shoes, a jeans jacket underneath a business-casual woollen coat and his hair is nicely combed. He looks like a man who actually cares about how he looks before he goes out in public. Which is a stark juxtaposition to the Carl we meet four months later, whose life is marked by trauma and PTSD to the point where he’s given up on giving a shit about much of anything, including himself.

Next, we meet Merritt Lingard. She listens to a harassing voice message of a man telling her she’s a selfish, manipulative bitch and very soon he will find her and show her what he thinks of her. It’s pretty much a death threat, but she seems to take it like it’s just another Tuesday. And maybe it is.

Striding assertively through one of Edinburgh’s closes, Merritt is a prosecutor and currently involved in a case where someone called Graham Finch is accused of pushing his wife down the stairs and killing her in the process. Finch doesn’t take kindly to the accusations that Merritt throws at him and yells at her. Merritt clearly meant for this to rattle the jury, but ultimately it gave Finch an opportunity to regale the court room with an emotional speech of how much he loved his wife, shifting the tone in the room by 180°. Certainly not what Merritt had in mind.

Afterwards, Merritt’s colleague and mentor Liam Taylor tells Merritt off about her strategy. Liam mentions that it was off that Finch’s counsel did not object to Finch’s little speech. Whatever the case may be, Merritt looked bad in court today.

Next thing she knows, her boss Steven Burns, Lord Advocate as it turns out, also rubs her less than admirable performance in her face. Merritt takes it in stride. They argue about a witness that Merritt wanted to use but that Burns wouldn’t let her. Merritt is sure the jury will convict Finch because the facts are all there. Burns isn’t so sure. And he’s also fucking pissed off. What isn’t quite clear to the viewer yet is that all of this took place four years before current events.

Later, it’s a grey morning in Edinburgh. A Lothian bus stops at Melville Street and Carl alights. He looks very different to the man we met before. Ill-fitting pair of worn black jeans, a weathered suede jacket and a set of low-cut black hiking shoes. His hair looks like he’s barely raked his hand through it after getting out of bed.

He enters a building, waits on a red sofa for some kind of appointment. Patience isn’t his strong suit because he’s about to leave again but stops the elevator doors from closing just as an attractive woman around his own age opens the door across the hallway. It’s not Dr. Sonnenberg, whom Carl apparently had an appointment with. This is Dr. Rachel Irving who is filling in for the hip fracture addled Sonnenberg.

Soon it becomes clear this is a psychotherapy appointment, and not one that Carl went to voluntarily. He sits there with his arms folded, the gunshot scar on his neck glaringly obvious. The physical wounds might have healed, but the mental ones clearly not.

They talk about Dr. Sonnenberg’s tennis balls, which are supposed to calm you down when you squeeze them. Carl reluctantly tries one but makes it a point to carefully choose which one to pick, in kind of a “I am in control of this situation, and I’m going to do my utmost not to let you psychoanalyse me” way.

The objective is to get Carl to talk about the shooting, maybe help him cope with the trauma he experienced that day. But Carl makes it very clear that this is not on the agenda, and not even the attractive Dr. Irving can penetrate those steel barriers he’s erected over the last years and four months.

Carl’s acerbic cynicism controls the room, but Rachel isn’t fazed by it. She’s dealt with a fair number of defensive clients turning up for work-mandated sessions. She’s got him pretty well figured out within just a few minutes. PTSD, depression, sleep problems, anxiety, superiority complex and a deep-rooted aversion to admitting or doing anything about it. Carl Morck in a nutshell.

Note how Carl mentions his unhappy childhood in this scene. Not the first time that will come up. A first puzzle piece to Carl’s past that made him the chronic cynic he is today.

Carl’s next stop is the other place he seems to loathe as much as a therapy office: His workplace. It’s his first day back after a four-months medical leave. It soon becomes clear why Carl is apprehensive to go inside. Rather than the warm welcome or applause you’d expect when a seriously injured colleague returns to work, Carl is met with everything ranging from dismissive stares to indifference. Oh look, the prick is back. Brace yourselves.

Notice how as Carl walks up to the police station, he holds a tennis ball in his right hand that he squeezes before he crosses the street to go in? Not the last time we’ll see one of these.

Inside, Carl’s boss Moira holds a hot beverage as she watches DCI Bruce interview a witness. Or rather former witness by the name of Caroline Kerr because she is now retracting her statement. This hearkens back to Carl’s shooting. The witness is a young woman who says she saw a man in dark clothing go into the back door of flat no. 226 and then, five minutes later, get into a car and drive away. And now she wants to retract that statement because she’s not sure anymore if it was that flat. This smells of her hand being forced. Moira frustratedly smashes the spider on the one-way mirror.

Here, we are explicitly told that the shooting happened on October 17^th. Which means current events take place in February. Not an important detail but interesting nevertheless. Surely explains the abundance of depressing weather and winter coats.

We learn here that Hardy was left paralysed from the shooting.

The first person Carl actually seeks out is Rose Dixon. They clearly have some work history, and Rose is one of those who seems to have learned to deal with Carl’s resting bitch-face and ever-cutting sarcasm in her own right. They seem to be on tentative terms of being able to tolerate each other, which seems to be the best that Carl can expect around the office.

Rose is cosy with a guy of vaguely Middle Eastern heritage who’s sitting out in the hallway. She waves to him. She calls him Moira’s stalker and elaborates that he’s after a job. And he’s bribing her with homemade sweet treats.

Carl, in the meantime, sits in Moira’s dark office to wait for her. And ironically, the topic of conversation as Moira and Logan Bruce enter her office is the Leith Park ex-witness and Carl being back at work today. And there he is, lounging in an armchair, shrouded in his eternal “fuck this and the whole world” attitude.

They talk about the status of the Leith Park investigation. Which is… basically fuck-all. No leads to speak of, and now no witnesses anymore either. Logan says it seemed like a pre-planned, organised, professional hit. Carl throws in that a pro wouldn’t have left Hardy and him alive, and he has a point.

Carl seems to be entertaining the idea of taking over the investigation, seeing how everyone else is grossly incompetent around here, but Moira quickly puts a stop to it. There’s no way she’ll let Carl investigate his own shooting.

Carl’s first order back in the office is to ignore every single thing he’s been told not to do. He clandestinely logs into a workstation off to the side and accesses whatever documentation they might have on the Leith Park shooting. The first thing he pulls up is a 3D animated reconstruction of the shooting.

Strangely enough, if you look closely at the reconstructed shots here, none of them actually hit Carl. The second one looks like it went through Hardy’s shoulder and then out the window, passing by Carl. The third one went through Hardy’s lower torso and nowhere near Carl’s neck. In a later episode Carl tells Martin that the bullet first went through Hardy’s spine and then into his neck, which doesn’t align with this reconstruction. How did Carl not question this? Is this a first clue that something about the case was doctored? Or is this incorrect memory on Carl’s part?

Carl’s mind goes back to that fateful day. He and Hardy arrived at the scene, bantering about football. It’s casually dropped that this isn’t even their case. They just heard it being called in and decided to check it out. There was supposed to be a response unit. Bloody ironic, that.

Another weird thing is that Carl in a later episode mentions that he clocked that there were bins and chairs piled up in front of the back door of the flat when he and Hardy arrived. Where and how did he actually see that? Carl and Hardy arrived and went straight to meet Anderson at the front door. Inside the flat, Carl and Hardy never went near the kitchen or the back door. Does Carl have x-ray vision? Or was this backdoor located where you could see it as you walked past that fence on the way to the flat? Let’s assume it was that, shall we?

What’s also ironic is that Carl is the person who sends Anderson to check the kitchen. No wonder he feels responsible. Does he replay it in his head, wondering if Anderson would still be alive if it had played out differently?

And then there’s the shooter, right there. A gunshot rings out. Carl looks around. Did anyone notice that he’s doing something unauthorised? He watches the shots being fired. Again. It replays in his head. The tennis ball is in his hand—a feeble comfort that doesn’t do enough.

There’s cold sweat on his face, and he gets up with a start, trying to get away from it all. His hands shakily extract an antidepressant from its bottle that he swallows with a cup of water from the water cooler in the hall. Yet, the shooting follows him everywhere, because right there, above the water cooler, is the memorial board for DC Anderson, a young offer with lots of promise whose life was cut too short. And it’s all Carl’s fault. Except it isn’t, it’s the shooter’s.

The hushed voices of Wilson and Clark filter over to where Carl is standing. They’re gossiping about him and Hardy, and Carl can’t have that. He walks over, ignoring the mishap. The board on the wall has all kinds of pictures from the Leith Park scene on it and Carl takes a closer look. He’s interested in a discarded milkshake cup and McDonald’s food wrapper near the tyre of the car the shooter got out of.

He asks if they checked the CCTV of the nearest McDonald’s for a man dressed in dark clothes. Apparently, they haven’t. Carl’s theory is that the shooter was watching the house to see who showed up. Bruce’s team seems to think the shooting and the stabbing aren’t connected, but Carl feels otherwise, and now Wilson and Clark have a new task. What the hell has Bruce been doing all these four months, though, that this was missed?

Moira has another problem to contend with. Two higher-ups are telling her in no uncertain terms that crime solving rates are too low and that it looks bad to the public. Never mind the skeleton budget and resourcing, something needs to be done. They offer up the creation of a new department to re-open unsolved crimes—a cold case unit.

Moira isn’t exactly thrilled, but she perks up when an autonomous budget is mentioned. She’s already plotting, this might come in handy after all. And who does she have in mind for the job?

Carl walks down a mint green hallway. It has the telltale feel of a hospital. This is Carl’s literal guilt trip along the drab hallways of the rehab facility they put Hardy up in. The latter is watching football on the telly mounted to the wall from his hospital bed. Carl puts a can of beer on the overbed table for Hardy, who just shakes his head, disinterested. Carl opens his which Hardy side-eyes for a second.

Fun side note, Carl says “Morning, mate,” to Hardy here and Netflix subtitled it as, “Only me.” Matthew, for fuck’s sake, stop mumbling.

Carl tells Hardy that he went back to work today and is fed up as fuck with the place. He plans to just put in his time and be done with it. Hardy never says a single word the whole time. These are two men who are deeply steeped in their mutual suffering and clearly not dealing with it very well.

It’s not just Carl who’s letting the day come to a close. Merritt is driving home. There’s a housekeeper waiting for her in a large house that seems massively overblown for just one person. The first thing Merritt does is pour herself a glass of whisky.

She tells the housekeeper to leave and then goes upstairs where there’s a man watching TV. This is her brother William. He seems to be non-verbal, but the two have a rapport like close siblings do.

Listen closely to the scene that plays on the TV that William watches. It’s one of the scenes that Lyle and Ailsa play over and over to Merritt later when she’s held captive. As part of the Graham Finch press coverage, she tells the public, “I firmly believe that those who commit violent crime don’t ever truly get away with it. The court might set them free, but be it conscience, karma or the universe, they are ultimately, one way or another, punished for what they’ve done.”

The vibe gets a little weirder when the housekeeper sits with William while he falls asleep, singing My Bonnie Is Over The Ocean to him. Merritt chides her for it later, telling her that William is a grown man and not a helpless child. Maybe this housekeeper has a bit of an unhealthy attachment to William.

Carl’s day, on the other hand, ends late and he takes the bus back home. He’s probably looking forward to a quiet night to unwind from shitty day, but that is not what life has in store for him. Loud, bassy music assaults his eardrums.

My keen eye can tell that the bus stop where Carl alights is called Links Gardens. Funnily enough, this is in Leith, northeast of the city centre and near the Firth of Forth. And I think we can assume that this is actually Carl’s neighbourhood.

My keen eye also spotted two bike helmets hanging on the coat rack in Carl’s flat. Whose are they? Martin and Jasper’s?

And thank you, dear set dressers, for putting a somewhat rickety clothes drying rack in their kitchen! It just adds so much more depth to these characters if you tangibly show the audience that they are dealing with everyday chores like normal people. (Although it’s probably Martin who organises their laundry rather than Carl.)

Carl downs another antidepressant to make it bearable. On the way to the source of the obnoxious music, he passes another door. Loud opera music escapes through the cracks. Carl knocks there first, yelling, “Martin!”

Martin is Carl’s middle-aged lodger, and he’s only playing the music so loudly to counteract the noise from the other room. In the other room lives 17-year-old Jasper. Figures. Carl doesn’t even knock when he enters.

Jasper is engrossed in an ego-shooter game. Like 17-year-old boys do. Carl literally pulls the plug on both the music and the computer, his mood already at ignition point. Embarrassingly, Jasper had a porn movie open on the laptop on the bed, which didn’t slip by Carl either.

Carl tells Jasper in no uncertain terms that he needs to turn the fucking music the fuck down or else Carl will throw everything in Jasper’s room out of the fucking window. There seems to be no love lost between these two and the viewer is left to wonder if Carl is a single parent with a perpetually disagreeable teenage son.

We switch back to Merritt’s house where she sits alone at her dining table, working on a case. An e-mail notification pops up from [Unknown Sender]. It’s another harassing message, and it speaks about her sitting at home at her computer, getting drunk. This is next level creepy. Is she being watched?

In the morning at the police station, the charismatic and very formally dressed Akram Salim more or less ambushes Moira as she comes into work. He begs for a job. He works part-time in IT but wants to move into the murder department. Moira has no time for HR matters and tells him he’s wasting his time. Next, she chides Rose for letting Akram into the building in the first place. Tough luck for Akram.

On the bus on the way to work, Carl is being pestered by a nosy teenager. Unsurprisingly, he has zero patience with the kid. He also has zero patience with Moira when she tells him he’s going to be the head of the new cold case department.

His first thought is probably, fuck, don’t give me something actually important to work on that needs results. He had plans to just put in his time, remember? But when Moira tells him he will have resources at his disposal, he perks up. Can he have a car? Oh, and he’ll get his own office. That’s probably an enticing idea to Carl, until…

Until he actually goes to see where this “downstairs-downstairs” office is that comes with a key labelled “Q”. Turns out it’s the old Shower Quarters. Quite literally. The place is a dump. Random unwanted furniture and files have been discarded in the hallway, which opens up into a larger space with shower stalls, urinals and toilet bowls to the side. One of the sinks spews diarrhoea-brown sludge when Carl tries it out.

The Dept. Q basement office is brilliant in so many ways. Compared to the book, where it was a basement storage space, the show elevated (or rather downgraded) it a notch by making it extra grimy.

Another very subtle but imo brilliant metaphor was the camera pan upwards towards the glass bricks in the ceiling that you can see people walking on. So, Carl and his new department are quite literally being trodden on. You could say he is being trampled under foot.

I think we can assume Carl has an immediate love/hate relationship with the place. He doesn’t love that he’s being relegated to the police office slums, but the one big perk is that no one will come bothering him here. All blissful solitude with no one to look over his shoulder.

Akram, on the other hand, is nothing if not persistent, but Rose tells him he can’t come round anymore. I think it’s clear we haven’t seen the last of him.

Downstairs, Carl is very literally taking a nap at his desk. That is, until Rose slams a cardboard box full of cases right next to him. He jumps out of his chair. Wtf, Rose?! She dryly comments that Carl is probably gonna need some help going through all these cold cases. And she’s right.

That’s another thing he can ask Moira for, but when he goes upstairs, he realises that the budget he’s been promised is not so clandestinely being reallocated to the rest of the department up here. Desks are being equipped with new computer screens and telephones, a large flatscreen TV is being carried into Moira’s office.

Carl knows how to push Moira’s buttons, so he puts in a request for an assistant. Hm, who will it be? Moira wants Carl’s pick for his first case by the end of the week, though.

In the High Court, the day for Finch’s verdict has come. Merritt’s expression looks grim. It turns even grimmer when the jury announces that the charge of murder was not found as proven. Finch walks, a free man again. Merritt escapes into a taxi. Her phone pings with more personal threats.

The next person to walk into the Dept. Q Headquarters is Akram Salim – Moira has found the perfect job for him. Make the unsociable arsehole downstairs a tad less grumpy and be out of my hair. Win/win, no?

We’ll never know what got into Carl that he thought it would be a good idea to try out the discarded bench press all on his own. Clearly, he’s out of his depth and struggling not to get crushed by what doesn’t even look like a massively heavy barbell.

It takes Akram a few seconds to realise that Carl is in actual distress, so he quickly goes to help out. Together they manoeuvre the barbell into its hanger, and it’s such a great metaphor that Akram stands astride Carl for it, effectively pinning him to the bench. Akram just met Carl, but already he has power over him to save him from being crushed by the weight he tries to wrestle. The makings of a dream team.

Carl immediately reprimands for Rose for unleashing Akram on him. Because Akram is eager and will mess with Carl’s ability to just quietly wile away the hours in the basement. Carl’s first order of business is to send Akram on some errands. Like, oh, clean up the place, mop the floors and get me one of those flatscreen tellies down here. Akram dutifully notes it down in his notepad.

Akram goes to take care of those errands, and then Carl’s phone rings. Next thing we know, he is rushing into Hardy’s rehab facility. Clearly, something bad has happened because Carl’s expression is grave and foreboding.

Hardy’s still alive, he’s lying in his bed, but his face is grim yet stricken with turmoil. Apparently, he was found on the floor near the window. They seem to think he fell out of bed. But that’s not what this is.

Carl makes a stupid Carl joke, but Hardy’s eyes are teary and he breathes hard, and suddenly Carl’s face falls. Oh no. No, no, no. Hardy was trying to kill himself, and he begs Carl to help him end this miserable existence. Carl promises that they’ll figure it out, like they always do. So now we know these two have been through real shit together. There’s implicit, full trust. A bond of platonic love shrouded in jovial insults and merciless ribbing.

The intense moment is interrupted by Hardy’s wife and kids arriving, and Hardy wipes away the tears in one fell swoop and puts on a smile. His family can’t know about this. Another poignant look between the two. Yet another thing to weigh down Carl’s shoulders, another ghost to haunt him.

Merritt has a small emergency of her own. She gets home, realising that something must be amiss. Claire, the housekeeper, chides her for being late. Something has William so agitated that he’s banging the back of his head against the wall that he sits against. He’s holding an old photo of himself and Merritt when they were teenagers, before he became disabled. Merritt does her best to console him and calm him down. Claire watches from the doorframe. She looks… upset. Jealous.

Merritt says she’s tired. She suggests a change of scenery, a trip away. Home. The camera pans to show a drawing of their father’s boat that William made.

In the Dept. Q basement, Akram is half-heartedly sorting through boxes with cold case files. Carl catches him in the act and scolds him. No one’s supposed to touch those files, least of all some low brow assistant who knows nothing. Except… Akram knows more than Carl thinks.

He’s read a lot of the files, now understand what this new department is all about. He finds them interesting. He mentions this isn’t unfamiliar to him. At home in Syria there are way too many instances where people go missing and no one cares to look. Except Akram. He looked.

Carl asks if he worked for the police, and Akram’s answer is deflective. He says sort of. It’s complicated. Who is this man?

Akram offers to help Carl sort through the files and pick a few that might be worth looking into. Carl’s reluctant at first, but something tells him Akram is way more capable than he let on. And Carl’s not really all that keen to dig through old paperwork. So why the hell not? Oh, and by the way, as per Moira, Carl’s not supposed to park in the disabled space. The glance Carl gives Akram upon hearing this shoots daggers.

After Hardy’s ill-executed suicide attempt, Carl makes it a point to go see him again. He verbally dumps his woes on Hardy, ranting on about how it’s bullshit that he’s supposed to make Moira look good by solving cold cases. He pointedly remarks that’s the two of them are the dysfunctional dream team: Hardy wants to kill himself, Carl wants to kill everyone else. Talk about 1+1=0.

It’s a rare moment of Carl honesty without his cynicism getting in the way because he admits that he can’t give up on Jasper and he sure as hell can’t give up on Hardy. So what’s he supposed to do? And then Hardy surprises him, because now his curiosity is piqued. He wants a beer and then Carl can tell him all about this new department that was dumped in his lap.

Merritt and William are taking their trip, we see them boarding a ferry. We don’t know this yet, but it’s going to be a fateful journey for both Merritt and William.

If you’ve ever been to the Orkney Islands, the scenery you see passing by as William and Merritt are on the ferry will look very familiar to you. Which makes it even odder that they chose Mhòr to be more in the general vicinity of the Isle of Mull. The ferry scenes were apparently filmed on an Orkney ferry. Makes you wonder why, seeing how that’s kind of way out of the way of Edinburgh.

We now see them intercutting between Akram sorting through Dept. Q case files, Carl returning to the police station and Merritt and William on the ferry. Merritts makes the mistake of checking her phone and she sees more of the harassing messages. She flips the phone closed and throws it into the water. As if by instinct and by way of imitation, William takes off his hat and throws it in the same direction.

Akram takes another file out of a box. He leafs through it, something catches his eye, and he takes it out for a closer look.

After William has thrown the hat away, he suddenly gets very agitated. Merritt thinks it’s because of the hat. She has to physically wrestle him away from the railing. When she tells him he shouldn’t have done that, he slaps her across the face. Merritt stumbles back and falls down, hitting her cheek on a storage box.

When she pulls herself back to her feet, she and William stare at each other. Merritt is clearly upset. William doesn’t usually get violent. She doesn’t understand. She walks past him like he’s deeply betrayed her.

At the police station, Akram reads the file with more interest as Carl walks through the upstairs open office to the elevator. Inside, he heavily exhales. Another day to fight his way through while carrying the burden.

He gets to his desk, and there’s a single file lying there. He picks it up, then looks over to Akram. Akram’s gaze says, ‘This. This is the one.’

On the ferry, William sits on the passenger seat of a car. A policeman gets into the driver’s side, and they drive away.

Carl flicks through the file. There are surveillance photos of William and Merritt on the ferry. Akram says to Carl that they can find her, but Carl isn’t so sure, seeing how she’s been gone for four years now, and she’s presumed dead. Carl questions whether this is just Akram’s gut feeling, but Akram says, no, it’s what’s in the file. Carl drops it carelessly on the desk, Merritt’s face on the photo pinned to the cover. “Nah. It’s a loser.”

The camera pans away from a dim, red overhead light of a narrow confined cylindrical space of some kind that’s reminiscent of the inside of a submarine. At one end of it lies Merritt on the ground, looking like hell. She makes her bed on a thin mattress on the ground with a heavy sigh. Her clothes are grimy, and her hair is long and unkempt.

If you’ve looked closely here, you may have noticed that the scenes inside what we later learn is a large hyperbaric chamber were filmed in a 4:3 format. This is said to have been an artistic choice to make those scenes feel even more confined and claustrophobic.

As Merritt starts her morning routine, loud music starts blaring through speakers and a male voice says, “Good morning, Merritt.” The camera pans up and over the metal cylinder Merritt is being held captive in towards a control room.

Not a loser. Merritt is still alive. And the mystery begins to unravel.

And that wraps up the first episode, which I still feel is a work of art in scriptwriting, storytelling and acting. There are so many nuances in not just the script but also the performances that you can rewatch the episodes several times and still find something you’ve previously missed. It’s been a long time that I’ve seen a show of this calibre, and I’m super happy that Netflix decided to renew it for a 2nd season!