Episode 1×03 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.

Episode 1×03

It’s another day in Merritt’s life in captivity. She wakes up on her barren mattress with the one woollen blanket and pillow they’ve allowed her. Her captor’s voice greets her to explain something new. As if being held in a metal tube with nothing but yourself isn’t bad enough, they are now going to also increase the physical duress by raising the pressure inside the chamber.

And it’s not just the bodily discomfort of a high pressure environment, it also raises the stakes in that Merritt won’t be able to easily escape. Once your body has adjusted to a certain amount of air pressure, you can’t just leave that environment, or else your body will quite literally explode from the inside. This hyperbaric chamber is both a tool of genius and evil.

In the present, Carl and Akram are taking a trip to where it all started: the island of Mhòr. Carl is still kneading tennis balls, telling himself, “Get it together, you fucking loser.” He frustratedly throws the tennis ball overboard. Life still sucks, and who is Akram on the phone with?

Another interesting tidbit about the ferry scene: The tennis ball that Carl throws into the water in real life isn’t actually a tennis ball. It’s an orange disguised as one. The prop department got creative to protect the environment and painted an orange to make it look like a tennis ball. Ah, the creative genius or prop departments. Can’t love them enough!

I haven’t mentioned this before, but I really love how they’re playing with the wardrobe and the overall styling of the characters on the show. While Carl has the “I don’t give a fuck how I look or if it’s stylish” thing going on, Akram’s style is super conservative to the point of frumpy, including the moustache and hairstyle. The grandfather hat he wears here is just the perfect icing on the cake. Matthew Goode tends to describe it as “geography teacher” look, and yep, that fits.

Presumably, Akram talked to Moira because he relays two messages to Carl: 1) He needs to answer his phone (of course Carl doesn’t give a fuck), and 2) William Lingard has gone missing after he saw Carl’s press conference.

Carl and Akram discuss the Lingard case as they stand at the ferry railing in the same spot where Merritt and William were seen on the cameras. Akram explains that when William got physical with Merritt, they were fighting over William throwing his hat out to sea.

Carl enquires about the wind conditions and then proves a point. He throws Akram’s grandfather hat in the same direction, and the wind blows it right back onto the ferry. They go to search for it and it landed down where the cars are parked. There’s cameras down there too but none of them picked Merritt up, which seems strange.

So what happened and how? The trip had been spontaneous, so not a premeditated crime. The fight with William was spur of the moment too. A crime of opportunity? On a ferry? Or was she being followed?

Just then someone steps into view from behind, dressed in a neon yellow safety vest and a baseball cap with a cormorant logo in their back pocket. We don’t yet know the significance of this, but the ominous musical crescendo should tell us that there is something to be noticed here.

On Mhòr, Carl and Akram meet with the local constable by the name of Cunningham – a seasoned gentlemen with grey hair, probably nearing his retirement. While he paints a tin soldier for his model army, he talks about the Lingard family and how they always had dark clouds hanging over them. The constable is a bit stroppy, doesn’t want to readily share a lot of details, but explains the mother died in a car accident in Glasgow, the father was a drunk and not fit to take care of the children.

William, as the older brother, stepped up and took care of Merritt. And Merritt, back then, had been a bit of a troublemaker. What changed her trajectory was what happened to William: he had his head bashed in by a local offender by the name of Harry Jennings that left him with brain damage and the aphasia. Harry broke into the Lingard house when Merritt wasn’t home and William was asleep.

Harry Jennings never paid for his crimes since he jumped off the ferry evading arrest which he didn’t survive since he was apparently drunk as fuck. Or as the constable puts it, his blood alcohol peaked at somewhere between blootered and completely fucking wrecked.

Carl asks where they can find Merritt’s father Jamie – maybe at the local pub? But no, the man gave up alcohol a long time ago and is now sober. And just as Carl is about to leave, the constable throws a last dagger. He saw Carl’s press conference and thinks Carl is an arrogant English bloke who is meddling in affairs that don’t behove him. Something tells us that the constable doesn’t like it very much that someone is digging around the Lingard history.

Next, they drive to Jamie Lingard’s house, Merritt’s father. The man doesn’t seem to be home, but the door is unlocked so Carl invites himself right in. Akram announces that they’re the police, then dryly comments off of a look from Carl, “We don’t have to break every rule.”

The home looks very clean and tidy, perhaps unusually so. Carl remarks there are pictures of William but none of Merritt. Just then Jamie Lingard makes his entrance, adding, “Because she was always a right cunt, that one.”

Carl asks why he thinks that, seeing how Merritt became William’s guardian when she was 24 and Jamie never challenged the petition. He said he didn’t have access to a fancy lawyer, and with his addiction history wouldn’t have stood a chance anyway. Plus, Merritt did the right thing. Jamie was unfit to be a father at the time.

Yet, 12 years later, on the trip where she vanished, Merritt came back to Mhòr, and Carl wants to know why. Jamie doesn’t know, Merritt didn’t tell him they were planning to visit. The last time Jamie saw William was the day after Merritt’s disappearance. He says it was too hard for him to keep seeing him after that.

Jamie is convinced they won’t find Merritt since she didn’t want to be found. “I’m very good at finding things that don’t want to be found,” Akram tells him. “Yeah,” Carl quips. “Outside of your self-control.”

Just as Carl is about to go, Jamie mentions that Merritt stole from him: a necklace that belonged to her mother Lila. It was the last thing that Jamie had of Lila, and Merritt knew that, but she took it anyway just to hurt him. A right cunt, eh?

We go into a flashback – a teenage Merritt talking to her father. We learn that Lila’s family disowned Lila when she got together with Jamie. They said Jamie was too old for Lila but mostly because he was a fisherman and not some fancy rich guy. It sounds like Lila died when she was visiting her family to try and make things right or maybe to get out of the shitty life she was trapped in. But Merritt thinks that the reason she went was to get money so she could put some away for her and William.

Jamie confesses to Merritt that, as angry as she is with him, he’s twice as angry at himself. And maybe that would help Merritt to try not to make him even angrier all the time. Merritt doesn’t have any empathy for Jamie. She accuses him by saying Lila died trying to save him. William hears the conversation from the other room and chides Merritt for being so cruel.

Merritt wakes up in her chamber prison, hollow sounds coming from the outside and there’s movement above the red-tinted skylight above her. She gets up and looks, then jerks away when a plastic safety helmet is being dropped onto the window.

She’s not allowed any peace, any self-determined actions. Everything outside of normal routine is being punished. “Fuck you!” she yells. Her defiance doesn’t come with impunity. Loud, monotonous music is starting to blare from the speakers. Merritt cowers on the mattress and covers her head with her pillow.

Akram and Carl return to the mainland. As they’re waiting to drive off the ferry, Akram remarks that what really happened in Merritt’s past won’t be in any file. Which is why Carl wants him to find William. Akram is surprised. Carl actually actively wants him to do something that’s conducive to the case? That’s new.

Carl is now also curious about Akram’s own background. “Tell me something. Back home, were you working for the good guys or the bad guys?” Akram looks at him. “When you know which is which, please do tell me.” Always deflecting. Just like Carl. The dream team.

William is stumbling through a forest that clears onto a road. He’s managed to evade the watchful eyes of the Egley House staff. He didn’t just randomly run away, though. He sought out their old house where he and Merritt used to live.

Their home is now in a derelict state – an abandoned building in the middle of nowhere that’s become home to a group of crackheads, graffiti on the walls both on the outside and inside, drug paraphernalia everywhere. As William walks into the old living space, he has a flashback to having dinner with Merritt. Old times, when things were still good.

He runs upstairs. Another flashback, this time to Merritt coming into his room as he’s about to go to sleep, switching off the lamps that illuminate his drawings and paintings of himself when he was younger, of Merritt. Now the same room is a drug den, and William anxiously pulls out the old suitcase that’s still there that houses some of his old drawings.

As he goes through them, we see drawings of Merritt as a teenager, Merritt as a young adult, smoking fags with a young man (possibly Harry Jennings). Their father with grey hair and bony hands. And then there’s one he’s been looking for. A round logo of some sort with a black and white cormorant in the centre. William folds it up and puts it in his pocket.

Back in Edinburgh, Carl gets home after a long day. Loud music greets him as he enters the flat. Fucking Jasper. He enters his stepson’s room without announcement, already angry. “Could you please turn the fucking noise down!”

Jasper’s playing a video game, but this music is a little different. He asks Carl to listen to the lyrics, because they’re about him and Carl, how they make him feel. Carl breathes in, listens for a moment. A male voice sings, “I can talk to anyone, I can’t talk to you. I can talk to anyone.”

Okay, Carl gets it. Jasper switches it off. He wants a truce between them. Jasper drives the point home that he and Carl aren’t biologically related and only stuck with each other because of unwanted circumstances.

Jasper suggests that they handle their relationship more like an army relationship, like they have to live together but leave each other alone as much as they can. Of course that only works if they actually do their assignments, as Carl points out. And he stresses that Carl is his commanding officer, not his comrade.

He also asks Jasper not to skip school, but Jasper says, “It is so fucking boring.” Carl is at the end of his tether. Clearly this isn’t salvageable. But Jasper is adamant that he wants this to work, so he says he will try to do all his assignments if Carl could try not to be such a massive fucking arsehole. They agree to both do their parts in this “arrangement”. Not with a handshake but with an army salute.

I love this scene because it was so well done to portray that Jasper is desperate for Carl’s approval and attention but doesn’t know how to reach him. A theme in Carl’s life since he’s made it his life’s mission to wall himself off and make it impossible for anyone to reach him, even the people who care about him. This scene was such a great stop along the path of Carl and Jasper trying to glue their relationship back together, once piece at a time, and the glue application here comes from a 17-year-old rather than the actual adult in this relationship.

Rose stands outside the station the next morning as Carl arrives in his run-down red Ford. Carl callously parks in the no-parking zone front of the police station. She makes an attempt to connect with him by mentioning that she herself is no stranger to mental health problems. Not surprisingly, this bounces off of Carl’s carefully erected walls with the glaring “I’m totally fine and don’t you dare suggest otherwise” graffiti on it.

Thankfully, Rose isn’t easily intimidated by Carl, so she approaches him with a pretty big ask: She wants Carl to consider adding her to his team. She hasn’t worked on an actual case in two years and she’s getting antsy. Of course this also sneakily circumvents Moira’s rejection of that same request earlier. But hey, this is Carl, the renegade. He might not care. Or do it out of sheer spite.

But no, Carl doesn’t want more people to hog all the basement air. His best laid plan was to sit back and not bother with actual work, remember? But Rose is eager and adamant, and loath as Carl is to admit it, he could use the help. Plus Rose has a blackmail card up her sleeve because now she can blab to Moira that Carl is letting Akram do some of his own investigating when he’s not supposed to be doing that. Carl grudgingly agrees to try having Rose help out for one day as a test run.

We learn another bit of background info on Rose here. Rose’s father was Hardy’s training officer, which is partly Hardy’s motivation to mentor her. Rose didn’t actually know this until Carl told her since Hardy is the kind who would keep quiet about such things.

Turns out William actually slept in his old home, oblivious to the fact that it’s been appropriated by a bunch of drug addicts who are now staking their claim of the territory. They threaten him with a knife and William bails the fuck out of there.

In Dept. Q HQ, the team keeps working on the case, trying to piece together the puzzle. Rose is munching on an apple – loudly. And it annoys the fuck out of Carl. Rose remarks it might be misophonia: a condition where people are sensitive to certain sounds. Certainly possible. Carl doesn’t like being armchair diagnosed, of course, so he sighs, leans back and asks Rose if she was close with her father.

She tells him he divorced her mother when she was five and remarried. The whole exercise is not to learn about Rose’s family history, it’s to brainstorm about why Merritt might have gone back to Mhòr 12 years ago to see her estranged father. People might see an alienated parent if they’re sick or dying. But that’s not the case here. So why did Merritt go to the island? Was her disappearance just a case of running away from a malicious stalker who caught up with her after all?

Rose’s theory is that she went back there not to see her father but someone else. Carl just stares at the board and keeps quiet. He already knew that. A teaching moment for Rose. “Look at you being a right proper mentor and all,” she remarks but he waves it off. His next assignment for Rose is to look through her appointments and bank statements to see if there was anything unusual there they can dig their heels into. Rose frantically scribbles it down on her notepad.

And then Carl pitches another angle. Was the investigation deliberately fucked up? It seems strange that the case landed with Fergus Dunbar, a relative nobody. They should also look into that.

Next, Carl ambushes, oh, excuse me, ambuscades Stephen Burns outside the courthouse. He wants a list of everyone that Merritt worked with. Did Burns know that she was receiving death threats? He shows Burns some of the messages that Merritt received, and Burns had no idea. But those threats could have been sent by anyone. Merritt would have made enough enemies during her career.

Carl insinuates that Merritt was always an outsider among her colleagues because she was a woman in a male-dominated field, but Burns doesn’t take the bait. “Oh, do fuck off, Carl,” he tells him, which Carl greets with a smug expression. Burns divulges that Merritt was ambitious, was perhaps even after his job eventually.

Carl challenges that, if she was that ambitious, isn’t the suicide story a little out of character? Burns thinks finally her darker side caught up with her, that she had secrets that may very well hold the answers to her disappearance. And, oh, by the way, Carl should make an actual appointment next time he wants to speak to the Lord Advocate.

I do love Mark Bonnar in this! His presence on screen is amazing and he plays the superiority and subtle threats so well. I can’t praise this whole cast enough.

Meanwhile, Akram is out and about on his mission to find William, using the pool car that he had Rose organise for him. His destination is Merritt’s old lodgings where William had been just hours before. He finds the crackheads conked out on mattresses on the ground floor but he ignores them for now.

His first focus is reconnaissance. Upstairs, his sharp eyes land on William’s suitcase in a nook in the wall that he pulls out. On top of it are two drawings he takes. He finds more of them downstairs, then wakes up the druggies and starts interrogating them. Did they retrieve all the drawings upstairs that are now scattered all over the place?

They tell him that someone else was here before who did that – the freak. William. One of the girls pulls out a knife to assert some kind of feeble superiority over Akram, who is seemingly unimpressed. When she actually points the knife at Akram, he grabs the neck of the druggie next to him in a practiced motion and starts squeezing it. “It hurts, I know. It’s a pressure point. Soon you will feel it directly behind your eyes, and then you will vomit.”

Nice, Akram. The girls are appalled. Who is this guy? One of them tells Akram that William ran away, down the road. Akram lets go of the guy and pockets the rest of the drawings. “Thank you very much,” he says calmly while the crackhead violently pants for air.

This is the first time we see what exactly Akram is capable of, and the first time we go, holy shit, who is this guy?! What did he do before he came to Scotland? Is he some kind of trained assassin? The plot thickens.

Akram must have told Carl about his little excursion (but likely omitted some of the pertinent details), because Carl and Akram show up at Claire’s house, looking for William. The latter was filmed by CCTV, a mile from Claire’s house.

Claire’s asserts that William isn’t here, but Carl insists they check themselves. However, it seems that Claire didn’t lie.

Huh, Shirley Henderson must be tiny. Both Matthew Goode and Alexej Manvelov seem to tower over her.

Carl eyes the religious pictures on the wall and Claire explains that they’re remnants of her estranged husband. They lost a baby and it spiralled from there. Claire makes an off-hand remark that she hopes they never find Merritt because she was the most rueful person that she ever met.

Akram, meanwhile, calls Carl over. Carl goes to look and then points out the window. William is huddled up in Claire’s tiny greenhouse out in the yard.

When they get William inside, he gulps down food and drink like he’s not had any in days. Which he probably hasn’t, he’s been on the lam for over a day. Carl tries to connect with him, and William hands him a drawing he pocketed at the old house. It’s the round logo of the cormorant.

When Carl asks him if he saw the bird on the ferry, William hastily turns the drawing over. On the other side is a faceless head with a baseball cap that bears the same cormorant logo. William points at it, now clearly agitated.

They start guessing since William can’t speak or write. Is that the hat he wore on the ferry? William shakes his head. Did he see someone with that hat on the ferry? Not on the ferry? William makes a gesture. Claire explains it means home. So he saw someone with that hat at home? Yes, they’re getting closer. Akram connects the dots. He saw someone with that hat both at their home and on the ferry. With Merritt. Hm. What does that mean?

Man, hats off (pun intended) to Tom Bulpett who was so brilliant as William. Acting without voice is such a challenge, and he managed beautifully. Scott Frank really assembled a masterful cast.

I also want to talk about a little detail here that might fall by the wayside if you don’t pay close attention, but there is this beautiful moment where Carl talks to William and Claire and he says, “Can he write? He draws beautifully. You draw… beautifully.” With how abrasive Carl often is, people may assume that he has zero regard for his fellow human beings, but that is very much not true. He is one of the few people who acknowledges William as an intelligent human being, who doesn’t automatically assume he is incapable of understanding or communicating. And in that brief moment, he corrects himself to address William directly out of pure respect. And that very much pays off and carries through the future encounters he has with William.

The camera then cuts to a sheet of paper glued to the wall of the hyperbaric chamber. It depicts the same cormorant logo we’ve seen in the drawing. Merritt looks at it intently.

Akram and Carl take William back to Egley House. Carl watches through the windscreen. They exchange a look that clearly tells Carl that William doesn’t want to be here.

Carl’s next stop is another visit with his best mate who is currently engaged with a nurse. They joke that Carl is English, and there’s some heavy flirting between Hardy and the nurse, which Carl annotates dryly with, “How’s your wife?” He hands out their signature shared beer cans and Carl gives Hardy a rare, genuine smile as he retells his adventures on Mhòr.

He shares with Hardy that Cunningham talked about how Merritt was a very different person as a teen—a rebel with little regard for education or a desire to become an upstanding citizen. Carl asks Hardy if he’s read the file, and Hardy comes back with a passive-aggressive retort. In fact, he’s full of passive-aggressiveness today, and it grates on Carl.

And then Hardy teases Carl about the disaster of a press conference. Carl says, “I was ambushed. Wasn’t prepared.” Hardy smiles. “Really? Because it looked a lot like your wee arse dropped out.” And then Carl lashes out as well because now he’s pissed off, especially since Hardy brings up his disability again. “Can you get me a computer?” Hardy asks out of nowhere. Carl now stands facing away from him, looking out the window. He’s tired of the reminders, the guilt hitting home. “Depends. You gonna pull the fucking cripple card every time we have a row?” But Carl being Carl, he agrees. Of course he’s getting Hardy a computer.

Carl walks back into the police station with sinister, bagpipes-heavy music playing in the background. (Btw, I love this musical theme! Carlos Rafael Rivera did such a great job with the score.) Moira is waiting for him, hands in her pockets. Something’s up. She got wind of Akram running around, crushing people’s windpipes.

Carl defends Akram, loyal to a tee. Also, Akram has long won Carl over because Carl tells Moira, “He’s good. Annoying, but good.” And he’s gonna take Rose as well. Turns out she’s not nearly as dumb as she looks. Jesus Christ, Carl. But also, Moira has a soft spot for the man.

And then Moira not so subtly points to her office where Rachel is waiting. Has Carl forgotten that he has department-mandated therapy sessions to attend? Because if he doesn’t, Moira threatens to give his job to someone else. Question is, though: Would she really?

Carl knows he doesn’t have a choice. And also, he’ll take any chance he can to get another look at pretty Dr. Irving, won’t he?

He fakes annoyance that Rachel ratted him out. She says she’s worried about him, but his sharp sarcasm cuts the air in the room to pieces. “Oh, well, that must gall you.” Rachel has seen the press conference too. Carl tries to deflect with feeble excuses. “I was dehydrated, okay?” And he sure didn’t have a panic attack!

Rachel then shares a similar experience of her own. She had a panic attack during her wedding. At the altar when she was supposed to say, “Yes, I do.” Except that perhaps she should have read it as a sign because it turns out her husband Albert actually already had a family back in Leeds – wife, children, and all that. Carl jokes about the name Albert, he’d pegged her more as a Jake or Luke type. And in case Carl missed it, that was her showing Carl how to open up. But Carl being Carl, he ignores it and goes on his merry way to the basement.

There’s a surprise for him waiting there. Boxes upon boxes with files – every case Merritt Lingard ever worked on. Carl instructs Akram and Rose to keep them for a week and then send them all back except her last five cases. Akram protests. They should look at the files.

Carl has another idea for how to make use of Rose’s skills. He wants her to go back to Mhòr the next day and chat up Cunningham, see if she can extract more information from him, seeing how Carl and Akram were so rudely rebuffed earlier. Carl then gets a text message and bolts out of there.

Presumably, this was Martin, informing him that Jasper decided to desert from the not so watchful eyes of Carl’s supervision, so Carl rushes home. Jasper isn’t there and Carl demands a status report, so Martin tells him that Jasper got a call from his mother, and next thing he knows, Jasper is cursing a storm and packing a suitcase. Carl’s only response can be, “Fucking hell.” Just another complication he doesn’t need in his life. And so much for a “strong, male figure” in Jasper’s life.

Elsewhere, Dr. Wallace is watching William frantically drawing new images via the camera in his room. As he does so, he has a memory from when he was still living with his sister at their house. He puts some of his drawings in a wall storage space and watches as Merritt practices a plea for the Graham Finch case downstairs.

William goes downstairs and switches on the television. There’s a thunderstorm raging outside, and suddenly there’s a man standing by their window in the rain. A man wearing a black baseball cap with a cormorant logo. William starts screaming, and Merritt is immediately alarmed.

Back at Egley house, William angrily scratches out the drawing he just attempted. He’s trying to remember and draw the face he saw, but it’s not coming out right. He’s frustrated. Wallace watches with interest.

If you look closely at these faces that William has drawn, he is not actually that far off. They all bear a striking resemblance to who we later find out is Lyle Jennings.

Merritt looks at the sheet of paper with the logo in the chamber. There’s an L in the middle and a question mark peeking out from under it, and that seems curious. Why hasn’t she noticed this before? She peels away the paper and the letters L H are revealed, scraped into the wall, above a question of ‘Why are you here?’

Knowing what we know by the end of the season, we can only assume that this inscription was etched into the chamber wall by either Lyle or Harry when they were held in the chamber by Ailsa as teenagers. Very likely she also emotionally tormented her children with the question as to why they had been locked up, much like what they’re doing with Merritt now.

Working late and now alone in the office, Rose studies William’s drawing of the cormorant logo and hat. She has a hunch and starts looking up shorebirds on the computer just as her mum calls her. The relationship seems strained, seeing how Rose lies to her mother about where she is and what she’s doing, pretending she’s getting ready for a date. Seems like overbearing mother whose expectation is that her daughter gets married and has children.

She finds a wiki entry for a bird that looks a lot like the one William drew. It’s a boobrie. According to the text on the screen, a boobrie is a mythological shapeshifting entity inhabiting the lochs of the west coast of Scotland. It commonly adopts the appearance of a gigantic water bird resembling a cormorant.

Rose goes back to the case whiteboard, rechecking one of the newspaper clippings they found about the attack on William Lingard when he was a teenager. Rose takes a closer look at the photo in the newspaper that depicts the house and a boat in front of it. With a magnifying glass, she can now make out the name of the boat. It’s Boobrie II. “Fuck,” she mutters. That can’t be a coincidence, right?

The screen fades to the end credits.

Fun fact: What you see on the screen is a rewritten version of an actual Wikipedia entry about the boobrie. And yes, it’s a mythological creature known in Scotland.