Dept. Q ending explained: Did Morck and the team solve their case?

At the end of the first episode, viewers found out that one storyline they'd been following, that of Chloe Pirrie's Merritt, was actually taking place four years in the past, and that she had been held captive all of that time.

Morck and his team work to find her, bring her home and bring her abductors to justice – but do they succeed and where does the end of the season leave the central characters ahead of any future additional seasons?

Read on for everything you need to know about the ending of Dept. Q.

Who was Merritt abducted by and why?

Through their investigation, Morck and the rest of the Dept. Q team found that a man claiming to be Sam Haig, who Merritt has been having a relationship with, wasn't who he said he was.

The man was actually Lyle Jennings, the brother of Harry Jennings, who Merritt had a relationship with when she was young.

Lyle had been abused by his mother from an early age, who frequently sealed him inside a hyperbaric chamber for long periods of a time as a punishment for bad behaviour. He believed this to be perfectly normal and acceptable.

He had also been known to have killed animals as a child, and to have killed his father in a fire when he was 14 – he had started a fire at home by flicking lit cigarettes at his dad while he slept.

Merritt and Harry planned to run away together to get away from her dad and his mum. They had a conversation about stealing some of Merritt's dead mother's rings from her father, in order to fund their life together. She told him not go through with it, but he did anyway.

One night, he broke into their house but found Merritt's brother William unexpectedly home. William, spooked, had hit Harry over the head.

Lyle, who had secretly been following Harry, saw this, and hit William back, beating him mercilessly. This left him in a coma, and when he came out he was non-verbal and unable to care for himself going forward.

Harry ran away, and Merritt always believed he had been behind the attack. As he fled on a ferry, he was chased by local police officer Cunningham, and ended up falling overboard to his death.

Lyle and his mother Ailsa both blamed Merritt for Harry's death. Meanwhile, Lyle begun to have delusions, believing Harry was still somehow with him. He was sectioned for some time, but let out 6 years prior to Merritt's disappearance.

He took a job working for the ferry, and, on his mother's instructions, abducted Merritt after scaring her into leaving town and boarding it with William. He and Ailsa had then kept her in the hyperbarric chamber, trying to get her to understand, explain and confess to why she was there.

Was Merritt saved?

By the end of the season, Lyle had killed Cunningham and the real Sam Haig, so he was certainly capable of killing Merritt, even though he appeared to have a romantic fixation with her.

He and Ailsa upped the pressure in the chamber, meaning even if she got out she would die from the sudden change in pressure.

Thankfully, Morck and Akram tracked down the location of the chamber just in time, and tried to stabilise the pressure to save Merritt. As they did so, Lyle found them and shot Morck in the shoulder.

Just before he killed them, Akram managed to get hold of the gun and shoot Lyle dead with it.

Morck and Akram then saved Merritt, stabilising the pressure before transporting her to a hyperbaric stretcher, where she could recover before being adjusted to a normal pressure. She was reunited with her brother William, and was later seen to have full recovered.

Meanwhile, as she was about to be arrested, Ailsa shot herself in the head.

Where did we leave Morck and the team?

Morck, his housemate Martin, his stepson Jasper and his therapist Rachel were seen spending time together and bonding.

Morck told Lord Advocate Stephen Burns that he wouldn't report how he had ensured the failure of the Graham Finch prosecution, understanding that he did this to protect his daughter, who Finch had threatened. With Merritt able to testify to Burns's actions, he could have been in trouble.

Instead, Morck blackmailed him into giving the department the budget it was meant to have, while he also got Akram fast-tracked to the DI rank.

Hardy returned to the department, now able to walk on crutches, and Moira told him she had a case for him to look at. He then joined Morck, Akram and Rose in the basement.

Dept. Q is available to stream in full on Netflix now. Sign up for Netflix from £5.99 a month. Netflix is also available on Sky Glass and Virgin Media Stream.

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