TV’s Best Spy Thriller Proves Itself Fresh, Time and Time Again
Family is not a word that comes up in conversation between the so-called slow horses. Apple TV+’s tatterdemalion group of MI5 rejects cooperate at the office and in the field to save Britain time and time again, but the buck stops once they leave the dingy walls of Slough House. They socialize, begrudgingly, when exhausted by their work, but no one could ever mistake this group for friends, let alone family. God forbid they mention those back at home—or anything too identifying or personal—for risk of being mocked by their co-workers, each as jaded as the rest.
Yet family takes the front seat in the fourth season of Slow Horses, the spy thriller based on a series of Mick Herron novels of the same name. The season’s inciting incident puts agent River Cartwright (Jack Lowden) and his grandfather David (Jonathan Pryce), a retired MI5 higher-up, on the run from both the service at Regent’s Park and a group of mercenaries operating out of France. There’s also a succession of bombings in London and, as ever, the specter of premature, likely death looming over this ragtag group of kin. The stakes of the show have never been quite high enough for the characters to take much more than a passing concern for their peers (and any semblance of romance between the slow horses is certain to be a death sentence), but here the worry finally feels quite personal—all those hours in the field have ultimately amounted to some care and compassion.
Perhaps more surprising than this season’s newfound heart is the competency of the slow horses. Whereas past seasons have homed in on the inevitable mistakes and blunders that doomed and continued to plague these agents, Season 4 focuses, instead, on what Slough House is really capable of when they put their minds to it and stop bickering for all of five seconds. Even hacker and resident asshole Roddy Ho (Christopher Chung) has it together, for once. Under the helm of wayward boss Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman), the group feels stronger, sharper, and more capable than ever. Even when they’re messing up, they’re not mucking it up as much as the Park this time.
There are a handful of new faces joining the cast this season, all of whom bring something new to the table. In Slough House, the overeager Moira (Joanna Scanlan, best known to some for her work in Armando Iannucci’s The Thick of It and In the Loop) works to get back to her old job as soon as possible, while the dead-eyed J.K. (Tom Brooke) sits and twitches in the corner. Over at the Park, the slick new First Desk Claude (James Callis) butts heads with Second Desk Diana Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas) and gets bogged down in the posh bureaucracy and PM of it all, as Emma (Ruth Bradley) gets off to a bumpy start as the head of the internal tactical and security unit known as the “Dogs.” All these fresh cast members are great, especially Callis and Bradley, who lend the Park—frequently the villains of the show—an unprecedented degree of incompetence. For once, the threat isn’t coming from inside the house.
The most notable addition to this season’s cast is its villain: Frank Harkness, played by Hugo Weaving. Other limited drama series often tout an acclaimed guest star for a single season of scenery chewing, but this is the first time Slow Horses has brought on a capital-B Big Bad. Harkness runs a sort of mercenary home for boys, one of whom might just be responsible for the bombing that sets off the season’s course of events. His aims are much more local: He’s less intent on world chaos than he is keen to fix his protégé’s mistake before the slow horses get a whiff of his work. In that sense, Harkness reads as an almost perfect foil to Lamb’s sweaty, smelly mess of a leadership strategy. Weaving gives the role a ruthless sense of control, down to his perfectly manicured beard. He’s a far cry from his most notable villainous turn in the original Matrix franchise. Here, he’s much more human, dangerously so. He’s polite, almost personable, in his short dealings with the MI5 agents, suggesting, perhaps, that a better workplace model is out there.
The pivot to personal is a bit of a shaky turn for a series that otherwise excels at both action and comedy. It’s easy to buy the disintegrating relationship between River and his ailing grandfather, or Lamb’s occasional affection for his team, but efforts toward developing relationships between some of the more minor characters ring hollow or overdone. The show struggles to find a solid motivation for Louisa (Rosalind Eleazar), who, in her grief over a past loss, seems to tether her emotional well-being to River, for some reason. These two characters have hardly interacted over the past three seasons; though they’re undoubtedly tied together by the strength of a “not being killed yet” bond, there’s little for their suggested connection to actually stand on. The same goes for Marcus (Kadiff Kirwan) and Shirley (Aimee-Ffion Edwards), whose arguing has crossed over the point of charming into tedious. The show may have, early on, earned the shock value of unexpected midseason character deaths, but this latest season might be the first to suggest that there are now simply too many slow horses to keep track of.
Or perhaps the reason why these moments of overstated sentiment can feel so rote in an otherwise action-and-espionage-driven show is because Slow Horses is often at its best when letting the loud parts go unsaid. Both River’s and Lamb’s arcs have the duo separated for the bulk of the season—the former researching Harkness and what’s been going on in France, the latter trying to hold the rest of his team together. As the two work their disparate jobs, they arrive at the same conclusion, one that binds them in affection and surprise, reaffirming that their mentor–mentee relationship runs much deeper than either would care to admit. If the fourth season of the show proves anything, it’s that these two characters—River, with his plucky earnestness, and Lamb, with his exhausted indifference—have given Slow Horses a beating heart this whole time.
Even amid its more-muddled plotlines and repetitive bickering, Slow Horses establishes itself as innovative time and time again, the action never boring, the acting sharp, the narrative original and interesting. It could just rely on a “ripped from the headlines” approach to modern-day espionage, as its American counterparts often do, but thankfully, the show favors novelistic storytelling, granting grace to all the characters, even the ones we don’t like as much. While it’s long been a matter of professional convenience for these characters to feign as if they don’t care about each other, their reliance on and admiration of each other comes to the fore. For all the opportunities they’ve had to leave Slough House, there’s a reason why they (and we) keep coming back.
