Slough House, the building the ragtag spies in Slow Horses work out of, is not a peaceful place. The fixtures are decrepit, the decor hums with mid-century must, the office banter is neither respectful nor constructive and, by the end of the new run of Apple TV+’s prestige espionage drama, the windows are smashed and the walls are pocked with bullet holes.
Slow Horses is, however, a comfortable show to slip back into. Discerning viewers, pleased by their own superb taste, revel in a series that is led by the sheer quality of Gary Oldman and Kristin Scott Thomas, and which evokes classic spy thrillers – intelligence work is a grand battle of wits, played by capable oddballs who are more concerned with winning the game than they are with real-world consequences – while updating the spies’ badinage so they sound like disaffected cynics in an Armando Iannucci comedy. The recipe has worked; Slow Horses is a word-of-mouth hit. But this is season four, which is the point where a winning formula can start to feel formulaic. Can Slow Horses keep it up?
Its return has plenty that is familiar. Straight away, two things happen. The closest the show has to a traditionally heroic pin-up, River Cartwright (Jack Lowden), voices his concern about his grandfather, old-school spymaster David (Jonathan Pryce), whose dementia is getting worse. Meanwhile, a London shopping centre is attacked by a suicide bomber. By now we know that these events will somehow prove not to be independent.
Another grand conspiracy is woven together and then unravelled, with the misfits who have been consigned to the purgatory of Slough House staying one step ahead of their supposed superiors in MI5’s headquarters. All the old beats are ready to be hit. There will be scenes where a bad guy is lurking somewhere and we don’t know when he’s going to jump out and attack the spook. There will be scenes where the spook is engaged in hand-to-hand combat with an apparently invincible bad guy, and they improvise a weird way of surviving. There will be scenes where the bad guys have the spook trapped in an office or bathroom, but when they kick the door in, the spook has jumped out of the window in the nick of time. There will, and this is an absolute certainty, be scenes where a spook is either chasing or being chased through a crowd of London commuters, and they have to knock bystanders out of the way.
Look past the deceptively expensive shabby chic and the faultless direction, and Slow Horses is, often, sticking closely to genre tropes. But it never lets itself go stale, and the new episodes benefit from new blood in what is already a luxuriously fine cast. James Callis, who was one of TV’s best ever serpentine egomaniacs as Gaius Baltar in Battlestar Galactica, plays another smooth weasel in the form of fresh MI5 boss Claude Whelan. The operative has evidently got his job by appealing to stuffed suits in Westminster (“My brief is to activate accountability and accessibility – that’s the triple-A promise”) but now has to manage his stone-cold operator of a deputy, Diana Taverner (Scott Thomas, wonderfully angular and withering). Hugo Weaving, last seen as a dithering softie in wry Australian comedy-drama Love Me, is now about as far from dithering or soft as he could be as the villain of the season, the mercenary Frank Harkness. Ruth Bradley is excellent as Emma Flyte, MI5’s new attack dog; Joanna Scanlan is perfectly cast as Moira, an unstoppably fussy administrator; Tom Brooke is an unsettling wild card as JK Coe, a rookie who says and does almost nothing, but is brutally impactful when he comes to life.
Slow Horses has slowly evolved its regulars too. The first thing newcomers notice is Oldman’s performance as Jackson Lamb, Slough House’s monstrously jaded and dirty-mac-clad ruler, who shambles and roars like a bear dipped in chip fat. A season or two ago, however, the showrunners realised he was, in more ways than one, wasted: there were only so many times he could sit in his stinking old chair, chugging corner-shop whisky and being verbosely rude to his underlings. The process of sending him out into the field, where he can be a little more human and a lot more lethal, continues this year, as the show hunts successfully for new nuance and depth.
Lamb is involved in one of two unexpectedly beautiful interactions between long-term cast members – love stories under deep cover – which sneak up on viewers who have been swept along by all the quips and shootouts, but who are ready to care about the Slough House kooks, even if these scruffy reprobates refuse to care about themselves. Slow Horses may still be a safe bet, but it’s not entirely the same old same old.
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