Slow Horses’ heroes are as crazily dysfunctional as ever in its fifth season, yet the Apple TV+ spy series, now streaming, is starting to show signs of losing its fastball.
Creator Will Smith’s latest tale of London’s “Slough House”—the department of MI5 misfits led by the disreputable Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman)—is hampered by frustratingly shoddy plotting, with characters behaving so illogically, and downright stupidly, that much of its suspense stems from events that strain credibility to the breaking point. Its slovenly, sarcastic personalities still carry the day, but with its comedy veering into cartoonishness, it proves a wobbly return engagement.
In the aftermath of their latest mission, Slough House loses one of its members: Louisa (Rosalind Eleazar), whose forthcoming six-month hiatus is less temporary than it sounds. This departure is most upsetting to River (Jack Lowden), who’s reeling from last season’s revelations about his dad (who wanted to kill him) as well as his grandfather David’s (Jonathan Pryce) deteriorating mental condition, and who continues to be at testy odds with Lamb.
Drinking and smoking without a care for his health (much to Saskia Reeves’ Catherine’s frustration), and capable of clearing a room with a well-timed toxic fart, Lamb remains a preternatural prick with contempt for his underlings, those who work at the Park (i.e. MI5’s main office), and anyone who can’t see and deduce what he can—meaning, everyone.
Even in the show’s fifth go-round, Oldman is perfect in the role, with Lamb’s sloppy appearance and disgusting habits reflecting his disdainful world-weariness and belying his daunting intellect.
Slow Horses thrusts its characters into action courtesy of a terrorist attack at an Abbotsfield shopping center carried out by a lone gunman who’s subsequently executed by the accomplices who provided him with his weapon. With 11 dead, this shooting is a national tragedy, and heightening the situation is the fact that the killer’s first target was a volunteer stumping for mayor Zafar Jaffrey (Ted Lasso’s Nick Mohammed), who’s running for reelection against right-wing opponent Dennis Gimball (Christopher Villiers).
Emma (Ruth Bradley), the leader of MI5’s tactical unit “the Dogs,” is assigned to the case, and quickly unearths clues that suggest the assassin was a Gimball supporter. At this juncture, though, she thinks the fiend offed himself. As she strives to play catch-up, Slough House vet Shirley (Aimee-Ffion Edwards) tries to convince her mates that she saved cocky techie Roddy (Christopher Chung) from being deliberately run over in the street—an incident that everyone else, including Roddy, thinks was an accident, and which was perpetrated by the same white van used by those responsible for the Abbotsfield massacre.
If Shirley’s theory is questionable, it pales in comparison to Roddy’s relationship with Tara (Hiba Bennani), a woman so far out of his league that it immediately arouses suspicions from his compatriots. Despite a bit of typical clownishness by Shirley and River at a nightclub where they’re trailing the couple, she turns out to be right: Tara is not who she appears to be, and Slow Horses slowly teases her connections to the strange occurrences happening throughout the city, such as a rash of car engine fires during midday traffic.
It’s weirdo Coe (Tom Brooke) who puts things together, realizing that these seemingly random mishaps conform to an old MI5 “destabilization strategy,” giving the Slough House team a template for what’s to come. The problem, however, is that they’re a hopelessly slipshod crew, and the Park has little interest in their conjecture—or in them at all, ultimately confining them to lockdown for their bumbling role in the ongoing crisis.
Slow Horses starts strong, courtesy of Smith scripts that lean into the frictions between the Slough House members and, in particular, River and Lamb, the former of whom has had enough of the latter’s acerbic nastiness. Lowden has rarely been funnier than he is this season; he’s so comfortable in his protagonist’s skin that he repeatedly generates humor from River’s long-simmering grudges and hang-ups.
His strong castmates similarly benefit from the fact that, with their players’ interpersonal dynamics already established, they can bounce off one another in contentious, ridiculous ways. There’s a comfortable prickliness to Slough House’s rejects that buoys the material, giving it a comedic edge no matter the perilous circumstances.
Unfortunately, Slow Horses pushes its funniness too far, beginning with Roddy. His online-dudebro arrogance amplified to extreme lengths, he becomes a caricature of a caricature, and his conduct—which directly contributes to the season’s mayhem—is not merely silly but implausible. There’s just no way to buy that even a doofus like Roddy would behave this idiotically, and that’s also true when it comes to MI5’s “first desk” Claude (James Callis), whose late decision-making is abjectly ludicrous.
The show tries to sell the notion that the smartest people in the intelligence community are actually the dumbest people alive, such that they’re less perceptive than the average TV viewer, who’s constantly three steps ahead of them. This might be a reasonable tack to take if this were a straight comedy. However, since it’s not—it’s a serious-minded espionage thriller that’s routinely amusing—it undercuts its thrills by asking us to accept developments that reek of absurdity.
Especially in its second half, Slow Horses relies on inane decisions and easily avoided mistakes that no real professional spy would make, and the more those pile up, the less the series works. Oldman and Lowden’s top-notch chemistry helps offset these shortcomings, but only to a degree, and as MI5’s “second desk” Diana, Kristin Scott Thomas is relegated to putting out fires and dealing with the moronic Claude.
It’s simply difficult to engage with a story that has this little interest in believability—less when it comes to its baddies (who have a geopolitical grudge and are using the UK’s methods against itself) than with regards to its do-gooders, whose incompetence and selfishness are at odds with the proceedings’ generally realistic tone.
With its leads in fine form, Slow Horses never completely goes off the rails. Yet for its next season, the show would be wise to avoid storytelling that hinges on this much far-fetched buffoonery.
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