“Elections aren’t idiot-proof,” says a campaign worker as he graciously accepts a cup of coffee and continues stumping for his candidate, the current Mayor Zafar Jaffrey (Ted Lasso’s Nick Mohammed), in the opening sequence to this season’s Slow Horses. When a sour-faced young man sits down on the bench in front of him, he immediately recognizes someone hostile to his cause. “I know a lot of you are disenchanted with politics,” he says. “I was too at your age. But Mayor Jaffrey offers hope…” And with that, the stranger pulls a semiautomatic weapon out of a bag and opens fire, making the campaign worker the first of 11 people he kills before a second gunman swiftly dispatches him with a headshot.
Such a scene of mass murder and political violence rings eerily familiar in today’s charged environment, and it offers a compelling opportunity (and plenty of pitfalls) for a series that’s more often concerned with the bungling nobility of a ragtag spy operation and its dysfunctional relationship with MI5. To say the sequence is a cold splash of water is an understatement, but part of what makes it so effective is that short exchange between the campaign worker and the shooter. Intelligence organizations often invest a lot of resources figuring out a suspect’s motives, but the victim here figures them out in a glance. When MI5 later comes back with a report on the shooter, named Rob True, he is an incel cliché: “He felt rejected by women, ignored by society, thought his British identity was being eroded, wanted the people around him to feel the pain he felt.” A real yawner, frankly.
So it’s a sick, effective joke in Slow Horses that in a world that now breeds Travis Bickle types on the Internet — True frequented a site called “The Unseen” — they could be easily weaponized by more powerful forces. It’s like having a sleeper cell where the agents don’t even know they’re being activated. In True’s case, he was activated and then deactivated, and there are surely many more such men who can be manipulated into the same violence. It feels surreal to live at a time when mass shooters are so common that they could themselves be used as human boxes of ammo for some shadowy organization. But here we are, seeing it happen on a reliably offbeat, escapist spy series.
Yet this shift to a much darker tone fits the mood of Slough House as we begin the new season. The fourth season ended with Marcus getting shot by a mercenary in the line of duty and River committing his grandfather, David, to a care home against his will. Now, Louisa has opted to take a six-month leave of absence that everyone but River realizes is a permanent break from the service. “I can’t deal with what I’ve witnessed,” she explains to River late in the episode, before pointing out that he, too, isn’t allowing himself to process the feelings that are surely overwhelming him. For the run of the show, we’ve understood the agents of Slough House being plagued by their own presumed ineptitude. Now they’re having to confront an act of domestic terrorism through frayed psyches.
Which is not to say that Slow Horses has turned into a bummer. Right after that opening shocker, we’re treated to Roddy bopping along to Robert Palmer’s “Simply Irresistible” with his headphones on, obliviously stumbling into traffic. Shirley tackles Roddy to keep him from getting struck by a van — the same van, we suspect, that was used to supply the shooter with his weapon and ammo — but he’s more concerned with replacing his headphones than checking the local CCTV for the car that nearly flattened him. He really is that stupid and self-absorbed, and Jackson Lamb, who has a conspicuously minimal presence in this episode, is too checked out to care much, either.
The fun twist of “Bad Dates” is that Roddy has the confidence to believe a gorgeous model-influencer type would go clubbing with him, but his colleagues see it as the most obvious red flag imaginable. When Shirley decides to tail Roddy, firmly believing that his near-death experience was not accidental, she’s so shocked to see his date that it becomes a crisis for the entire agency. The chances that Roddy could score a babe like that without paying are precisely 0 percent. That leaves Catherine to beg River to take Shirley’s claims seriously and rush to the club to protect the poor doofus from getting targeted again.
From the balcony, River and Shirley gaze upon the spectacle of Roddy and this mysterious woman dancing with an almost anthropological curiosity. “Maybe she’s in it for the sex,” Shirley speculates before correcting herself. “I think I’d rather sleep with Lamb, but in a club situation, I can see why someone would use him as a human sex toy.” Soon after, Shirley makes a typical Slough House mistake by tackling a perceived attacker from above before realizing he had a bottle instead of a knife. When River catches up to her in the bathroom, she whips out a small packet of cocaine and can barely summon an excuse to cover for the fact that she’s using again. Losing Marcus has knocked her off the wagon.
Yet even that moment isn’t as pitiable as the one that ends the episode, with Roddy angling unsuccessfully to bed his date (“So… is tonight the night? Where two become one?”), only to be told that she wants their first time together to be special, as if she were a prim high-schooler deflecting the advances of an overanxious boyfriend. Roddy does indeed appear to be the target of a nefarious enterprise and his continued obliviousness makes him a good one.
Shots
• When Ruth Bradley was added to the cast last year as Emma Flyte, new head of the “Dogs,” she was poised to join Taverner as a Slough House tormenter, but she’s doing her job in a straightforward and competent way this episode. We’ll see what happens when the Roddy subplot collides with the mass shooter subplot, but it’s interesting to observe all parties operating independently of each other towards a common pursuit of justice.
• The detail of the shooter deliberately leaving a cartridge behind for the authorities to see is a remarkable flex, an early indication that whoever’s responsible feels they can activate other shooters with impunity and get away with it.
• Roddy blanching at the implication that he pays for sex: “Sex pays for me.”
• Gimball’s attacks on Mayor Joffrey (“the policies of this soft-on-crime mayor have turned this city into a war zone”) sound awfully familiar as a political scare tactic, do they not?
• A big welcome back to MI5 stooge Claude, who steps in it again by assuming Joffrey’s Black chief of staff is his bodyguard.
• “I love that you’re happy with waiting. It’s so powerful.” And with that, the mystery woman sends poor Roddy off into the night.