Copyright Vulture
One great way to stay ahead of an audience is to turn the most obvious conclusion into a twist. Viewers inclined to theorize their way to some baroque explanation are naturally going to disbelieve what’s right there in front of them. While Occam’s razor, the principle that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one, is worth applying to nearly all real-world problems, cleverly plotting TV shows like Slow Horses are always trying to keep people guessing. You do not, for example, have to be in MI5 to take one look at Roddy and Tara’s partnership and conclude that she’s way out of his league. On a TV show, egghead government agents like that are often wrong. Who’s to say Tara isn’t head over heels for Rodzilla? And so a few episodes ago, when Tara politely declined Roddy’s clumsy advances in the back of the car and sent him into the night, alerting unseen conspirators that he was on his way home, the show could count on us not to take what we just saw at face value. That’s not to say Slow Horses doesn’t have other intricate moves to make on a storytelling front — Tara’s entire interrogation session at the Park is an elaborate scheme unto itself — but for the show to settle on Tara’s motives being as clear as they looked is ingenious. Now there’s no stretching any credulity about Roddy’s unlikely ascendance from pitiful incel status, and many of the key players involved are still fooled, despite never believing in Roddy as a lothario they somehow underestimated. He was mark. They were a mark. We were a mark. Well-played. One person who appears to be right about a lot of things is J.K. Coe, whose speculation about the “destabilization strategy” has borne enough fruit for Lamb to step into the lion’s den of the Park and share his findings with Taverner and Whelan. That’s all the praise Coe should get, however, given the calamity of Gimball’s accidental death. We learn from the opening sequence that if Gimball had lived on the night Mayor Jaffrey was saved from an assassination attempt, then the Libyan terrorist group responsible for the strategy would have broken apart. In the parking deck of an airport, one of them nearly gets shot by their leader after Jaffrey’s survival. Fortunately for him, this particular airport parking deck has a giant screen projecting news of Gimball’s demise, which puts the multi-step plan back on track. “This country is fucking mad,” he muses. In the aftermath of the mayoral protection bids, Lamb is left understandably flummoxed. Lamb doesn’t give Shirley and Catherine much credit for saving Jaffrey’s life by “assaulting him with a water bottle,” but his attention naturally drifts toward Gimball’s death and the inconceivable lapse on his agents’ part in allowing it to happen. He texts River with a two-word meeting spot (“Piss Underpass”) and heads out into the night for what he anticipates will be “one of the all-time great debriefs.” Meanwhile, River and Coe scramble to cover up their presence on the scene, with Coe taking River’s cash to buy him new clothes and using the extra change for pitted cherries. Coe doesn’t seem all that engaged in coming up with the least-bad cover story for blowing the assignment — he’s more focused on hawking out cherry “stones” — though he does surmise that the only other person on the scene was a Black man who was fighting with a known racist and would likely not come forward after the racist was found with his head split open. The excuse that River concocts is that Gimball getting clocked with a paint can was an accident, and they got there too late to prevent it from happening. It will look terrible for the two of them not to have had eyes on the person they were sent to protect, but the alternatives are much worse. This leads to what, indeed, is an all-time great debrief. River floats the theory that the terrorists might have dropped the paint can on Gimball’s head to make it look like an accident, a notion Lamb immediately dismisses due to the group’s extremely noticeable acts of violence. (“They blew up a fucking penguin enclosure! They didn’t try making that look like an accident!”) In maybe the funniest exchange in an episode full of them, Lamb asks River to name a single person with a grudge against penguins, and the only one River can muster is “Batman.” Lamb doesn’t buy the story his agents are telling, and seems mostly annoyed that they’re so slow to tell him the embarrassing truth so he can move on with his evening. The episode in general is a wonderful showcase for Gary Oldman, who gets to hold court in every scene like Hercule Poirot at the end of an Agatha Christie novel, because he’s far ahead of everyone else. River’s apology for failing the mission rings false to Lamb because River never takes responsibility for his “litany of fuck-ups” and Coe merely standing around without his hoodie draped over his head is a conspicuous admission of guilt. Once Lamb finally takes his theory of the case to the Park, too, hitting them with unassailable logic that their Libyan adversaries are turning the tables on them out of revenge for a 2013 coup attempt. “We’ve killed and plundered and blackmailed,” says Lamb, “and now it’s being done to us.” The next step in the plan is to “blind your enemy,” but the Park gets distracted by Tara’s evocation of the Libyan proverb “Rainfall makes no impression on the hard stone,” which they take as a threat to the airport because “bodies do.” Yet the thrilling final stretch of the episode is given over to a sting operation under Whelan’s supervision, which is how you know it’s going to be a disaster. Tara has succeeded in convincing him and the others that she’s an innocent woman coerced into doing the terrorists’ bidding. When they propose a sting operation connected to her next meet-up with the group, Tara pushes the naïf angle even further by rebuffing the plan, allowing Whelan to play the supportive man who has her back. The double-cross at Piccadilly Circus is inevitable, but the episode plays the sequence elegantly, intercutting Tara’s effort to give her minders the slip with the Park’s feckless attempt to manage a breach in the MI5 database. The sequence is a duet of official ineptitude, ending with Tara easily giving an entire MI5 surveillance team the slip and a piece of computer code shutting down all the monitors at Park. The fate of London now rests in Lamb’s grubby hands. Shots • Taverner’s initial assessment of Tara’s politics will sting anyone looking to make a difference on their laptops and smartphones: “The usual activism for an educated woman of her age. Heavy on hashtags, light on results.” • Roddy continues to take hits. Tara finally has to admit to Flyte that he’s “not really my type,” to which Flyte responds, “I don’t think he’s anybody’s type.” Fortunately for Roddy, his unassailable confidence is a great shield against constant humiliation. • Lamb making quick work of Coe: “Why is his hood down? And he’s got some color in his cheeks. He looks positively post-coital.” • Great to see Naomi Wirthner pop up again as Molly Doran, the Park archivist who knows Lamb from way back and has an unexpected role to play in the investigation. She’s nearly as salty as he is. • Lamb to Taverner on Whelan’s stupidity: “You should bring forward your resignation before you die of shame working for that.” • We’ll see how much River’s grandfather has to contribute to the case (“It’s something to do with honey”), but Jonathan Pryce is touching in his brief return to the fold. • “We all tried too hard to help your country after the coup. Sadly, it was too great a burden to take on.” Kudos to Tara for keeping her composure as Whelan offers this condescending remark about Libya. • “I don’t understand. Why would she dump her coat?” The hamsters in Whelan’s brain must be starving, but the wheel isn’t turning.
