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The fifth season of Slow Horses starts with a timely sequence: a gun attack perpetrated by a follower of a far-right politician (we even briefly glimpse a few St George’s crosses). Rightwing politics is an area that Apple TV+’s spy drama has tackled before; back in season one, a British-Pakistani student was memorably taken on a joyride by a nationalist group named Sons of Albion, who threatened to behead him on a live stream.
However, like many things in the Slow Horses universe – based on Mick Herron’s bestselling novels about a group of MI5 rejects – the opening proves something of a red herring. Season five isn’t really about white nationalists, or environmental activists, or hostile foreign actors, and yet it is also about all of those things, all at once. As a result, it is overstuffed and strangely lacking in substance.
Worse still, people-pleasing agent River Cartwright (Jack Lowden) has undergone a personality bypass, and spends much of the series acting in a way that can only be described as unnervingly dickish. (Lowden pulls it off, but it does feel rather unbecoming for the show’s unofficial hero.) Still, it figures: as well as observing his grandfather David’s rapid descent into dementia, last season saw River discover that his real dad was an ex-CIA agent turned cult leader, who had impregnated multiple women in an attempt to raise a cabal of future assassins. Yikes.
Season five, then, is centred on the fallout of that aforementioned attack, and – somewhat separately – the possibility that Roddy Ho’s (Christopher Chung) new girlfriend is using him to get her hands on classified intelligence. Chung is more cringe-inducing and more pitiful than ever as the computer whiz who is convinced that his new squeeze couldn’t have possibly been a spy (after all, as he says, he doesn’t pay for sex, “sex pays for me!”). He’s got a purple man-bun and Prodigy-style dance moves now, too, which only makes the pathos more pronounced when it does arrive.
Gary Oldman, of course, remains the reluctant leader of the pack as Slough House boss Jackson Lamb. Aimee-Ffion Edwards returns as Shirley, who has developed PTSD on top of her drug addiction, but is still as deliciously acerbic as ever (she describes Lamb’s notorious flatulence as smelling as though there’s “a pauper’s grave in your arsehole”).
The death of Marcus (Kadiff Kirwan) last season has robbed the show of its second-best double act, after the death of Min (Dustin Demri-Burns) robbed the show of its first-best double act, with Louisa (Rosalind Eleazar). (We tragically lose her, too, as she takes a much-needed mental health break from Slough House – although not before an excellently bad leaving party, catered by River with Tesco’s best snacks.) This series is now largely devoid of duos, which may be where it goes wrong. Still, it would have been more awkward to force something substantial between any of these asocial characters – not least Coe (Tom Brooke), who remains more discomfiting than most of the bad guys.
The main problem here, though, is that the plot pinballs around far too much, and far too frivolously. In previous series, the enemy – the Russians, rogue ex-MI5 agents – has been identified early and given plenty of screen time. Here, a terrorist plot battles for relevance with meditations on “incel” culture and the environment; a blackmail threat against spineless service head Claude Whelan (James Callis); and a brief will-they-won’t-they between two characters that adds absolutely nothing to proceedings. Meanwhile, Nick Mohammed plays the platitude-heavy London mayor, Zafar Jaffrey, for about five minutes, and Diana Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas) has nothing to do apart from frown and drink large amounts of wine.
It is possible that someone somewhere decided there had been too many foreign dalliances, and was worried about either the budget or the climate impact. But having watched a scene set entirely at London zoo’s penguin enclosure, I can’t help but feel that the amount of CO2 emissions expended by the series is proportional to its dramatic chops.
There is, naturally, a late twist: no new paternity test results for River, sadly, but something that does change the mood of the series. But, really, it comes too late to salvage the thing. The sound editing at the end of episode five is really, really good. But the fact that I am so intensely taken by what I am listening to and not what I am watching says it all.
