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Warning: contains spoilers for SLOW HORSES 4.2 “A StrangeR Comes to Town”.
River Cartwright is out of the fire and into the frying pan. After tracking his dead doppelganger to a French chateau that looks like it recently hosted either a terrorist training camp or a series of particularly hardcore corporate away-days, he’s just been pulled from a burning building by an unnamed Frenchman. Friend, or foe?
Let’s guess ‘friend’ based on the fact that our mystery Jean D’Eau first saved River from an attacker before knocking him unconscious. Might the kidnapper be a contact of Lamb’s? After all, when Jackson Lamb tells his slow horses that they’re going to sit there and do nothing, he often means that they absolutely are, but he’s already set a plan in motion.
The bigger question we were left with by episode two: is Lamb the would-be assassins’ second target? Over the phone, they described their next mark as being “anuzzer old man” (Gary Old Man? – Ed) who might have forgotten “why he has to die”. The relative age of Lamb’s liver notwithstanding, he’s easily a decade younger than River’s granddad, but could still fit that bill.
If Lamb is next on the killer’s wipeout list, then, splendid. 1) Nobody’s done more to wipe Jackson Lamb off the face of the planet than Jackson Lamb, so good luck to anyone trying, and 2) that means we’re about to find out more about the man, the guff, the legend. During Lamb’s eventful but patchily memorialised time in the field, whom did he unwittingly piss off?
That’s the question he pledged to answer for Moira Tregorian over a plate of pork and a bottle of house red in the local Italian. What inadvertent f**k-up landed her at Slough House, dusting Lamb’s mantlepiece? Or is she just there as a plant for Claude ‘what glass ceiling?’ Whelan.
This episode, Mr Transparency showed his hand and it was… empty. The man’s practically an import from screenwriter Will Smith’s old show The Thick of It. Whelan’s a blank space, like one of those fake books hollowed out to hide your valuables in. On the outside, it looks leather-bound and legit, but on the inside is only a void and none of the complete works of William Shakespeare.
Speaking of comedies, who noticed the photograph of Whelan in a hard hat wielding a pair of big scissors framed in his office, and the ad on the side of the bus in which Taverner schooled him on exactly who was really in charge? Claude’s humiliation took place inside a giant poster for an exhibition on leadership promising “500 Years of Defining Authority” and ending with the hashtag #greatleaders. If irony was the goal, then Taverner couldn’t have chosen a better venue.
Did Taverner choose well when she quashed bright spark Giti Rahman’s discovery that the Westacres bombing was carried out by somebody using an MI5 fake ID? Probably, though as Tierney found out last season, these cover-ups have a habit of coming back to bite you on the bum. Whomever ‘Robert Winters’ is working with will have presumably chosen that ID advisedly to send someone a message. Shredding the evidence (under the watchful eye of the Park’s record keeper Molly Doran, no less) is a short-term solution. Still, it beats shredding Giti Rahman, which I feared was Taverner’s original plan. (And judging by the cavalier way Emma Flyte parked her car across that Disabled parking space, she’d have done it without a qualm).
Back at Slough House, rumours of River’s death proved to have been greatly exaggerated, which removed Louisa from the hook for sending him to Casa Cartwright that night, and earned Ho a deserved box of Jaffa Cakes to the head. Marcus was too distracted by his 10k gambling debt, and Shirley too distracted by giving him a hard time about it, to notice one way or another. There also seemed to be some hint of silent new detainee JK’s Slough House-worthy sin when Lamb screamed at him that YOU NEVER BLOW A JOE’S COVER. Lamb learned that the hard way in Berlin.
Finally, some words of praise for Jonathan Pryce and Jack Lowden. After three excellent seasons, we’ve come to expect plenty from Slow Horses – ingenious plotting, witty scripts, down-to-earth action and shock twists… emotional poignancy, though, is rarely on this menu. Pryce and Lowden’s scene in the bathroom, as River had to step up and take care of the man who’d always taken care of him, and David struggled to find purchase on reality after blasting that intruder’s guts out? Well, now I know how the intruder felt.
Slow Horses season 4 continues on Wednesday September 11 on Apple TV+.
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