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Warning: contains spoilers for the Slow Horses season 4 finale.
“I just hope you’re not too attached to anyone who might show up,” Frank warned River about his under-the-table call during that rancorous father-son beer date.
Attached? To the Slow Horses of Slough House? That sewage farm?
I’d die for each and every one of them. Well, obviously not for Ho, whom they should have crammed into a recycling bin and bowled overarm down the stairs to slow Patrice down, but everyone else in the Siege of Slough House has earned an unexpected place in my heart. Attachment to these D-listers is what made this finale the show’s most emotional yet. That, and a performance from Jack Lowden that blew everything – including that grenade – out of the water.
River’s sardonic response (“I feel like I’m at a Ted Talk”) to his dad’s sales pitch was tonally very Slow Horses – glib, funny, ironic, and undercutting the gravelly seriousness of Frank’s moustache-twirling supervillain vibe. Underneath the animosity and gags about calling Childline though, was vulnerability. Lowden layered his performance to show flashes of River’s loneliness. Hate Frank as he does, there were moments when, despite himself, River still seemed to crave that evil man’s approval. Somewhere underneath all the hostility and studied coolness was an abandoned boy.
That boy was present too, in the episode’s touching but perfectly underplayed final moment. Lamb’s gruff invitation for River to stay and have a drink with him, “as long as you get your own and don’t say a fucking word,” was the normal-person equivalent of pulling River into a big bear hug and ruffling his hair. Drinking silently side by side, River couldn’t help but smile. He had one psycho dad in the wind, and had just painfully checked another into a retirement home, but one was still right there, stinking up the place.
Of course, the brilliant thing about the bundled-up, barbed character of Jackson Lamb as played by Gary Oldman is that we never know if he invited River to sit next to him for that drink because of fellow-feeling, or simply to block a draught from a nearby window. It’s appealing to romanticise Lamb but Slow Horses shows remarkable restraint in keeping the character’s emotions under wraps and his mystery alive.
Watching Lamb discover Bad Sam’s body, it was obvious that – in answer to Taverner’s question earlier in the season – he does have a heart, he’s just a minimalist when it comes to expressing it. A sigh, one extra pat to the dead man’s chest not aimed at searching through his pockets, and the honourable act of leaving Sam’s flight fund intact only to take his whisky bottle, showed us that Lamb cares. As did him trying to stop Shirley from looking at Marcus’ body, and quoting chapter and verse of service regulations to ensure that the Longridge family get twice the death benefits Taverner was offering.
It’s a good job Lamb did pick up that whisky bottle, because it led to another heroic moment for the wall of fame. Hanging right next to the image of him saving the gang by driving a London cab into Le Terminateur, will be one of Lamb’s well-aimed throw at the back of Patrice’s neck, giving Shirley a chance to stamp Marcus’ killer deservedly into a glass table.
No wonder Patrice was begging for death – he’d been run over, shot, knifed, scalded by a boiling kettle (nice work, Coe), coshed with a bottle of cheap whisky, and raised by a father who didn’t give him a second thought while he made his way smugly around central London, enjoying the smell of his own farts. Coe put Patrice out of his misery with a professional ‘two to the chest and one to the head’, saving Shirley the trauma and giving the finale its other truly emotional moment with the line: “He loved you and he wanted you to love yourself”.
RIP Marcus, but let’s not be too sad that he’s gone – it was a hero’s ending, and by the look of exhilaration on his face when Coe threw that kettle, Marcus got off on this action-hero stuff. If he didn’t want to go out in a blaze of gory glory, then he’d never have joined the service in the first place. The gambling addict bet twice in this finale, winning big the first time, and then losing big on his final punt: “Shirley, I got this”. He didn’t got this, it turned out, but he still died trying to protect his ramshackle colleagues.
Ramshackle is the word for Slough House’s response to its armed intruder. No cool-headed, hi-tech, booby-traps here, they mostly handled it like any of us might – with yelling, swearing, running around and dropping things. A joy of Slow Horses is that its characters have always been human idiots first, cool spies second. For proof, witness the panicked, screaming seconds of Louisa bungling that grenade out of River’s coat hood before she lobbed it into Regent’s Canal and caused that dramatic explosion.
Leaving his enraged grandfather at the Sunny Times Retirement Home (the Park run an old folks’ home for retired spies? Spinoff please, if Richard Osman agrees not to sue), River also felt more human than ever. Thankfully, most of the problems the Slow Horses go through are far beyond its viewers’ experience, but the care of ageing loved ones isn’t one of them. David’s dementia storyline took this show’s humans-first approach even further, and without schmaltz or sentimentality, made this the most affecting series we’ve had. Oh, and a shout-out to George Smiley’s Karla from David Cartwright at the end? A lovely bit of business in a wonderful finale.
Slow Horses season 4 is streaming now on Apple TV+. Season 5 is expected to air in 2025.
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