Everything To Remember Ahead of 'Slow Horses' Season 2

It feels like the main appeal of British cop and spy shows – MI-5, Line of Duty – is to hear all the monikers and nicknames agencies use for their missions. On this front, Slow Horses is a complete success, adding “dogs” (the heavy men of MI5’s gruff internal investigations unit) to our expanding lexicon of words we say in broad English accents to pretend we’re involved in backstreet espionage. Slow Horses, the British series focusing on MI5’s most useless failures, clearly anticipated our hunger for more, as Season 2 is rolling out eight months after its premiere in April. To refresh your memory here’s everything that’s happened so far.

The show kicks off with a complex, dangerous mission unfolding at Stansted Airport, which ends up a costly and public failure, despite the best efforts of agent River Cartwright (Jack Lowden). Although it’s played for real, we find out later it was a training exercise – but the scale of MI5’s embarrassment still ends River up at Slough House, a London office for incompetent screw-ups. The spy work is demeaning, and the boss is… even more so.

Enter Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman), a belligerent, day-drinking codger with poor hygiene and an endless string of insults for his staff. It seems like an odd role for the recent Academy Award winner to commit to, but it’s likely down to Slow Horses’ robustly written characters allowing a lot of room for charismatic performances. The cast is game; the dialogue is sharp – all in all, a good laugh.