'Slow Horses' Gets Stuck "Cleaning Up" in Season 3's Penultimate Episode

It’s Siege Week on Slow Horses. “Cleaning Up” dials up the pressure on Slough House, who have once again found themselves unanimously at the center of a clandestine MI5 coverup, leaving only one episode left for MI5’s most productive screw-ups to do their classic maneuver of a) stopping rogue agents doing something calamitous and evil and b) avoid being murdered in the process. With the majority of the slow horses pinned under gunfire when the credits roll, Season 3’s final cliffhanger takes the biscuit for “Most Likely for Our Beloved Characters to All Be Killed” out of any thus far.

With Louisa and River being violently flushed out of the archive facility, Marcus and Shirley taking the initiative to rescue them, and Jackson and Roddy on route to save Catherine before Duffy and Chieftain execute her, it’s easy to forget that Slow Horses Season 3 takes place over, at most, two days. This is par for the course with the series – both Seasons 1 and 2 kicked into overdrive around the halfway mark and then unfolded in less than 24 hours. And yet, the insistence on slick, tight, economical storytelling that Season 3 prioritizes still makes this Slough House outing feel a touch slighter than before, even if the raised stakes deliver a seriously entertaining package.

Diana Taverner has barely left her office this season, which hasn’t changed with “Cleaning Up.” It’s calmly (anti-climatically?) revealed that Taverner is behind, well, everything – she set up Sean, Webb, and Chieftain to find Alison’s to-be-leaked Footprint file to oust Ingrid and replace her as First Desk. Ingrid signed off on a new piece of tech, one that wirelessly hacks encrypted computers, but the device didn’t work, and loads of international agents were injured and endangered. Alison was assassinated for the simple crime of finding out what the MI5 chief had done.