'Slow Horses' Season 5 Opens with Multiple “Bad Dates”

Slow Horses is back – one year after its superlative fourth season, the down-and-dirty modern London spy saga returns for another messy adventure with MI5’s least loved and, by this point, criminally undervalued department. In Season 4, we lost agents, confronted harsh truths, and uncovered long-buried secrets – Marcus (Kadiff Kirwan) died, David Cartwright (Jonathan Pryce) got sicker, and River (Jack Lowden) discovered his father was Frank Harkness (Hugo Weaving), a rogue CIA agent with his own private mercenary cell.

In the first episode back, “Bad Dates”, everyone at Slough House is struggling to return to peak performance: the loss of Marcus has put Shirley (Aimee-Ffion Edwards) in a state of agitated paranoia, something that River is unsympathetic to due to his ongoing confrontations with familial mortality. Louisa (Rosalind Eleazar) is sick of this ongoing rigamarole and has opted for a mental health break, and mum and dad – elder agents Catherine (Saskia Reeves) and Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman) – are at odds about how seriously to take everyone’s concerns.

(No prize for guessing which one favors a hands-off parenting style.)