'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.) 

But Slow Horses is no muted character drama – this is an action show, and before we get into any jaded and immature interpersonal squabbling, we discover the catalyst for this season’s thriller plot

 In a nondescript housing estate in London, a white man pulls out an assault rifle and mows down everyone in their sights. It’s a grisly scene, delivered with uncomfortable slickness – the established Apple TV+ house style robs domestic terrorism of its necessary ugliness – and by the moment where the shooter is taken out by a lone sniper hiding in a nearby parapet, Season 5 has gotten our attention with threads that will quickly annoy more than provoke us.

It’s hard to articulate the degree of irritation when you realize in the first couple of minutes that Slow Horses is doing a storyline about mainstream populism and political polarization. The gunman’s (Edward Davis) first victim is a South Asian campaigner for Mayor Zafar Jaffrey (Nick Mohammed), London’s incumbent mayor seeking reelection, and the police investigation – aided by returning MI5 agent Emma Flyte (Ruth Bradley) – uncovers that the gunman owned a book by the racist loudmouth du jour, and mayoral challenger Dennis Gimball (Christopher Villiers).

The gunman’s flat overlooks the central square where he committed the mass shooting, and there’s also a photo of Gimball pinned to his fridge. Sensing some culture war extremist dogwhistles, Flyte’s team pored through his internet accounts and digital footprint, where they discovered he was a member of an incel forum and may have been groomed to violently cleanse his local community by unseen forces. Flyte also discovers the tower where the sniper shot their naive disciple, and her team deduces that the single bullet casing was left behind as a calling card to taunt the intelligence service.

Diana Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas) updates Prime Minister Claude Whelan (James Callis) on the political optics of the terror attack, and their relationship seems to have established a more even-keeled dynamic. Whelan visits the venue for a mayoral debate to brief Jaffrey and Gimball on the grave situation, and in maybe one of the most clunky and embarrassing dialogue scenes in Slow Horses’ history, the inanity of showrunner Will Smith’s political writing reveals itself. 

The core problem with Slow Horses is that, with a few exceptions, everybody is a broad caricature; they exaggerate regional accents, they swear and shout a lot, and the real-world commentary is smug and cartoonish. Britain, worryingly, is no stranger to elections between ambitious and overly curated moderates and Farage-esque, Trump-chasing reactionary bigots. However, Smith’s dialogue insists on using so much creaky, forced humor and clumsy buzzwords that the satire makes you wince rather than wryly chuckle. 

This unimaginative approach to character extends outside of the politicians – Flyte’s scenes at the crime scene are marred by her interactions with a former police colleague who had an egregious reputation for misogyny. Besides how uncomfortably glib the jokes are about how accepted and widespread sexism is in the police force, Slow Horses’ attempts to criticize corruption and incompetency in law enforcement are undone by the fact that Smith only writes characters within a strict, tedious binary: snarky but morally upright, and a moron who talks too much and whose only destiny is being embarrassed by the smart characters. Five seasons in without any signs of improvement, character problems like these feel like a symptom of an overconfident Slow Horses switching to autopilot.

How does Slough House get involved in this significant event? A lot of deep research and ID checks are dropped at the agents’ feet, which coincides with Louisa’s final day and River’s pitiful attempt at a going-away party that she does not want and no one enjoys. Roddy Ho (Christopher Chung) continues to be the most annoying character written for television, but after a white transit van almost runs him down in Barbican, London, Shirley gets very intense about the possibility that Slough House agents are being targeted for assassination. 

Because it’s a spy thriller show, obviously, there will be truth to her shut-down suspicions, but based on the evidence that she presents to the team, the fact that they’re unconvinced is pretty reasonable.

In a Thameside confessional, Louisa tells River he needs to be more emotionally honest, and he responds by kissing her and gets a deserved bollocking for it. Louisa admits she’s leaving Slough House and the service for good, and she needs a lot of space from all spy-types before she and River can continue being friends. River is pulled away by Catherine, who’s gotten herself in a tizzy over Shirley, who herself has gotten very paranoid about Roddy’s safety. She spies on Roddy and a beautiful woman who, confoundingly, seems to be attracted to him, and follows them into a nightclub – on Catherine’s insistence, River chases the three of them inside.

All River discovers is that Shirley isn’t doing very well. He apologizes for his bad behavior, and both of them are shocked at how attractive Roddy’s girlfriend is on the dancefloor, and debate the case for Roddy being actually attractive. In a stab of paranoia, Shirley jumps down from a balcony onto a bystander she thinks is holding a knife, and River stops her relapse seconds before she snorts cocaine in a bathroom stall.

In a typically insensitive fashion, he calls her out for being a mess —a fact Shirley readily admits —but goes on to say that the thought of Marcus’ judgment and/or wisdom stops her from actually crossing the line and relapsing. Because nobody in this show is nice to their friends, she sneaks in a jab at River because his half-brother (another one of Harkness’ bastard sons) killed Marcus. 

Still, it’s clear that Shirley needs help and is unwilling to accept it; she and River part on bad terms, and she has to flee from her Roddy surveillance when a bouncer chases her out of the club. She knocks out the security guard, knocks a man off his bike, and gives chase to Roddy’s Uber. Inside the cab, Roddy puts the moves on his ladyfriend, but she gently passes on spending the night with him, leaving him bristling with erotic anticipation – not something I needed to see. As she drives away home, she texts someone that Roddy is now alone in his flat, basically confirming that Shirley was right – someone does want Roddy harmed, and there is a conspiracy to disguise it. It’s a fun cliffhanger for an episode that is far stronger in exploring our messy, bitter core characters than in expanding the political boundaries of its scrappy spy sandbox.

Slow Horses Season 5 continues with new episodes every Wednesday through the end of October. Seasons 1 through 4 are streaming on Apple TV+, and Seasons 6 and 7 are already in production.