Slow Horses Season-Finale Recap: Everything Changes Shape

Slow Horses
Judgement Day
Season 6 Episode 6
Editor’s Rating ★★★★★
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It has been an all-gas, no-brakes season of Slow Horses. The first episode started with poor Struan Loy getting stalked and later torched alive by a pair of Russian assassins as relentless and seemingly unkillable as Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees. And ever since Sid Baker’s return at the end of the second, the episodes have barreled into one another with a breathless propulsion that’s closer to Mission: Impossible than to the hermetic paranoia of Gary Oldman in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. The immediate threat to Slough House agents past and present has kept Lamb and his joes out of the office — where they weren’t getting paid anyway — and in constant fear for their lives, leading to a succession of cliffhanger episodes as if Slow Horses were an old serial from the first half of the 20th century. Even this final episode blows up its own denouement to get you primed for season seven.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. The sixth season has been able to have its cake and eat it, too, ramping up the action without shortchanging viewers on spy craft and intrigue. In that sense, it has worked a little like Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, which has Cary Grant’s “wrong man” character running from nefarious agents and crop dusters while puzzling through his predicament. The season finale brings the various strands of the story together elegantly and a bit pitilessly, too, as the body count continues to rise and the struggle for survival grows genuinely desperate. Those two Russian assassins turned out to be significantly more skilled than the horses and perhaps more motivated, too, in seeking revenge for the killing of one of their own. It stands to reason they would cross a few names off their list before being finally outwitted or outmanned.

Yet the major takeaway from this season is arguably the humbling of Diana Taverner, whose ascendancy to First Desk resulted in some growing pains, to say the least. Perhaps it was easier for her to operate behind the scenes, where she didn’t have to manage the buck-stops-here accountability, but her use of Cantor’s money for the off-the-books assassination on Russian soil created a gruesome mess that the end of the season doesn’t entirely tidy up. For all the exciting shoot-outs and showdowns in “Judgement Day,” the most gripping scene may be Taverner’s confrontation with Lamb, who has finally unpacked the entire situation. She falls back instinctively on a tone of haughty dismissal, accusing him of hiding away in his “filthy little office” while she’s making big consequential decisions for the country. But it takes shockingly little pushback from Lamb for Taverner to fess up to her mistakes and even suggest resigning in disgrace. “I am the greatest threat to national security we have seen in years,” she says, “and I’m taking myself off the board.” 

Perhaps there’s something to this idea of rivals needing each other because Lamb would normally savor outwitting Taverner, but he throws her a lifeline instead. (Not before demanding she “get off that fucking cross” first, however.) But he also needs her to take an active role in getting them both out of a situation in which his joes are getting killed, and the fallout from her errors continues to spill out through the countryside. The bottom line is that Taverner did compromise herself by taking Cantor’s money, but that money was used for an operation against Russia, the country Cantor has been courting to expand his media empire. It therefore becomes easy — and, in dramatic terms, richly satisfying — for Taverner to trick Cantor into a meeting that ends with his getting shuttled to the airport and becoming the sacrificial lamb Taverner had intended Sid to be. 

One amusing punishment for Taverner is that her beautiful vacation home on the Suffolk coast will be in serious need of renovation. For a time, it looked as if this luxury safe house with an extensive high-end liquor closet wouldn’t be a bad place to hole up, but it’s not a secret location for Harkness, who has recruited two more mercenaries to hunt down Reece, or for the one surviving Russian assassin, who has more names on her kill list. Shortly after River turns up with grim news of Coe’s death and Taverner’s involvement in the Kazan hit (“that fucking woman,” Flyte complains bitterly), all hell breaks loose on a house with fishbowl windows that attract bullets as readily as the summer sun. The ensuing firefight leads most of the horses, along with Reece and Flyte, to the beach below, putting them in another vulnerable spot. 

Once again, Slow Horses isn’t afraid to acknowledge its heroes are in a terrible situation and will pay the price for it. While it’s immensely (if conventionally) satisfying to see Reece save the poor-shooting Roddy by embedding a harpoon into his assailant’s chest, Flyte suffers a shocking death at Harkness’s hands, and Louisa’s gut-shot wound proves nearly fatal. Although any future Flyte might have had as a spy would have been tough for the show to manipulate, her loss brings a sudden end to a character who started as a ruthless Dog and proved more conscientious on the job than we might have expected. The Dogs tend to be just that, loyal meatheads of the kind that clever agents like River can outwit by the dozen. At first, Flyte seemed like a more advanced version of that archetype, but her loyalty as Taverner’s right hand was more to protocol and country than to thoughtlessly serving her boss. She redeemed herself, but now her trajectory ends and Taverner will likely vet her replacement differently.

Back at the house, Harkness manages all this chaos with the relaxed confidence of a man who creates it for a living. He pours himself a drink from a bottle intended to be a Molotov cocktail, hangs up on a desperate plea from Cantor to stop the Reece job, and then casually shoots the last assassin in the head as she goes after his son. He then utters a line that’s critical to understanding him and perhaps every major character on the show: “Everything changes shape.” He’s talking to River about his deal with Cantor, but he’s also talking about River’s grandfather, whose activity in MI5 may not always hold up to scrutiny, and he’s issuing an implied warning to his son. Never forget that Harkness was once a CIA operative and perhaps served a higher calling before creating his own mercenary network and taking jobs for monied sleazebags like Cantor. The arc of River’s career could bend in that direction too. Even a public servant like, say, Taverner took the First Desk job expecting to solve threats to national security, not become one herself, but everything changed shape.

Once all the smoke clears, there are signs of things returning to normal with Lamb toasting his fallen joes (and a hobbled Louisa, who may or may not be back) and Taverner successfully scapegoating both Cantor and Peter Judd, whose ambitions to get back in the game make him a natural fall guy to lay before the Home Secretary. But Taverner’s issues with her Russian counterpart, Vassily, are not over, and nothing is settled in the closing sequence where River’s romantic moment with Sid is drastically short-circuited. In the second episode, he brought a crowbar into his grandfather’s house to confront the person he’d assumed to be Harkness. Now, a poisonous residue on the same crowbar has left him incapacitated. 

What does the ending imply about River and Sid’s relationship? That’s a question for next season, but their flirtation has been built around Sid’s ambiguous motives from the beginning. Just before she was shot, in the second episode, Sid confessed to River that she had been asked to spy on him for Taverner, and not every question about what she’d been doing in the years since has been answered this season. As much as it feels as though there’s something real between them, it feels just as much as if she’s hiding a card or two from him. 

Everything changes shape. 

Shots

• There’s no time for anyone in this episode to process Coe’s death — and probably not a huge amount of sentimentality around him given his relatively brief tenure under Lamb — but the sigh Oldman lets out when he realizes Coe is gone carries a surprising amount of weight. Lamb cares about his charges, part the billionth. 

• Clever idea for Lamb’s confrontation with Natasha to take place with her child’s birthday party as the backdrop. Her daughter confuses this disheveled man for a clown, then he helps himself to finger sandwiches in front of Natasha’s armed henchmen. 

• Sad words from Shirley to Reece about processing traumatic memories like seeing his father murdered: “Bury them. Just push them down really deep and pretend they’re not there.” 

• In the end, Cantor discovers being a billionaire doesn’t shield you from accountability. Slow Horses is a very good fictional show.

• Harkness’s line “I’m the same as I always was. It’s the jobs that got small” nods to Norma Desmond in Billy Wilder’s classic Sunset Boulevard: “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.”

• Slow Horses recap recommendation corner: (1) The folk song underscoring River’s fateful trip to his grandfather’s house in the closing scene is Nick Drake’s “One of These Things First,” a great song off his 1971 album, Bryter Layter. Those new to Drake’s music are often directed to his much sparser 1972 LP, Pink Moon, but I prefer the lusher orchestrations on the earlier record. (2) Coe is not dead, at least if you happen to see the latest (and quite solid) adaptation of Sense and Sensibility. The man who plays Coe, Tom Brooke, stands out unmistakably as John Dashwood, the mostly amiable gentleman who inherits the estate where his half-sisters, Elinor, Marianne, and Margaret, live with their mother.