Slow Horses Recap: A Bullet Named Poirot

Slow Horses
Resurrection
Season 6 Episode 3
Editor’s Rating ★★★★★
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The first two episodes of the current season were about as dark and sobering as Slow Horses has gotten in its six-season run. Grim developments arise surrounding the death of River’s father figure and the reemergence of his malevolent actual father, Catherine potentially falling back off the wagon, Taverner under attack from far-right conspiracists, and the slight hassle of Russian assassins murdering anyone ever connected with Slough House. The past has become present. The payment on previous sins has come due. All that jazz.

None of those realities have changed in this wildly entertaining third episode, and many of them have intensified, as you would expect leading into the back stretch of a six-episode season. But ever since the gang assembled at Blake’s grave in response to the imminent threat against them, they’ve essentially all been running for their lives, which completely changes the tone. Spy narratives tend to sweat through tense, knotty backroom machinations — like, say, Gary Oldman in the 2011 version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy — but with the horses flushed out into the open, there’s a rollicking sense of adventure that plays to the show’s strengths. Divided into small groups of two, three, or four, they have to improvise their way through the night.

At least some credit for the shift in tone belongs to Olivia Cooke’s return to the fold as Sid Baker, which is a reminder of the specific energy she brought to the first two episodes of the series before the character got shot and went dark. Her shock appearance at the end of last week’s episode raises a ton of questions that she (and the show) are in no hurry to answer, despite River’s (and our) curiosity about where she’s been for three years and what’s behind her return. When Sid puts on a kettle for tea and asks River if the milk smells a little off, he’s aghast at her nonchalance, and the two barely get through a discussion about why Sid never told him she was still alive. The flirty–frisky chemistry between Cooke and Jack Lowden, which Slow Horses had deftly established in season one, comes back so effortlessly in their scenes together that it feels fine to table the larger mysteries of Sid’s disappearance for now.

The “Why didn’t you tell me?” question doesn’t inspire much of an answer from Sid, who is stuck on River’s suggestion that her getting shot in the head was traumatizing to him. But that’s really a fake fight between them, a little bit of banter to signal that he cares about her and feels guilty for putting her in a bad situation. The two can barely suppress their grins when River asks, “So you’re alive? Just alive?,” and the show leaves it at that. The moment he attempts to circle back to why she’s suddenly appeared at his late grandfather’s house, the assassins pull up outside, and they’re on the move for the rest of the episode. Only a scene later, when Sid is checking back on a possible assassination in Kazan, Russia, does the mystery of her reappearance open up.

As River and Sid dash through the mucky cow paddocks and fields extending out from David Cartwright’s rural home, the remaining horses are off on their own side adventures in response to the threat. After departing from the service for what appears to be a cushy corporate job — everyone is wowed by the sleek Audi the private sector landed her — Louisa is so resistant to returning to Slough House that she refuses Catherine and Shirley’s urgent requests for her to leave a meeting. When Catherine’s hilariously muddling attempt to speak to her in wink-wink code (“I’m afraid your Uncle Blake has met with a serious accident. It’s a grave situation”) fails to rouse Louisa, Shirley opts for the blunter approach of declaring that people have killed poor Uncle Blake, which does the trick. The three of them peel off to check on Moira and discover that she’s still alive despite the gas leak intended to lead to an “accidental” death. Louisa’s return to the fold brings her into a rare partnership with Shirley, and the contrast between the two is comically jarring with the now-professional and polished-looking Louisa getting dragged into the muck of Shirley’s dysfunction. Louisa had gotten off scot-free in a cushy corporate job, and now she’s stuck in a car with Shirley, a barely sober Catherine, and Moira puking into a purse. 

Meanwhile, Lamb beelines to a children’s home with a protection order for Reece Nesmith, the boy who partially witnessed Harkness murdering his father, which makes him a loose end Harkness will need to tie up. The urgency of the situation is lost on the home’s receptionist, however, who tries to insist she cannot honor a protection order that hasn’t been phoned in well in advance. (“You catch the bit about his life’s in danger?” Lamb asks.) Reece turns out to be a great foil for both Lamb and Roddy, who comes along for the ride as a kind of driver-babysitter and gets teased relentlessly by the boy, whose dwarfism seems to have toughened his defenses. Every time Lamb or Roddy try to diminish him, Reece comes back with a cutting one-liner that puts them in their place. Still, he does eventually give Lamb the information he needs about Harkness arriving at the apartment with money and his dad attempting to blackmail the mercenary over the stolen file from the park. 

Pointedly, the one loner in the episode is Taverner, who’s dealing with significant fallout at the Park over her disastrous TV interview. At no time in the show’s history has Taverner looked as vulnerable and out of sorts as she does right now, and her instinctual response is to lash out caustically at anyone who tries to question her judgment. That starts with Oliver Nash, the government overseer who’s waiting in her office after she successfully avoids eye contact or discussion with anyone else in the Park. Taverner calls the interview questions a “tabloid trick” designed to give a false rumor some credence by asking about it, but Oliver isn’t persuaded and leaves with a warning that there will be consequences. 

More intriguing still is the conflict Taverner has with Flyte, who may be her right-hand woman but isn’t given to sycophancy. Flyte criticizes her boss for failing to give any notice to the Second Desks and her head of security about the interview, and she’s forced to defend her decision to tell Lamb about Struan Loy’s assassination because it’s “protocol.” But when Taverner snaps “I am protocol,” it spells the end of Flyte’s time as head of the Dogs, and her reassignment with the other losers at Slough House, which she rejects. It’s a stunningly impulsive swipe from Taverner, whose current difficulty at running First Desk has led to tyrannical fits that seem wildly out of character for a woman who’s normally in total command of every situation. It’s also a significant moment for Flyte, who started the series as a fierce loyalist and quick ascendant to the head of the Dogs but now is in a position where her principles have gotten her knocked off the perch. 

“You’ve got a leak that Julian Assange would be proud of,” Lamb says to her later, after sneaking effortlessly into the garden area next to her home. The rivalry between Lamb and Taverner has been an ongoing feature of the show, defined at times by Taverner’s eagerness to ship her problems downstream to Slough House and leavened at others by a grudging respect between the two. Taverner is not in the mood to get a visit from Lamb at this moment because she doesn’t seem to have a handle on whatever skullduggery is happening in house. If Lamb and his team weren’t currently fighting for their lives, he might have a laugh about it. 

Shots

• As American viewers, we’re so used to law-enforcement figures being armed to the teeth that it’s disconcerting to see MI5 agents scrambling for ways to defend themselves. In an American thriller, River and Sid would have had the drop on the Russian assassins when they turn up at David Cartwright’s place pretending to be lost travelers, but instead, they quietly slip out the back. Then later, Louisa has to make a desperate plea to Dancer Blaine, the black-market weapons dealer, to pick up whatever pitiful handgun he can sell to her for self-defense. 

• Between her throwing up repeatedly and complaining about only technically being part of Slough House, Moira does her best to make Catherine, Shirley, and Louisa regret having saved her life.

• Congrats to Flyte for telling off her boss, as few people get a chance to do when they quit: “With the greatest lack of respect, ma’am, fuck you and fuck your job.” 

• Wonderful exchange between Reece and Lamb about the boy’s lack of sentiment for his miserable father. “I just saw my dad get murdered,” says Reece. “I’m upset. I’m traumatized.” “Oh yeah,” replies Lamb. “And I’m a fucking ballerina.” 

• As much as Taverner doesn’t seem to know, there are other things she absolutely knows, especially as they relate to Sid and the “movement order” that accounts for her resurfacing. Sid’s first priority may be to dodge her assailants, but she spends the episode urgently trying to connect with Taverner and ends it by putting herself and River back in danger while looking for a phone. 

• Great little one-off character here in Anne, a widow who hosts River and Sid while they hide from the assassins. Her extremely old-fashioned sense of office dynamics leads her to assume Sid was part of the “typing pool” and to lament the death of workplace romance. (“I think it’s such a shame you’re not allowed to have sex with your colleagues anymore. All those girls making a fuss about a bit of bottom-pinching. I mean, how are you meant to meet a nice boy if you can’t, you know, go out with your boss?”) 

• Never get into a farting contest with Lamb. Reece learns that lesson the hard way.