The first season of Slow Horses was grown-up fun with a decorous amount of stakes. The second season adds another turn of the screw, ratcheting up the tension with some genuinely frightening villains and a higher body count.
But what makes this season great is the old-school spy vibe. Poison rings, swapping files in a laundromat, going undercover disguised only in glasses, double crosses, Russian pseudonyms, sleeper agents, radioactive poisoning, and even a few games of deeply meaningful chess. It’s Get Smart for adults.
Based on Mick Heron’s Dead Lions book, this season explores the twenty-first century lives of old Cold Warriors: Jackson Lamb, of course, but also Catherine Standish (whose previous boss was a double agent) and Diana Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas can do no wrong).
They all get wrapped up in old grudges when one of Lamb’s former “Joes” (his spy cronies) is found dead on a bus in mysterious circumstances, leaving only a cryptic note on his phone: cicada. It's a code, of course, for a probably-fake (but actually not) KGB program to plant sleeper agents across Britain for later activation. And while the KGB may not exist anymore, many previous KGB spies still do. We meet quite a few of them throughout the season, some unexpected and some obvious.
Those Cold War Boomers are linked to a present-day plot to cause a ruckus at the Glasshouse, the symbol of finance in London, during an anti-capitalist rally. The real goal, of course, is much less political and more mercenary: to use that distraction as a chance to steal all the digital and diamond wealth from a Russian oligarch. (And that whole situation is Webb's fault, since he fell for a fairly obvious ruse.)
If it sounds complicated, it is. If it sounds like a magical coincidence (that old Joe happening to spot a familiar face right at these plots got set in motion), it is that, too. But coincidences do happen, old grudges do exist, and most importantly... poison rings! Chess games! Twentieth-century spycraft is so much more fun to watch than twenty-first century espionage.
As Lamb explains it to River: “Sometimes the only way to work out why a trap has been set is to walk into it.” This season is full of characters walking, sometimes stumbling, into traps without realizing how complex the trap is.
River Cartwright’s experience is probably the funniest, perhaps because he suffers from what the kids these day call Main Character Syndrome: he definitely thinks he’s the hero of the story, when really he is, at best, a patsy and, at worst, a bumbling fool. But watching him try to be undercover and fooling almost no one was hilarious, mostly because he took himself so seriously. Seeing his relationship with his grandfather (Jonathan Pryce, wonderful of course) lent an emotional dimension to his character, but also a generational connection from the days before the Berlin Wall fell and the present moment.
Louisa Guy, on the other hand, has to struggle with losing her new boyfriend Min for the stupidest of reasons: he saw something he shouldn’t have, so the Russians killed him. Louisa has never been weak-willed, so watching her on a mission of vengeance—at one point armed only with a wrench and a belt—was really delightful. (I’m still really curious about what landed her in Slough House.) She was a nice entry point to helping us get to knew newbie Marcus, too.
Roddy Ho, as the tech asshole, lived up to the same low standards the character set for himself last season. He was more palatable, though, after some interactions with another newbie, Shirley Dander. Played by Aimee-Ffion Edwards (she was Esme on Peaky Blinders), she’s my new favorite character, because she’s bossy and mean and takes no prisoners and likes to punch people.
It takes this whole team and a lot of luck to mostly foil the plan, which wasn’t quite the plan they thought they were foiling, but nothing got bombed, so that’s a win. Right?
More or less, I suppose. At one point River makes a joke about how Lamb needs to update his ethics training. Lamb responds by pointing out that, if they start to think about ethics in their profession, they’ll just have to stop doing their jobs.
But for all of Lamb’s dismissal of ethics, it’s impossible not to root for MI-5. Their enemies, after all, are some of the great boogiemen of the twentieth century: KGB (now FSB) spies, sleeper agents, geo-political tricksters who are, perhaps worst of all, still committed to a cause that absolutely no sane person thinks is worth it—Soviet Communism.
While Leo may be the obvious threat, it’s Katinsky who is most interesting. He’s also Popov, whose real name is lost entirely; he is undercover but not really; he holds on to old grudges; he has known of Jackson Lamb for more than 30 years. He is playing a long game, one that ties into Catherine’s old boss, all the back-and-forth of agents as Communism fell, and some basic personal animosity and one-upmanship.
And he almost wins! He pulls the wool over Lamb’s eyes, making him one of the few people who can outmaneuver the master. It’s impressive, but also a testament to the increased stakes of this season as our characters become more personally enmeshed in the problems they’re trying to solve.
Our heroes, who aren’t really heroes, do eventually win, but not really winning winning. Rather, we reset to the status quo of vaguely unethical political machinations, fumbling ineptness, and lots of snarky humor. It’s a good set up for a new season, and a pleasure to watch.
Four out of four cicadas.
Josie Kafka is a full-time cat servant and part-time rogue demon hunter. (What's a rogue demon?)
Everything about this show is brilliant.
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