Incommunicado
Season 5
Episode 2
Editor’s Rating
4 stars
****
Even the Park is interested in finding out what is going on with Roddy and his “girlfriend.”
Photo: Apple TV+/Copyrighted
Wait, is it possible that Roddy has a girlfriend?
Slow Horses is a twisty show, but the assumption that Roddy had been hoodwinked by a glamorous woman far out of his league seemed about as safe a bet as possible. Even Jackson Lamb, who’d been reluctant to endorse Shirley’s suspicion that Roddy was targeted deliberately by a van that nearly killed him, admits that Roddy’s romantic relationship was finally enough to pique his interest. “It’s dodgy,” he tells Roddy about Shirley’s concerns at his apartment, “but none of it raises my Spidey senses as much as hearing a real live woman is happy to spend time with you.” Certainly after the final scene in last week’s episode, where Tara primly resisted Roddy’s advances before calling the goon squad on him as soon as he departed, we could safely believe he was being duped.
And yet, maybe he isn’t. We now know for absolute certainty that the same terrorist group responsible for the Abbotsfield shooting is indeed going after Roddy, but the motives remain obscure. Yet Roddy, who’s as embarrassed as a man like him is capable of being (which is to say, still not that much), firmly insists that what he has going with Tara, his girlfriend, is real. And tonight’s episode winds up backing him up on two important fronts: One, when River and J.K. Coe are sent to pay Tara’s apartment a visit, they’re greeted by a knife-wielding older woman and her son, who claims she isn’t there, but we see her peering down from a bedroom curtain as they depart. She looks scared, a sea change from the confident, slinky young woman who’d been clubbing earlier that night with Roddy. Two, we know that the terrorists like to coerce and weaponize people unconnected to their organization to do their bidding. Tara could fall into that category, just like the Abbotsfield shooter and the trio of eco-anarchists who are deployed later in the episode.
So there are plenty of juicy questions on the table for future weeks of the season, but it should be said that putting a character like Roddy at the center of Slow Horses has given season five a rousing comic boost. It seems odd to admit that after the season opened with perhaps the single most disturbing event in the show’s history, but focusing on the Roddy situation has given Slow Horses a necessary counterbalance in tone. As much as the spy games are triggered by real-world violence and the occasional loss of a character like Marcus, there’s some dedication here to maintaining its deft, light, escapist appeal. Without Roddy occupying so much screen time, perhaps the events so far would leave too sour a taste. With him, the show is zipping along as confidently as ever.
Picking up right where the premiere left off, Roddy enters his apartment, hears a noise upstairs, and grabs the closest thing to a weapon he owns, a giant novelty sword with colorful LED lights at the shaft. (It’s not really clear if it’s sharp enough to do much damage, but when he does swing it later to repel an attacker, he smacks him with the broad end rather than the blade.) It turns out that Lamb has stopped in to babysit him, finally convinced that Shirley’s worries about him were justified. Roddy’s wildly overeager attempts to turn his bedroom into a love nest give Lamb an opening for a few solid zingers about his waterbed (“must be like sleeping in a bouncy castle”) and the cheap bottle of bubbly he was saving for that special someone (“For losing your virginity? It would be vintage by then.”). Even amid his colleagues’ concerns, Roddy hasn’t noticed anyone following him, which probably accounts for his limited role at Slough House as a tech guy.
With Lamb in the apartment and Shirley scanning for suspects outside, the stage is set to apprehend anyone who comes hunting for Roddy, but in typical Slough House fashion, the operation is a bit of a shambles. Even with all of them in place, Shirley misses the masked attacker sneaking his way up to the apartment door, and Lamb’s attempt to blind him with bleach creates a chaotic struggle that wounds the assailant without containing him. Shirley’s last-ditch effort to beat the man into submission at a nearby skate park fails, leaving the terrorist group, still operating out of the same white van, to terminate their connection to him on their own. Loyalty does not appear to be one of their core values. They specialize in disposable fanatics.
Typical of any Slow Horses season, the collaborative spirit has once again eluded the factions at Slough House and the Park. While the Roddy situation has given Slough House its own angle on the Abbotsfield massacre, the Park is conducting its official investigation, with Emma Flyte tentatively taking the lead. (I say “tentatively” because Taverner hasn’t been impressed with Emma’s work so far and suggests she stay at the office until she does something right.) While unwinding with a Big Gulp pour of red wine at home, Taverner gets a visit Peter Judd MP (Samuel West), the oily right-wing politico that Slow Horses author Mick Herron once compared to Boris Johnson. Judd informs her that the weapon used at Abbotsfield was stolen from a cache at a gun fair. In exchange for a helpful itemized list of this and other missing weapons, she has to agree not to embarrass the company by making its identity public.
The conflict between Slough House and the Park turns into a political theater that Lamb cooly anticipates. Taverner wants to show she’s serious by having her agents storm Slough House with guns, whisk Roddy away, and keep the others under watch in the building. Lamb barely looks up from his desk when they come barging in. As this dysfunctional intra-agency rivalry plays out, meanwhile, the terrorists have enlisted a social-media-savvy dupe to plant a bomb in a sprawling oil refinery. What do the Abbotsfield shooting, the refinery bombing, and Roddy Ho have in common? That’s a pattern that so far defies logic, and everyone seems too preoccupied by other dramas to make the connection.
• Lamb & Co. planting themselves as the hippest, bougiest high-rise bar in London proves to be a great hideout plan, given their association with the musty, cluttered, fart-choked spaces of Slough House.
• Important detail to remember: The high-powered rifle used to kill the Abbotsfield assassin is the same one used to shoot up Roddy’s apartment from the street. Unlike their American counterparts in the action genre, the Brits will reuse weapons rather than tossing them out like disposable diapers.
• Whelan’s vanity and gullibility makes him a perfect target for Dodie Gimball, the wife of the populist mayoral candidate and a tabloid columnist itching to exploit MI5 for political gain. Her stooge makes easy work of him in the park during a supervised jog.
• After Roddy likens his personal magnetism to “the twin moons of Tatooine,” Lamb hands him a pen and notepad to write down what he remembers about his relationship with Tara: “Every detail is important, apart from the shit you were telling me just now.”
• Solid quip from Taverner, who’s annoyed by the bearded doofus spoiling her evening: “Can we get this over with? That’s something I’m sure you’ve heard often from ladies this time of night.”
• Roddy’s efforts to mask his location on the lease are foiled by his attempt at a hypermasculine pseudonym: Clint Wolf.
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