It’s great to see the Slough House massive back in action again, even if they’re looking more fractured than ever. Jackson Lamb is on blistering form, with Gary Oldman delivering a record number of “fuck offs” to all and sundry throughout the first episode. Louisa bows out for a much-needed mental health break (although she’s intent on leaving for good), River is sulking, wallowing and being insensitive to his colleagues after the revelations of season 4, and Shirley is twitchy and on edge, haunted by Marcus’s death and the storming of Slough House. Shirley’s PTSD manifests itself by becoming convinced that someone is trying to kill Roddy.
Even the aforementioned Roddy ‘I don’t pay for sex, sex pays for me’ Ho, usually the butt of the joke, is strutting with misplaced confidence because he’s – somehow – seeing someone extremely glamorous. Naturally, everyone’s antennae goes up when they see Roddy with a woman.
Character developments aside, the bonds painstakingly built over the past few seasons feel splintered, and the team is, in its own shambolic way, broken.
However, the story doesn’t begin in Slough House. Instead, we open on a London estate, where a campaigner is canvassing for the upcoming mayoral election. It’s a bitter contest between a Southeast Asian candidate and a Reform-esque populist, the latter as odious as you’d expect. Suddenly, the scene explodes into shocking violence: a young man emerges from a flat above the precinct armed with an assault rifle and slaughters innocents in broad daylight, before being ruthlessly (and really brutally) taken down by a sniper. The massacre is horrifyingly staged, and the shooter’s links to the right-wing candidate inject the season with a fiercely topical, if somewhat heavy-handed, edge.
Mass shootings, extremism, racism and incel culture – it’s very, very on the nose. In light of Apple postponing The Savant, I wonder if bigwigs had a sit-down and discussion before this first episode aired.
That’s the set-up out of the way. You can nit-pick (characters occasionally veer into pastiche, and some feel as though they’re in competition to out-stupid each other). But Slow Horses has always thrived on its balance of grit, gallows humour, and dysfunction, and here it largely works. You just have to sit back and enjoy it.
Lamb, Standish, Taverner, and Elizabeth Flyte are all on glorious form, cutting through the chaos with razor-sharp dialogue and backroom manoeuvring. And Shirley’s jumpiness? Turns out it isn’t just PTSD – she’s right to suspect Roddy’s new romance. In classic Slough House fashion, he’s walked straight into a honeytrap.
Paul Hirons
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 4 out of 5.