{"id":160971,"date":"2025-09-26T05:47:10","date_gmt":"2025-09-26T05:47:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/160971\/"},"modified":"2025-09-26T05:47:10","modified_gmt":"2025-09-26T05:47:10","slug":"review-slow-horses-s5-e1-6","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/160971\/","title":{"rendered":"REVIEW: Slow Horses (S5 E1\/6)"},"content":{"rendered":"

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It\u2019s great to see the Slough House massive back in action again, even if they\u2019re looking more fractured than ever. Jackson Lamb is on blistering form, with Gary Oldman delivering a record number of \u201cfuck offs\u201d to all and sundry throughout the first episode. Louisa bows out for a much-needed mental health break (although she\u2019s 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\u2019s death and the storming of Slough House. Shirley\u2019s PTSD manifests itself by becoming convinced that someone is trying to kill Roddy.<\/p>\n

Even the aforementioned Roddy \u2018I don\u2019t pay for sex, sex pays for me\u2019 Ho, usually the butt of the joke, is strutting with misplaced confidence because he\u2019s \u2013 somehow \u2013 seeing someone extremely glamorous. Naturally, everyone\u2019s antennae goes up when they see Roddy with a woman.<\/p>\n

Character developments aside, the bonds painstakingly built over the past few seasons feel splintered, and the team is, in its own shambolic way, broken. <\/p>\n

However, the story doesn\u2019t begin in Slough House. Instead, we open on a London estate, where a campaigner is canvassing for the upcoming mayoral election. It\u2019s a bitter contest between a Southeast Asian candidate and a Reform-esque populist, the latter as odious as you\u2019d 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\u2019s links to the right-wing candidate inject the season with a fiercely topical, if somewhat heavy-handed, edge.<\/p>\n

Mass shootings, extremism, racism and incel culture \u2013 it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the set-up out of the way. You can nit-pick (characters occasionally veer into pastiche, and some feel as though they\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n

Lamb, Standish, Taverner, and Elizabeth Flyte are all on glorious form, cutting through the chaos with razor-sharp dialogue and backroom manoeuvring. And Shirley\u2019s jumpiness? Turns out it isn\u2019t just PTSD \u2013 she\u2019s right to suspect Roddy\u2019s new romance. In classic Slough House fashion, he\u2019s walked straight into a honeytrap.<\/p>\n

Paul Hirons<\/p>\n

\u2b50\u2b50\u2b50\u2b50<\/p>\n

Rating: 4 out of 5.<\/p>\n

READ MORE: ALL OUR NEWS AND REVIEWS OF SLOW HORSES<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s great to see the Slough House massive back in action again, even if they\u2019re looking more fractured…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":160972,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[96,391,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-160971","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-entertainment","tag-tv","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160971","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=160971"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160971\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/160972"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=160971"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=160971"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=160971"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}