{"id":233249,"date":"2025-10-30T03:15:09","date_gmt":"2025-10-30T03:15:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/233249\/"},"modified":"2025-10-30T03:15:09","modified_gmt":"2025-10-30T03:15:09","slug":"the-truth-about-lambs-feet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/233249\/","title":{"rendered":"The Truth About Lamb’s Feet"},"content":{"rendered":"

Note: This story contains spoilers from \u201cSlow Horses\u201d Season 5, Episode 6.<\/p>\n

\u201cSlow Horses\u201d<\/a> creator Will Smith says Slough House head Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman) is a \u201cwalking backstory.\u201d In the \u201cSlow Horses\u201d Season 5 finale<\/a>, aptly titled \u201cScars,\u201d viewers learn exactly what he means by that.<\/p>\n

The episode\u2019s climactic scene sees Lamb go head-to-head with MI5 head Claude Whelan (James Callis) at his Slough House office. There, Whelan informs Lamb he intends to shut Slough House down and pin all of the season\u2019s terrorist attacks on the organization. The only one who will get to remain in the service will be River (Jack Lowden), as a reward for saving Whelan\u2019s life. \u201cCheckmate, mate,\u201d Claude tells Jackson, before informing him that an MI5 team will arrive later in the day to \u201cclean\u201d Slough House up (and out).<\/p>\n

It looks, for a moment, like Lamb has been cornered. That is, at least, until he pulls from his coat pocket the dictaphone that formerly belonged to the late Dennis Gimball (Christopher Villiers), which was given to Lamb by River and JK Coe (Tom Brooke) in the wake of their role in Gimball\u2019s death. Lamb plays the recording Gimball captured with his dictaphone of Whelan\u2019s meeting with the far-right politician and his wife Dodie (Victoria Hamilton) just hours before his untimely death. \u201cThat was you threatening a political figure hours before he was killed,\u201d Lamb explains to the confused, panicking Whelan.<\/p>\n

As Claude asks him what he wants in return for keeping the recording secret, Lamb replies, \u201cI want what I always want: to be left in utter f\u2014king peace.\u201d He demands that Slough House be left alone, Roddy Ho (Christopher Chung) be reinstated and that Claude himself take the fall for the Libyans\u2019 attacks. \u201cIf you\u2019re not out of your office within the hour, I\u2019m going to send this to every grubby little hack I know from my drinking days,\u201d Lamb warns. When Claude argues that the tape\u2019s release would do \u201cuntold damage\u201d to the service\u2019s reputation, Lamb responds, \u201cLike I give a f\u2014k. Look what the service has done to me.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the next scene, Lamb is shown taping up a hole in one of his socks. While he has a banter-filled phone call with Diana Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas), who is in the midst of moving into Claude\u2019s now-vacant office, director Saul Metzstein slowly pans out to show viewers the horrendously scarred, calloused bottom of Lamb\u2019s bare foot. It is a shocking image for \u201cSlow Horses\u201d Season 5 to end on, and one that forces viewers to reconsider a key scene from earlier in the season.<\/p>\n

\"TheThe haunting closing image of \u201cSlow Horses\u201d Season 5, Episode 6 (Apple TV)<\/p>\n

Look what the service has done to me<\/p>\n

In \u201cSlow Horses\u201d Season 5, Episode 3, Oldman\u2019s Lamb tells a detailed, horrifying story about one of \u201chis joes,\u201d who was allegedly captured by the Stasi in Berlin in the 1980s and was tortured for days on end by captors who were in search of a name he did not even have. The Stasi used makeshift blowtorches to burn off the soles of the man\u2019s feet and beat a local German woman he loved, who was pregnant with their unborn child, to death with a fire extinguisher in front of him. It\u2019s a tragic story, but the details throughout it give the Slow Horses enough inspiration to stage a daring breakout from their MI5-imposed lockdown.<\/p>\n

Afterward, Catherine Standish (Saskia Reeves) asks Lamb if the \u201cjoe\u201d he mentioned in his story was actually him. Lamb tells her he made the whole thing up, but one look at his scarred foot in the \u201cSlow Horses\u201d Season 5 finale proves otherwise. Whether everything he said in that story actually happened to him or not is unclear, but we know that at least some of it was true \u2014 and that it did happen to Lamb.<\/p>\n

According to Smith, that last shot of Lamb\u2019s foot \u2014 and the confirmation it provides about his tortured past \u2014 was not part of his original plan for the \u201cSlow Horses\u201d Season 5 finale. The idea to \u201copen the door\u201d to this other side of Lamb\u2019s life did not actually come from him or any of the other \u201cSlow Horses\u201d writers, but Oldman\u2019s wife, Gisele Schmidt.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m pretty sure it was Gary\u2019s wife, Giselle, who was later like, \u2018Hey, what if we saw his foot at the end and he was scarred?\u2019\u201d Smith recalled. \u201cMe and Gary were immediately like, \u2018Oh my God, that\u2019s amazing.\u2019\u201d The show\u2019s creative team then spent a while thinking about how they wanted to pull off the final reveal. Among the options they considered was a scene of Standish seeing Lamb\u2019s scars through a hole in his sock, accompanied by a final shot of Lamb opening his eyes as Standish walked away in a twist that was meant to let the audience know that \u201cLamb knows she knows.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Tom\t\t\t\t\t<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cUltimately, we came down to the decision that just the audience knows and that it would be the last moment, so you\u2019re left thinking, \u2018Oh my God, did that\u2014? Did I just see that? What does that mean!?!\u2019\u201d Smith explained. \u201cWe shot it one way where Gary\u2019s foot was kind of across his leg, but it just didn\u2019t quite hit the way we wanted. [Director] Saul [Metzstein] then had this great idea of that slow drifting shot down to his foot.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHe\u2019s on the phone with Taverner, so you\u2019re sort of not sure at first why the camera is moving to his foot. You\u2019re thinking about how Taverner is First Desk again and she looks happier than we\u2019ve ever seen her. River thinks he\u2019s going back to the Park, even though we know that Lamb has just nixed that,\u201d Smith said. \u201cAll that is going on, and you\u2019re just thinking the whole time, \u2018Ok, so they\u2019re wrapping it up, just wrapping it up,\u2019 and then it\u2019s [smacks hands], \u2018Oh, my God,\u2019 again.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe open the door to this other side of Lamb and then we immediately shut it,\u201d Smith observed, noting that the reveal still leaves some ambiguity for viewers to parse through themselves. \u201cYou might think all of that story [Lamb told] could actually be true or none of it could be true, but what is true is that something very bad happened to him. The rest is to be unpacked at [our] leisure.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"GaryGary Oldman in \u201cSlow Horses\u201d Season 5 (Apple TV+)<\/p>\n

A walking backstory<\/p>\n

For Smith, who passed the lead reigns for \u201cSlow Horses\u201d over to Gabby Chiappe and Ben Vanstone for Seasons 6 and 7, respectively, writing Lamb has been a tricky balancing act between hinting at the character\u2019s traumatic past and letting his present day actions speak for themselves. \u201cThe amazing thing about the character is that you\u2019re meeting him at the end of his arc,\u201d Smith said. He remembered a conversation he had early on with Oldman, in which he asked the actor, \u201cYou realize that there is no arc here, right? The arc\u2019s all behind you. Are you OK with that?\u201d Oldman said he was, and Smith explained why.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe character reveals his arc in little, micro-expressions, partly, of course, in the whole way he carries himself. You look at the character and you go, \u2018What happened to you?\u2019\u201d the \u201cSlow Horses\u201d creator remarked. He likened the effect of the character\u2019s physical presentation to the structure of \u201cTrue Detective\u201d Season 1, which left viewers to wonder what happened to Matthew McConaughey\u2019s Rust Cohle between its past and present timelines.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a similar thing with Lamb, where you look at him and go, \u2018People don\u2019t normally look and act like this unless they\u2019re very unhappy. So what made you unhappy?\u2019 On a basic level, he\u2019s a walking backstory that you want to unpack,\u201d Smith elaborated. The final scene of \u201cSlow Horses\u201d Season 5, in which viewers get their clearest idea yet of the exact traumas Lamb is carrying with him, gave Smith the rare chance to offer viewers a peek behind the character\u2019s self-drawn curtain.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m so proud of that moment and the way it came about, so organically and with such an open collaboration,\u201d Smith confessed. \u201cHopefully, fingers crossed, it feels like a really explosive moment for the audience, too.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSlow Horses\u201d Seasons 1-5 are streaming now on Apple TV.<\/p>\n

\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Gary\t\t\t\t\t<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Note: This story contains spoilers from \u201cSlow Horses\u201d Season 5, Episode 6. \u201cSlow Horses\u201d creator Will Smith says…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":233250,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[9265,96,7210,59,72097,56,54,55,14914],"class_list":{"0":"post-233249","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-apple-tv","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-gary-oldman","11":"tag-gb","12":"tag-slow-horses","13":"tag-uk","14":"tag-united-kingdom","15":"tag-unitedkingdom","16":"tag-what-to-watch"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233249","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=233249"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233249\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/233250"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=233249"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=233249"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=233249"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}