It’s the worst outing yet for the Slough House gang, with main characters having unnerving personality transplants and ‘action’ sequences taking place in penguin enclosures. Yikes!
T
he fifth season of Slow Horses starts with a timely sequence: a gun attack perpetrated by a follower of a far-right politician (we even briefly glimpse a few St George’s crosses). Rightwing politics is an area that Apple TV+’s spy drama has tackled before; back in season one, a British-Pakistani student was memorably taken on a joyride by a nationalist group named Sons of Albion, who threatened to behead him on a live stream.
However, like many things in the Slow Horses universe – based on Mick Herron’s bestselling novels about a group of MI5 rejects – the opening proves something of a red herring. Season five isn’t really about white nationalists, or environmental activists, or hostile foreign actors, and yet it is also about all of those things, all at once. As a result, it is overstuffed and strangely lacking in substance.
Worse still, people-pleasing agent River Cartwright (Jack Lowden) has undergone a personality bypass, and spends much of the series acting in a way that can only be described as unnervingly dickish. (Lowden pulls it off, but it does feel rather unbecoming for the show’s unofficial hero.) Still, it figures: as well as observing his grandfather David’s rapid descent into dementia, last season saw River discover that his real dad was an ex-CIA agent turned cult leader, who had impregnated multiple women in an attempt to raise a cabal of future assassins. Yikes.
