Review: Slow Horses, "Bad Dates" | Season 5, Episode 1

Welcome to Episodic Medium's coverage of the Apple TV+ drama Slow Horses, which debuts its fifth season today. As always, this first review is free to all subscribers, but subsequent reviews will only be available to paid subscribers. Our yearly subscription drive ends next week—this is your last chance ever for 20% off a yearly subscription. Find out more here.

“Might not be terrorism, but it’s something more than mass murder.”

Watched over the course of a single week, the first four seasons of Slow Horses are an interesting experience of serialization.

From a plot perspective, the show consciously avoids overlaps between seasons. No matter how large the threat against the U.K., and how much history it might involve, it will be resolved in six episodes. The fourth season was a test of this principle, with Hugo Weaving emerging as River’s father and eventually securing his release at season’s end, but the “plot” was still resolved. We still know going into a fifth season that things are going to mostly start over from scratch.

But if you binge the show, it becomes one long, very bad time for the crew at Slough House. It’s hard at times to gauge the time between seasons, but there’s always a tension within the show as it relates to our central characters living with the burns from past seasons while being forced to jump into yet another fire. It’s something of a running joke with River Cartwright, continuing to absorb mishap after mishap, but in other cases it’s more serious: Catherine Standish leaves Slough House entirely between seasons three and four, and of course Min’s death echoes in the team between seasons two and three. Binging makes those echoes more prominent, but it also foregrounds the show’s commitment to a reset button.

Plot-wise, season five is what we’d expect. Before we see what Slough House is up to, we’re embedded with a young misogynist, who emerges from his apartment, collects an automatic weapon from a van, and then opens fire on a public square. When he’s shot dead by another gunman, who gets into the van and drives away, we have the intrigue necessary to elevate this—as Emma Flyte notes above—to something that would require MI5’s expertise. By the time Flyte has finished her investigation, she’s correctly surmised that the gunman was effectively coerced into committing the crime, and subsequent investigation shows whoever killed him wants them to know it was a setup. They also clearly want the crime to be linked to a right-wing blowhard running for Mayor of London, a political implication that puts Whelan on alert while Taverner continues to do his job for him.

What you might notice is that, at least to this point, Slough House has nothing to do with this. Standish suggests they expect some grunt work to come their way as a result of the shooting, but for most of the episode there’s nothing concrete to pull them into the investigation. This was also the case last season, because at least initially we had no way of knowing that the attack on David’s life was as tied into the suicide bombing as it was. But in seasons two and three, there were clear entry points for our characters, whether it was Lamb’s discovery of Dickie Bough’s phone or Standish getting swept up by the Tiger Team. It’s a quick way to ensure that character and plot are aligned, with only six episodes to work with.

That’s a television logic, though, and the characters don’t know they’re in a television show. So this helps explain how the fifth season is approaching this challenge, as Shirley effectively thinks that she is. Living with the trauma of Marcus’ death, and working in a Slough House still under construction following the carnage, Shirley is understandably on edge. And so what reads to us as a comic relief opening of Ho dancing through London and nearly getting run over reads to Shirley as an assassination attempt, and a sign of an imminent threat on everyone at Slough House.

It creates two forms of tension in the episode. The first is Shirley's conflict with her fellow residents at Slough House. It’s clear that everyone is processing what happened last season in their own way, but they’re trying to move past it, either to avoid their own trauma or to face it in a way that works for them. River’s insensitivity is particularly extreme—”Are you trying to keep us alive or bring Marcus back?” was a low blow—but it’s not far off from how everyone feels. No one takes Shirley’s claims of assassination seriously, and while the improbability of Ho having a hot date raises some eyebrows, they’re still largely humoring her.

The other tension, though, is that we know we’re watching a TV show where she has to be right. Sure, perhaps there could be a season of Slow Horses where Slough House just works on the back bench, but we know better. And so even though Shirley’s claims seem absurd, it was hardly surprising when I—belatedly, having missed making the connection at the beginning—realized it was actually the van from the shooting that nearly ran him over. And because that would be way too random a coincidence, it means that these cases are connected. Someone tied to the shooting does have to be trying to kill Ho, which—presuming we take his date’s text as sinister instead of, like, someone planning a surprise party—is revealed at episode’s end.

Now, there’s still plenty of mystery here, mainly the question of “Why?” But for the time being, it’s mostly about Shirley’s PTSD, and the way her drug addiction is intersecting with that trauma. Even if she’s right, she’s clearly lost any sense of equilibrium, and with Louisa’s departure Slough House is not in a place to find it again. It’s just Shirley going rogue, River trying to back her up, and Standish helping as best she can when she’s not even an actual agent. Lamb is certainly going to be no help chomping away at the Colin the Caterpillar he absconded with from the goodbye party, but we know from past experience that he’ll kick into gear when he needs to. It’s just still unclear exactly how this connection will play out.

That’s a fun feeling to have for the first time with the show after binging through the four seasons so quickly. In that format, you’re always able to jump to another episode—I don’t think there was an instance where we watched a single episode to start a season, always moving onto the second to get into the rhythm of the new plot. In this way, I’m somewhat surprised that Apple stopped doing two-episode premieres last season, but this suggests to me that Will Smith wants it this way. He wants us to sit with this moment, especially for the viewers who—unlike me—were waiting a full year for the show to return.

Slow Horses is among a small group of shows that are managing yearly releases in this climate of lengthy hiatuses, which goes a long way. It’s also a show with a short run, though, and I still don’t know how that’s going to play on a weekly basis, but we’ll know more about how this season works once Slough House’s involvement comes into focus.

Stray observations

• Why did I wait so long to watch Slow Horses, you ask? No idea, really. It moved super quick once we started, though.
• I’m gonna put a pin on River and Louisa for a second. I saw the kiss in the “Next Season” montage at the end of Season 4—what a weird novelty those are, huh?—and presumed it would play out like this. They started playing that card last season when River wanted to talk about this grandfather and she presumed he was asking her out, so we’re on some kind of path with it. I’m…ambivalent about it, though, and will have more to say once (if?) we return to it beyond this single kiss.
• Everyone’s in the opening credits now!
• I held my tongue for now, but if you are at all aware of my feelings about Nate from Ted Lasso, you’ll know that Nick Mohammed’s presence in this season as London mayor Zafar Jaffrey is deeply triggering. I’ll do my best to go in with an open mind, instead of presuming that he’s somehow the real dirtbag as opposed to the Trump stand-in. I’ll just focus on the much preferred Ted Lasso connection with Ruth Bradley, aka Roy’s niece’s teacher, as Flyte.
• Gotta say, it wasn’t particularly gory or anything, but the shooting sequence was still terrifying, and shot with a real sense of violence. A definite tonal whiplash from that to Ho dancing to Robert Palmer (although we get the theme song in between).
• If you didn’t go back yourself, you can clearly see the same faded writing on the back of the Van when it runs over Ho—it’s not ambiguous, even though I didn’t jump to that conclusion with the credits in between.
• With Flyte getting a bit more screentime, we learn more about her departure from the Met(ropolitan Police), via her interactions with Fuckability Phil. A real twat, that one.
• And thus begins my coverage of Slow Horses season five. As always, these reviews are written episode-by-episode, without knowing how the story is going to play out. Looking forward to seeing how this season compares to the first four for everyone.