Review: Slow Horses, "Circus" | Season 5, Episode 5

As you’ve no doubt seen in my reviews, I’ve been confused by the decision to leave the terrorists responsible for the attacks on London a mystery. We’ve spent too much time with the characters for us to be confused about their intentions, and once the destabilization strategy moved into place we understood their basic goals as well. So why not tell us that they were Libyans, specifically responding to the attack on Gaddafi? Why would that detail be something that Lamb casually drops as he finally debriefs Taverner and Whelan on what he’s learned thus far based on Coe’s theory?

The answer becomes clear in “Circus,” which is that this was a Scooby Doo plot all along, and the villain has been hiding in plain sight. Last week, it seemed plausible that Ho was right, and Tara really was just a civilian trapped in a bad situation who fell in love with her target. Lamb agreed she was hardly a professional, and when they make the Libya connection here the story checks out: it was a cultural group, and what she thought was simply rhetoric turned into a very real plan to hurt people that she got pulled into against her will. But once Whelan makes the push to send her out into the field, and she gives them the code that she inserted into the MI5 database on Ho’s laptop, there’s enough red flags for us to presume that something is amiss. And even if you missed David Cartwright predicting a “double Honey Trap” as River ignores him on the phone, it was crystal clear that once she learned the tracker was in her coat that it would be disposed of shortly after her trip down into the tube.