Review: Slow Horses, "Incommunicado" | Season 5, Episode 2

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When I committed to writing about Slow Horses, looking to leverage the momentum of four seasons’ worth of observations from catching up over the summer, I worried about the middle episodes.

What’s weird is that if I actually go back through the seasons, the second episode has often taken the story in whole new directions. It’s technically the end of the first “act” of the six-episode season, and so there is a pressure to re-escalate after where the season begins. In the first season, Moody shoots Sid as the second episode comes to a close, while in season three the reveal of the “Tiger Team” twist resolves the tension of the opening episode before creating more when it’s clear the team has gone rogue. And in season four, because the show went all cloak-and-dagger to trick us into thinking River might be dead, we don’t really have a clear grasp on the nature of the threat until his trip to France in the second episode.

The one exception to this is in the second season, when the show effectively establishes the whole of the plot—Dickie Bough is dead, the cicadas may or may not have existed, Bough’s death was a murder—in the premiere and then the second episode is just Slough House investigating this. There’s even a very linear B-story with Min and Louisa, which unfortunately for Min converges with the larger story when his side-project for the Park puts him in the wrong place at the wrong time. Obviously, the fact that Min dies in the following episode raises the stakes of what we saw while binging, but if I were to just write about the second episode what would there be to say?

This is one thing in a second season. Then, there’s the shift that comes with a sophomore outing, with a show returning to its world and its characters for the first time. But when a show is in its fifth season, and there isn’t a dramatic departure from its existing rhythms (which I’d argue is pretty unlikely with a six-episode drama), there’s not really enough to go on to say anything substantial. We don’t have a clear enough sense of where these character arcs are heading to wax poetic about them, and if the plot doesn’t make a particularly shocking twist or turn, what is there to say that I didn’t already say last week?