Review: Slow Horses, "Lost and Found" | Season 6, Episode 4

Slow Horses is a show about spies, so it makes sense that the audience is often left in the dark. And because Slough House is on the outside looking in most of the time, they’re always a little behind the eight ball, which keeps them and the audience on an even playing field.

At the same time, though, the show needs us to be slightly ahead of the characters for a couple of reasons. One is that the show wants to be able to tell stories about its villains, which means spending time with Damien Cantor and Frank Harkness that gives us more information than the Slow Horses are going to have. The other is the prominence of First Desk, where Diana Taverner is playing a larger game in which our characters are merely pawns. As long as the show is telling its stories about those characters, we’re not going to be shocked by how the story is playing out; the pleasure comes in the suspense of seeing how and when our characters become subject to their machinations.

“Lost and Found” is the point in the season where the audience, I would argue, almost has the full lay of the land. When Diana gets her shadowy phone call from the Russians, there’s no pretending: she had a Russian operative killed, and the Russian assassins (credited as Jim and Jane) are in America for justice against the person who killed them. If she is willing to hand over Sidonie Baker, the woman who they believe executed the order, then all of this—the manipulation through Damien, the targeting of the Slow Horses—is over. The season now reorients itself to whether Taverner’s efforts to satisfy the Russians’ demands can be undone by the Slow Horses’ efforts to protect her, or at least it seemed like it was before Jim and Jane abduct Sid at episode’s end.