Review: Slow Horses, "Resurrection" | Season 6, Episode 3

When you write about a show every year, there are sometimes qualities inherent to the show that keep emerging as a point of contention. As a critic, you don’t want to be constantly repeating yourself, but there’s also something important about acknowledging when a show is repeating itself when it comes to a particular problem.

Last season was my first time writing about Slow Horses, but my gut says that if I had written about the four seasons before it, it wouldn’t have been my first time pointing out the show’s wonky temporality. The show wants to live in something close to “real-time” as much as possible, but that often means that it needs to transition from moment-to-moment irrespective of how time actually works. Some of this just has to do with cramming whole novels—two this season!—into six episodes, but it’s also a conscious choice to maximize momentum. Stopping to ensure there’s enough time for news to travel is not good television, they would argue.

“Resurrection” is actually an important episode for the show’s temporality, the first conscious acknowledgment of how much time has passed since the show began. When Sid Baker emerges very much alive, it’s discussed that it has been three years since they last saw each other, which means…a lot has happened to these characters in just three years. But the episode itself also underlines just how much is happening to these characters on this particular day. River is still in the suit from his grandfather’s funeral, which means that today he has confronted his father, investigated the murder his father committed right after, traveled to his grandfather’s home, and then run through the countryside being chased by Russian assassins.