Review: Slow Horses, "Sayonara" | Season 6, Episode 5
However one feels about the season's plot, the penultimate episode forces you to get on board
“Maybe that’s how it works with traumas. One cancels out the others.”
When I write about a show like Slow Horses, it’s easy to get caught up on “plot,” even if you know from past seasons that it doesn’t necessarily matter that much. In last week’s review, in particular, I found myself stumbling over “why” questions at a time when the show just wanted us to be in the moment. I don’t think this is a show driven exclusively by vibes, since the plots do have to hold together, but writing about the show is a bit of an occupational hazard when it comes to just being able to enjoy the ride.
“Sayonara” knows that there’s been some confusion in the story, given how quickly it sends Lamb into the Park to lay it all out to Diana Taverner. It’s a trick the show always has up its sleeve: once Lamb has enough information, he’s been established as the greatest mind for piecing things together. When he takes into account everything we now know, he makes it sound really simple. Diana Taverner unknowingly used money belonging to Damien Cantor to fund an off-the-books hit in Russia, utilizing Sid Baker’s identity to protect the agent who executed the hit, and then removed the Slough House records in order to try to scrub her from the system. The targeting of Slough House was thus an unintended consequence, drawing an arrow to him and his Slow Horses given they were the most recent files deleted.
To be honest, I’m still really stuck on one piece of this: why would the Russians’ approach be “murder them one by one?” It’s good for the purpose of driving tension, but I’m still trying to figure out how they got from Point A (The person responsible for the hit was someone whose identity was recently erased) to Point B (Identifying Sidonie Baker by name). It just strikes me as a wildly inefficient approach. We do get an answer to why Sid was at River’s grandfather’s house here—he was the only friend she imagined would help her—but the details that were pulling me out of previous episodes remain here.
