I don’t know what changed, but my appreciation for this show sky-rocketed after watching the second season, so I couldn’t get to Slow Horses‘ third season quick enough! Lucky for me, a fourth installment is on the way later this year. I’ve also got the first novel in the series waiting for me at my local library.
Now that the dust has barely settled on Min’s death and the events involving Russian sleeper agents has settled, of course someone else on the Slow Horses’ team is in danger. This time it’s Lamb’s keeper, Standish. After leaving an AA meeting to further help a new attendee, she is soon taken hostage. It’s revealed in the very next episode though that Standish’s kidnap was part of a planned pen test of MI5 that they clearly failed. The first desk, Ingrid Tearney contemplates putting in her resignation when more complications arise.
It turns out the team hired to do the pen test have other plans for their hostage. They aren’t necessarily fatal ones, but Lamb and the rest of Slow Horses aren’t willing to take that chance. Lamb works through anyone that can help him and deposits the rest, while River gets sucked into the kidnapper’s plans. He’s also a part of Tearney’s master plan, which essentially kills two birds with one stone. See, the kidnappers are after some sensitive documents that were about to get leaked that would tarnish MI5, and more specifically the First Desk and Home Secretary of the organization.
I liked that this season poked at corruption within MI5. I’m sure it exists there as well as in the FBI or CIA. As an outsider, sometimes it’s hard to put your trust in those places to be pure-intentioned all of the time, and in a fictional setting it’s neat to see those thoughts play out. As always, the Slow Horses are scrappy and make me think I’m looking at the average Joe’s of MI5, though they’ll always be infinitely more skilled than almost anyone on the street. As much as they’re all trying to get back in MI5’s good graces, they seem to be getting plenty of attention and action in the field.
What continues to shock me about this show is how willing they are to put their main character’s lives on the line. It’s a toss-up if they will live or die and that makes the stakes really nail-biting. With a big enough break, I guess, I was able to really appreciate that about this show this time around. I think Gary Oldman found himself a really neat gig and I hope this show keeps quietly getting renewed until they’ve run out of source material to work with. Fingers crossed!