Who knew I’d breeze through three seasons of Slow Horses in 2024 after almost completely writing if off after watching the first season back in 2022? Not me. But I’m glad I gave this series another shot because it has been an absolute delight!
The show keeps ticking down Mick Herron’s list of novels following these characters, so this most recent season is named after the fourth book, Spook Street. It starts with River going to visit his grandfather, who is becoming more and more untethered from reality as he deals with dementia. Because of this, his shoots River dead thinking he’s an intruder. This happens in the first episode of the season! But, hate to ruin the fun so quickly, it was in fact, not actually River. Just someone who looked creepily like him. At the end of the first episode, Lamb finds River’s grandfather safely hidden, for now, at Standish’s and learns that River has headed to France to learn who was sent to kill his grandfather.
This personal attack is done in tandem with a bomb going off in Westacres and MI5 soon learns that they are in deep doo-doo if anyone were to learn how these two events are connected. Taverner remains at Second Desk, but is playing the rather unqualified First Desk like a fiddle. That means that she gets a lot of old documents destroyed related to some old covers that they’ve had active for quite some time. Turns out the bomber had been using one of these fake identities meant for MI5’s Joes. After a moment of clarity, River’s grandfather reveals that this death squad got access to all of this MI5 stuff from him way back in the day so he was able to get his daughter back. It sounded like a crazy cult where it’s leader, a man named Frank Harkness, fathered children with multiple women, who he would raise from birth to be the perfect killers. Yikes.
Now that the Slow Horses have several assassins after them, MI5 complicates matters further by having them pursued by the Dogs with a shoot to kill order on River. Emma Flyte, the new head of the Dogs, finds her allegiance to First and Second Desk wavering when she realizes there might be more to the story than she was given. It’s not much, but it does help River buy some time and confront his father, Frank Harkness. I couldn’t believe it! The fake kill in the first episode and this moment both had my mouth fall open in surprise. It was also at this moment where I finally realized Hugo Weaving was playing Harkness. So cool. He tries and fails to recruit River to his “cause,” and in the end almost kills River to escape. He gets caught in the end, but he has a pretty solid failsafe in order to negotiate his release.
It’s not ever clear, to me at least, if he did get released, so maybe that’s something that gets tied up next season. Oh yeah, this show’s got at least two more seasons ahead, and I personally cannot wait for them! The first three seasons were released at a pretty steady clip so I hope we don’t have to wait as long as we did for this fourth season. Of course, the season wasn’t all rainbows and butterflies. A new Slow Horse, Coe, is in residence at Slough House. He didn’t provide much this season, though the moments he did have were memorable. I assume he’ll play a bigger role in future seasons. Marcus was also collateral damage this season. This grit and quick wit of this show are so fun and it reminds me that I want to keep reading the novels! Please check out this Golden Globe nominated series, I promise you won’t regret it.