Slow Horses Season 6 is the latest round of the Apple TV+ spy saga about the screw-ups of Slough House, a purgatorial spin-off of MI5, who are hunted this time by two black-clad killers wiping out past team members. If you enjoy dry British humor, shabby urban settings and a spy story that treats its heroes like losers, you may still find enough here. If you want sharp action, real tension or a show that still has something to say, you won’t.
Season six is the first not guided by Will Smith, the writer from The Thick of It and Veep whose drollery gave this series its sharp comic tongue. The straight-faced new story shows his absence, but the bigger problem is simpler: Slow Horses is old. For me, it took a wrong turn a long time ago, and I honestly don’t know why we keep getting new seasons.
Plot. Someone is bumping off former team members, which starts with a cruelly brief return for Struan Loy (Paul Higgins), who meets a horrible end in a shipping container on a dull expanse of estuary mud. When it becomes clear that the killers, played by MyAnna Buring and Kyle Soller, won’t stop at spooks from season one we barely remember, the whole gang ends up on the run. That’s the entire story: a long chase. The killers keep coming, River and the rest keep running, and the murderers have to turn incompetent at convenient moments so the story doesn’t end early. Trained killers who can’t shoot straight are a trope I expect from a lazy B-movie, not from a prestige thriller.
Acting. Jack Lowden’s River Cartwright has the looks of a spy hero and some of the skills, but he’s also brittle, luckless and whiny, a wretch who must regularly be saved from an ignominious death. The jokes used to help me forgive that. They don’t anymore.
Then there’s Gary Oldman. I was never a fan, and Jackson Lamb is the reason I wasn’t wrong. The physically disgusting, intellectually unbeatable boss is a terrible character you simply can’t enjoy, and by season five he had started to burn out. Others call him a brilliantly conceived cartoon. I call him a cartoon I’m tired of watching. Oldman is the star, and he’s the show’s biggest obstacle.
The supporting cast doesn’t solve it. Christopher Chung’s Roddy Ho went from snarky comic relief to a pivotal role, where he became unbearable. Rosalind Eleazar, Joanna Scanlan and Hugo Weaving all return as Louisa, Moira and Frank, the bleakly amoral mercenary who is, a bit implausibly, River’s dad. Nobody’s return is unwelcome, but cycling back through familiar faces is what a show does when it’s short of ideas. The real waste is in the new faces.
Buring and Soller are actors of real calibre, and the show never bothers to get to know them. Harry Lloyd looks like he could be superb as a malevolent media mogul blackmailing MI5 boss Diana Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas), but he never gets a proper chance. Lenny Rush, a civilian caught in the crossfire, immediately improves everything he’s in.
Directing and writing. New lead writer Gaby Chiappe, of The Level and The Beast Must Die, inherits a desk with several red lights blinking. She turns the show into a more conventional thriller and mutes the complex geopolitical machinations almost entirely. The vicious banter isn’t as piercing, and the real political parallels aren’t as sharp, apart from some material about Russia. Without the humor and the satire, you’re left with the bones, and the bones are thin.
Stunts and fight choreography. There is nothing here that elevates the action. The chase is the show’s engine, but it runs on contrivance and doesn’t produce thrills. When the danger depends on killers missing on purpose, I stop worrying about anyone’s survival.
What failed and why. The direction. The show lost its way a long time ago, and the tricks that carried it, the comic relief, the cartoonish boss, the loser heroes who beat the elite, now feel like a formula. Season five’s flat story about generic terrorists was the warning, and season six doesn’t fix it. It repeats it with a longer chase.
Best moments. Lenny Rush’s every scene, the bleak, desolate settings that still give spy thrillers a welcome decaying-urban look, and Kristin Scott Thomas, who is still a tonic.
Impact. Slow Horses is still slick and confident enough on the surface. But the series feels like it has run its course, and I can’t tell you why it keeps coming back. A show that once felt fresh is now going through the motions.
Verdict. A long chase, a lazy script and an Oldman I just couldn’t enjoy. This one never earned the punch.
