A slow burn of a spy thriller (following on from a high octane opening few minutes), the Slow Horses team find themselves the fall guys for an operation that has gone badly wrong.
Left a top secret file on the train? Failed miserably in a training exercise? Then it’s off to Slough House, the MI5 dumping ground for losers, headed by the do nothing mantra of a gone-to-seed super spy, Jackson Lamb (a magnificent Gary Oldman). It’s a career ending hell hole. But for River Cartwright (Jack Lowden) – the training exercise failure – such a posting cannot be. He’s the grandson of legendary operative, David Cartwright (Jonathan Pryce). So when a young British-Asian male (Antonio Aakeel) is abducted in Leeds by right-wing thugs and threatened with beheading, Cartwright sees it as an opportunity to beat the devil and claw his way out of hell.
But nothing is as it seems and, over a riveting six episodes, politicians, spy masters, journalists and more become embroiled in a messy operation as Diane Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas), the calculating acting head of the intelligence service with an agenda of her own, tries to navigate her team through the uncertainty. But that support in no way includes the slovenly and sarcastic Lamb and his Slow Horses. It’s the Lamb/Taverner animosity towards each other and the tension created that underpins this superior drama: the hostage crisis seems almost secondary.
Adapted from the Slough House series of novels by Mick Herron, there’s certainly more to come!
Rating: 82%
An Opinion or Two 