Right off the top, let’s give a salute to Alex, our surprise cicada from Upshott, for knowing how to tie a really strong knot. Because when Alex tasers River and leaves him in the office of the family runway strip, it initially seems like the old action trope where the villain does shoddy binding work and our hero breaks free just in time to save the day. A version of that does happen here — though is there any reason why River is allowed to live? — but no matter how much squirming and scraping he does with those ropes, River cannot MacGyver his way out of them. He still requires Alex’s now-innocent husband Duncan and daughter Kelly to free him, all while Alex’s bomb-freighted Cessna approaches London at the approximate speed of Sideshow Bob attempting a kamikaze mission in the Wright Brothers plane on The Simpsons.
As Slow Horses careens toward its season finale next week, it’s leaning on another classic action trope: A bomb about to go off. In fact, you could call the whole season 24 (Minus 18), in that it does the business of the Kiefer Sutherland hit series in six tight hours without the additional burden of limiting the action to a single day. The tension here is so rudimentary that it’s almost insulting, an East-versus-West post–Cold War showdown where the good guys have to stop the bad guys from blowing up a building before hundreds — or possibly thousands — of people die. This isn’t the stuff of one of John le Carré’s stories, where George Smiley, played by Gary Oldman in the 2011 Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, has to sort through subtler forms of treachery. This is “Code September.” As in 9/11: Part II.
Yet Slow Horses does this simple thing in a typically sophisticated way. There are questions that need to be sorted out about the “cicada” program, how it’s structured at the top, and what its connection might be to other Russia-related events happening in London. For Lamb, it starts with doing justice by his own people, however much he blasts them with contempt and hot gas whenever he’s in their presence. In the early going, he manipulates an MI5 “Dog” into giving him access to the Park’s records room by ridiculing the pathetic investigation into the bike accident that reportedly killed Min: “If you’d done more than scratch the surface,” says Lamb, “you’d have found a connection between the driver and two Russian goons who couldn’t more suspicious if they had scars running down their cheeks and glass fucking eyes.” The records keeper recognizes him from his time at Park (“The years have not been kind to you”), and he’s come to get a closer look at Nikolai Katinsky, the “shambling loser” at the language school that he’d clearly underestimated. Who signed off on his defection papers anyway?
Turns out the answer is a guy named Jackson Lamb, though it appears a traitor within MI5 was actually responsible. No sooner than finding out that Katinsky is the guy behind the guy in this whole operation — and connected to Pashkin, which explains why Lamb and Slough House were roped into it — the “Code September” alert filters from a newly freed River to Taverner to the authorities everywhere, and Lamb has to respond, not least because he has two of his people in a boardroom on the 47th floor of Glasshouse, the intended target. (Does this discourage him from issuing one of his trademark sardonic one-liners? It does not: “Fucking paperwork’s gonna be a ball ache.”)
I had assumed last week that Nevsky’s murder would have scuttled the big meeting between Pashkin and Webb, but it still happens, with seemingly everyone other than Webb understanding that the conditions had changed significantly. Louisa and Marcus go through their security protocol, patting down Pashkin and his two goons and picking through Pashkin’s briefcase — not realizing that Pashkin is pulling a switcheroo with an identical briefcase in his trunk. (In plain sight, too! Not the most thorough work on Slough House’s part.) Fortunately, Louisa and Marcus have a contingency plan in the form of a gun taped under the table. The whole scene is like Die Hard in miniature: The modern high-rise building under terrorist attack, the taped gun, and Webb acting like Harry Ellis, the slickster who wants to negotiate with the bad guys but winds up endangering others and getting himself killed.
There’s vanishingly little nuance in the politics of this attack, which really is like a mini-9/11 attempted by an older set of enemies. As Katinsky tells the bound-up River, who worries about the protesters in the march near Glasshouse, “They are my brothers and sisters in the fight against capitalism.” Never mind that it’s been decades since that fight has been active — Alex, our Tasering cicada, has used the time to raise a daughter into what looks like her late 20s or early 30s — and the diplomatic landscape has changed quite a bit in that stretch. It almost seems like the “cicada” program is equivalent to Fail Safe (or Dr. Strangelove) — a mission that can’t be called back even when nobody wants it to happen. There isn’t much thought given to the protest, either, an event featuring such scintillating signs as “Judd’s a Dud,” which probably won’t be enough to scuttle Peter Judd’s ambitions to be prime minister.
Still, the stakes couldn’t be higher for a finale, where the least-shifty resident of a quaint countryside village is puttering toward a London high rise with a bomb-filled Cessna, Pashkin and Katinsky and Chernitsky are running free, and River can finally get out of the fake-journalist game and back to his actual occupation, for which he’s slightly more plausible. Will he finally redeem himself in Taverner’s eyes and become the high-functioning nepo baby MI5 needs? Stay tuned …
Shots
• Some nice chilliness between Taverner and Judd during his escort to give a speech near the protestors. “I’m sorry I made you wait,” says Judd, “but I was busy making you wait.” Once Judd dangles the possibility of a first desk position for Taverner if she can help him finagle his way to 10 Downing Street, however, the conversation gets a little easier.
• Hilarious bit where Webb has to explain to Pashkin what a “meet-cute” is when the Russian fails to get the reference: “A meet-cute a term for a moment in television and film when the people who will go on to form a romantic attachment meet for the first time.”
• Standish using the queen sacrifice to trick her overconfident opponent in chess is perfectly in character for an office administrator who’s probably the best spy in Slough House.
• “Duncan, I’m sorry. Forgive me. I love you, Alex.” I’m going to guess that it will take some time for Duncan to forgive his wife for being a Russian sleeper agent who’s used their marriage as a cover for executing the British 9/11. But love is a strange and irreducible thing.
