TV’s greatest spy returns as ‘Slow Horses’ celebrates its explosive fourth season premiere – review

One could say that Jackson Lamb is the hero that television needs right now, but not the one it deserves – to use the words of Commissioner Gordon – also played by the unique talent Gary Oldman – in The Dark Knight when he talked about Batman.

Lamb is, of course, a very different hero than Bruce Wayne, although both men share some characteristics. Both Lamb and Wayne are constantly pretending. Wayne pretends to be a rich, carefree billionaire and playboy while secretly saving Gotham from all manner of evil. Lamb hides his genius behind a facade of alcohol, sweat, and junk food, and pretends not to care about the men and women he works with while fighting fiercely to protect them from all manner of danger.

Maybe they are not so different after all. Lamb and his Slough House crew are back today for the premiere of the fourth season of Slow horses, one of the best TV shows of recent years. Oldman is as grotesque as ever. I swear you can smell him through the screen. He’s just as funny and just as clever.

Spoilers follow.

Slow horses picks up shortly after the action-packed events of season three and gets going right away. A terrorist attack at a mall leaves numerous people dead and appears to be the work not of foreign radicals but of a domestic group, although they don’t appear to be white nationalists as we saw in an earlier season.

The first explosion is followed by a second tragedy, which I had already foreseen: When the police and forensic team enter the suicide bomber’s apartment, they empty everything except the windows. When one of the forensic team tries to open the blinds, he triggers the booby trap, which blows the apartment into a thousand pieces and leaves even more dead.

All this is met with a grim resignation from Diana Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas), who remains the capable head of MI5, even if she is not yet the first desk clerk. That honor has been bestowed on Claude Whelan (Battlestar Galactica James Callis). He does not take these events calmly.

Elsewhere, the “outcasts” at Slough House mostly fool around, making bets on how long they can endure waterboarding torture – Shirley Dander (Aimee-Ffion Edwards) lasts just seven seconds and Marcus Longridge (Kadiff Kirwan) wins – being tricked into going to fake Christmas parties that only Roddy Ho (Christopher Chung) is gullible enough to fall for, and tiptoeing around their newest member, JK Coe (Tom Brooke), who barely speaks and is constantly angry and agitated. I’m not sure what his story is yet, but I suspect we’ll find out soon enough.

However, River Cartwright (Jack Lowden) has a problem that he brings to Louisa Guy (Rosalind Eleazar). His grandfather, David Cartwright (Jonathan Pryce), is losing his mind due to dementia, he tells her, and he doesn’t know what to do. Louisa tells him that he needs to pull himself together and take care of his grandfather, who raised him and cared for him his whole life. Go see him tonight, she says, and River does that, and then David shoots him with his shotgun in the bathtub.

Or at least that’s what the show wants you to think — sort of — and definitely that’s what River and Jackson Lamb want the rest of the world to think. Lamb shows up to identify the body. “That’s Cartwright,” he says. The big mystery throughout — before the shooting and after — is that the camera never actually shows us who David shot. That might have worked to portray David’s mental state and keep us guessing, but the same trick is used when Lamb shows up (though the face has also been shot, obviously post-mortem) to obscure who actually died.

Lamb confirms it’s Cartwright in the most nonchalant way imaginable – much to the dismay of brand new MI5 security chief Emma Flyte (Ruth Bradley). Even for a character so determined to make everyone believe he doesn’t care, I suspect his reaction wouldn’t have been quite so perfunctory if he’d really found Cartwright dead in his grandfather’s bathtub. I had a moment where I wondered – after all, Olivia Cooke was killed off so early in this series, who’s to say Lowden isn’t looking for another job, like playing Sauron in The Rings of Power? – but as soon as Lamb showed up, I was convinced River was alive.

Lamb, who is as clever as he is smelly, goes straight to Catherine Standish’s (Saskia Reeves) apartment, where he tells her the sad news and gauges her reaction. After playing with her for a few minutes, he reveals to her that he knows she knows River isn’t dead and that David is hiding in her bedroom. She denies it, but he goes in and sure enough, there’s the old man, taking a nap. “Where’s River?” he asks.

At this point, we see River in France, following up on leads as to who exactly it was that posed as him and sneaked into his grandfather’s house, almost certainly with the intention of killing him and making it look like an accident (death by falling asleep in the bathtub). It seems that River showed up shortly after and switched his car with his grandfather’s, took him to Standish to keep him safe since he couldn’t trust him to the police, and faked his own death to buy himself time to investigate on his own. Lamb, being the reliable guy he is, must have suspected all of this at the crime scene and decided to cover for River on the spot.

For the ruse to work, not only MI5 but also Slough House needs to be convinced of River’s death, at least for a few days, so he sends a text message to Ho (of all people) to share the news. The office takes it pretty badly, but not as badly as Louisa, who blames herself. As relieved as she will no doubt be when River turns up alive and well, she is also sure to be furious.

All in all, this was another great premiere for Slow horses which remains one of the best TV shows right now and another hit for Apple TV, which has many of my favorite shows. Last night I watched three brand new episodes of three different shows on Apple TV and each one was excellent. (In addition to Slow horses, both Evil Monkey And Sunny are still airing and both are fantastic).

What do you think about the season 4 premiere? Let me know on ÞjórsárdalurInstagram or Facebook. Also, be sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel and follow me here on this blog. Sign up for my newsletter for more reviews and commentary on entertainment and culture.