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This is a new Slow Horses: season six is the first not to be guided by its creator, Will Smith, a writer whose previous work on The Thick of It and Veep explained why this espionage saga had an unusually sharp comic tongue. The absence of Smith’s drollery is discernible in a more straight-faced new story, but the bigger problem is one of a creative work naturally eroding over time. Slow Horses is now old.
It’s always been a difficult, delicate proposition. The staff of Slough House, a purgatorial spin-off of MI5 where misfits and screw-ups are given boring work when it would make more sense to just fire them, regularly outstrip supposedly elite spies despite being shambling losers. Leading the field agents is River Cartwright (Jack Lowden), who has the good looks of a spy hero and some of the skills, but is also a brittle, luckless and rather whiny wretch, who regularly has to be saved from ignominious death. The jokes have helped us suspend our disbelief that River and the rest haven’t yet been riddled with bullets, and the relocation of traditional spy thrills to decaying urban settings is still a tonic, but enjoying this conjuring trick gets harder every year.
The crisis descended in season five, Smith’s last, with a flat story powered by generic terrorists delivering blowback for British crimes abroad. Slow Horses also began to suffer from the curse of the celebrated supporting character: when you know you have failsafe comic relief in your cast, the temptation to promote them can be irresistible, but they don’t always survive the exposure. That happened to showboating virgin Roddy Ho (Christopher Chung), who had previously snarked from in front of his computer but was now given a pivotal role, in which he soon became unbearable. Even the star of the show Gary Oldman might have been better staying in the background as the physically disgusting but intellectually unbeatable Slough House boss, Jackson Lamb: he’s a brilliantly conceived and perfectly performed cartoon, but in season five he started to burn out.
So, new lead writer Gaby Chiappe – who did The Level and The Beast Must Die, two lean and underrated dramas – is pushing buttons on a desk that has several red lights blinking. She responds by making the new Slow Horses more of a conventional thriller, with complex geopolitical machinations almost entirely on mute; for the Slough House mob themselves, old friends unexpectedly reappear.
Someone is bumping off past team members, which at first means a cruelly brief comeback for Struan Loy (Paul Higgins), who meets a horrible end in the typically desolate Slow Horses milieu of a shipping container parked on a dull expanse of estuary mud. When it becomes clear that the two frighteningly confident, black-clad killers – played by MyAnna Buring and Kyle Soller – are not going to be satisfied with slaughtering spooks from season one whom we barely remember, the whole gang ends up on the run.
As well as the re-emergence of a more important character from long ago, recent apparent departures are reversed: Rosalind Eleazar is back as Louisa, Joanna Scanlan is back as Moira, and Hugo Weaving is back as Frank, the bleakly amoral mercenary who is also, a bit implausibly, River’s dad, and whose narrative seemed to have played out perfectly well back in season four. None of them makes an unwelcome return, but cycling back to familiar faces does feel like something that might be done by a show that finds itself short of ideas.
The main issue, though, is the plot, which boils down to a long chase. The killers keep coming and the slow horses, mainly River, chaotically run away – which often requires the murderers to suddenly become incompetent in order for the story not to end prematurely. With the vicious banter not quite as piercing as it used to be and the parallels to real political issues also not as piquant – besides some stuff about Russia – it becomes more noticeable when tropes like trained killers who can’t shoot straight creep in. Having cast actors of the calibre of Buring and Soller to play the new foes, the show inexplicably never gets round to getting to know them. Also struggling to make an impact is Harry Lloyd, who looks as if he could be superb as a malevolent media mogul who is blackmailing MI5 boss Diana Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas), but who never gets a proper chance to show us.
Slow Horses is still slick and confident enough, and it helps itself by casting Lenny Rush, an actor who immediately improves anything he’s in, as a civilian caught in this year’s crossfire. But it might have run its course.
