THESE DAYS, THE cycle of prestige television has started to feel akin to the pace of blockbuster movie franchises. Across a number of networks and streamers, it’s now common for multiple years to pass between new seasons of big-budget, critically-acclaimed shows such as Stranger Things, Severance, and House of the Dragon. Which is why there’s something equally impressive and comforting about the consistency of Apple TV+’s Slow Horses, a lean, reliable, and expertly-crafted spy series that feels like a throwback considering the production’s quality, efficiency, and week-by-week rollout.
Based on Mick Herron’s book series, Slow Horses follows a ragtag group of disgraced MI5 agents who have been kicked out of Regent’s Park and shipped to Slough House to pursue the agency’s menial tasks. In charge of this inconspicuous department is Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman), a former Cold War field spy with a foul mouth and even dirtier apartment whose cynical worldview and black humor masks his sharp instincts and wise leadership.
Slow Horses (Deluxe Edition) (Slough House)
Over three seasons, he’s leaned on his unheralded expertise and a mostly unreliable team (led by River Cartwright, played by Jack Lowden) to thwart high-profile hostage crises, uncover KGB conspiracies, and expose even bigger secrets within the British government. Along with its strong cast, detailed writing, and underdog spirit, each season of Slow Horses has seized on a variety of relevant and real-world stakes, ranging from white nationalism, government overreach, and international politics. But those ominous backdrops don’t overshadow its biggest pleasures: Oldman’s caustic humor (and his commitment to looking as greasy and disheveled as possible), twisty narratives, and compelling action sequences that turn London into a foggy and mysterious playground.
With season 4 rolling onto the streamer this week, it’s a great time to brush up (or familiarize yourself) on what previously happened on the show. So here’s a refresher of Slow Horses and all the hijinks and happenings that have taken place between MI:5’s forgotten spooks.
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To understand what it takes to be demoted from MI5 to Slough House, all you need to do is watch the show’s opening sequence, when River botches a training simulation at Stansted Airport and fails to apprehend a suicide bomber, theoretically killing hundreds of people. As a result, he’s relegated to dull, pedantic paper pushing and trash picking, tasks that conceivably prevent him from making the same grave mistakes. It’s an embarrassing blemish, especially considering the pristine reputation of River’s grandfather, David (Jonathan Pryce), a former MI5 agent whose advice River frequently solicits.
In any case, it’s taken River some time to ingratiate himself with his other rejects, which most prominently include field agent Sid (Olivia Cooke), Louisa (Rosalidn Eleazar), Min (Dustin Demri-Burns), tech specialist Roddy (Christopher Chung), and veteran administrator Catherine (Saskia Reeves), a recovering alcoholic who shares a history with Lamb. The Slough House leader, one of the more crotchety government leaders in television history, has assigned River to sift through the trash of Robert Hobden, a right-wing freelance journalist whom the government believes has valuable information. As Sid runs surveillance on him and procures a useless USB stick, the team discovers that Hassan Ahmed (Antonio Askeel), a Leeds University student, has been kidnapped and held hostage by the Sons of Albion, a far-right group, which promises to execute him the next day.
As the Sons—made up of Larry, Curly, Mo, and Zeppo—hold Hassan inside a London basement, Lamb starts to grow suspicious about why Diana Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas), MI5’s second in command, has assigned Slough House a mission with a former white nationalist. It seems too coincidental. Those suspicions come into relief when Cartright finds iron oxide in Hobden’s trash, a sign he’s been using the chemical to destroy hard discs. Their continued surveillance ultimately leads to Sid getting killed by a masked attacker (aiming to kill Hobden), before Min and Louisa accidentally knock him down the stairs and kill him at Slough House, revealing him to be one of their colleagues.
Lamb quickly intervenes. He arranges a meeting with Taverner and learns that she has staged the kidnapping to neutralize all the nationalist groups and curry favor with Pakistan by rescuing Hassan, a nephew of one of the country’s military leaders. The only problem? Curly has beheaded Mo, Taverner’s double agent. Upon learning about the mess, Ingrid (Sophie Okenedo), director of the service, instructs Taverner to shut the operation down and terminate the Horses. The only chance for the group’s survival is to split up and collect the incriminating evidence on Taverner and threaten to leak it.
Everything comes to a head when the Sons begin infighting. This leads to a shootout between Curly and River outside the city that ends when Hassan knocks out Curly with a rock, allowing government agents to apprehend him. In London, Hobden remains ready to expose MI5’s staged kidnapping until Nick Duffy (Chris Reilly), an MI5 enforcer, discreetly pushes him in front of a double-decker bus and kills him. It’s a morbid way to close the season, which briefly reveals one of the show’s ongoing and mysterious storylines: Lamb, in a flashback, is revealed to have killed Charles Partner, MI5’s former Director-General and a close friend to Catherine, despite the widespread assumption he committed suicide. Only David knows his secret.
Season 2
A new season, a new case to solve. This one starts with another set piece, in which a former field agent named Dickie recognizes an older bald man (Marek Vašut) as his torturer years earlier during the Cold War. So he follows him onto a bus, but Dicky’s pursuit ends when he begins to have heart complications and dies. Luckily, he leaves a note on his phone, which is wedged into a bus seat and discovered by Lamb as he snoops around the crime scene. The message? “Cicada,” the name of a group of Russian sleeper agents thought to be embedded in British society.
When Roddy uploads the surveillance footage of Dickie’s heart attack, the Slough House agents recognize that the bald man likely poisoned him. Later, during a chat with David, River learns that nobody in the agency believed that cicada (or its alleged mastermind, Alexander Popov) was real, but Lamb learns otherwise from Nikolai Katinsky (Rade Serbedzija), an ex-KGB defector who claims to have overheard Popov telling someone that the cicada program existed after the Soviet Union’s fall. The description of the man Popov spoke with, Andrei Chernitsky, matches Dickie’s bald killer, so River chases his whereabouts down to a flying club in Upshot.
At the end of last season, Min and Louisa developed feelings for each other. Now they’ve engaged in the beginnings of a relationship. Their awkward romance gets tested when they take on a job guarding MI5 agent James Webb (Freddie Fox) during a meeting with a man named Pashkin (Alex Utgoff), a representative of Alexander Nevsky, a Russian oligarch with ambitions to be president. After Min tails Pashkin’s guards, however, they eventually run him over and kill him with Chernitsky, staging his death as a bike accident. Lamb visits Katinsky to see if he might have information, but he reveals that the KGB had instructed him to keep Lamb preoccupied with himself and Dickie.
Lamb and Shirley (Aimée-Ffion Edwards), a new addition to the Horses, trail Nevsky at his house, but soon find him dead from radiation injection. Still promising to avenge Min, Lamb tells Louisa to team with Marcus (Kadiff Kirwan), her new partner, and attend the meeting between Pashkin and Webb at an office called the Glasshouse. Meanwhile, in Upshot and undercover, River learns that his host family is actually in cahoots with Chernitsky and Katinsky, and is attempting to bomb the Glasshouse using a plane. Accordingly, River calls Taverner to issue a “Code September,” an alert for an air attack. But the plane is a ruse (and eventually diverted), a chance for Pashkin to shut down the building so he and the Russian government can steal from Nevsky’s accounts.
At the same time, Lamb learns Katinsky is actually Popov, who traded resources with the Russian government in exchange for learning who killed Charles Partner, a Russian double agent all along. As Marcus chases Pashkin to a rooftop and shoots him down in front of Louisa, Katinsky orders Chernitsky to kill David (the only other person aware of Charles’s death) at his home—but David is ready and kills him outside his doorstep. Upon hearing the news, Popov concedes defeat and shoots himself.
Season 3
Like the previous two seasons, the third begins with another intriguing (and briefly romantic) setup. Sean (Sope Dirisu) and Allison (Katherine Waterston), cozy in bed in Istanbul, lounge through the morning together and seem to be in love. But the moment she leaves to shower, Sean begins rifling through some files to find something called “The Footprint,” which he believes she’s trying to leak. When Allison catches him, he confesses he’s a spy, forcing Allison to kick him out and meet a contact to hand off the file. Sean secretly pursues her by boat, then by car, to a stadium where her associate grabs the file and pushes her over a barricade to her death.
A year later, Sean attends an AA meeting led by Catherine. After convincing her to speak with him alone, he abducts her with a couple of accomplices. It takes a while for Slough House to realize she’s gone, until River receives a text with a photo of her gagged at gunpoint. He soon finds that he and Webb have each been targeted by the kidnappers’s to break into MI5 headquarters and steal the prime minister’s vetting files. Always two steps ahead, Lamb believes the kidnappers are bluffing and tells River to stand down until he can get more information.
In actuality, Webb reveals that after being fired by MI5, he’s become the leader of the Chieftain Tiger team (a private security firm hired by the Home Secretary to expose MI5’s weaknesses) which helped Sean kidnap Catherine, humiliating River and Louisa. But when he realizes Sean is still holding Catherine hostage, the Chieftain’s director assigns Webb to offer Sean his bonus money in exchange for letting her go. Sean rejects the offer. He only wants access to MI5’s gray books, which have records of all the government’s conspiracy theories over the last century, and eventually slams Webb’s head against his SUV, a blow that ends up killing him.
As Sean and his kidnapping crew go over their next plans, Catherine offers to help, disillusioned by the government’s deceitful history and familiar with the storage facility where the gray books are located. As Lamb goes over Catherine’s hostage photos, he recognizes that Sean has teamed up with Allison’s siblings to avenge her death, and soon discovers their location. As this takes place, River and Louisa (at Ingrid’s behest) escort Sean and his accomplice Ben to the gray book storage facility—but Sean deceives them and begins searching for the footprint file. We soon discover that Ingrid has been responsible for covering up Allison’s death as a suicide, and, wary of being discovered, orders Duffy to round up a team, head to the storage facility, and kill everyone.
This leads to a large military shootout inside the facility, where Marcus and Shirley pick off soldiers to assist River and Louisa escaping. But it’s too late for Sean and Ben, who locate the footprint file before getting shot, requesting that the pair of Horses leak the file once they return home. After Lamb breaks Catherine free, he finally tells her the real story about Partner, sending her into a fit of rage and confusion; she quits on the spot. After reading the footprint file (which discloses Ingrid’s operation to hack encrypted computers with an untested and malfunctioning device that ultimately killed Korean embassy workers), River decides to leak it, exposing the government’s culpability. The news finally pushes Taverner to her ultimate goal: head of MI5.
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