No one-trick ponies, these spooks

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This article was published 31/08/2024 (603 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In this era of peak streaming, viewers sometimes approach the new season of a much-loved show not with anticipation but with apprehension. They fear the dreaded drop-off that has marked series like Westworld, The Handmaid’s Tale and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.

That kind of dispiriting decline usually happens when a “limited series” becomes not so limited and just goes on and on and on, leaving behind its sense of narrative necessity and devolving into rote repetition or muddled mess.

Mercifully, fans of Slow Horses, which has a fourth season starting next week on Apple TV+, can relax. This is a series that deepens rather than dilutes, expands rather than exhausts. Part bone-crunching spy thriller, part hapless office comedy, part ruthless social commentary, Slow Horses continues to be one of the best things going.

One of the reasons the show avoids aimless narrative bloat is that each season is a super-condensed six-episode adaptation of a novel by much-awarded British writer Mick Herron. This season brings us 2017’s Spook Street, the fourth book centred on Slough House, the mouldering, out-of-the-way London office building that holds MI5’s losers and castoffs. Because of this crackerjack source material, SH4 is able to add to the bleakly cynical, mordantly funny world that’s been built up in the preceding seasons while also functioning as an effective, urgent standalone spy story.

SH4 starts with a deadly car-bomb attack at a London shopping centre. As the people at Regent’s Park, MI5’s shiny official headquarters, try to figure out whether this is a “one-off or the start of something,” River Cartwright (Jack Lowden), onetime MI5 golden boy who’s been unfairly exiled to Slough House, is drawn into a plot that involves not just the murky moral history of the British intelligence services but his own family past.

This fourth season also works by being a deft combo of familiar and the fresh. Slow Horses fans will know that the door to Slough House still sticks, that its desks are still covered with old takeaway food containers and cups of stewed tea. We’ll expect the boss, Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman), to be just as greasy and grimy and grunting and farting as ever. (Possibly more so.)

We’ll recognize the dysfunctional family dynamics, Lamb’s vicious putdowns of his underlings — his so-called “slow horses” — during their endlessly dull workdays matched only by his sneaking loyalty to them when things go dangerously sideways. There’s also Lamb’s adversarial but oddly amiable relationship with MI5’s Second Desk, Diana Taverner (“Lady Di” behind her back), played with terrifying crispness by Kristin Scott Thomas.

Meanwhile, there are some new situations and characters, an organic result of Slough House’s constant turnover. Each season we lose people. Even though the slow horses are assigned nothing but pointless, purgatorial desk work, they have a knack for getting accidentally embroiled in lethal field operations. Over the past seasons, the death rate has been surprisingly high.

And there are always more people arriving at Slough House, there being no shortage of spies with addiction issues, anger-management problems, debilitating PTSD or just inconvenient or embarrassing knowledge.

This season, along with two new slow horses, the silent JK Coe (Tom Brooke) and the chipper Moira Tregorian (Joanne Scanlan), there’s a new top bureaucrat at Regent’s Park, Claude Whelan (James Callis). His brief is to “activate accountability and accessibility” in the intelligence services, a lofty democratic ideal that lasts only until it’s his backside that needs covering. Claude also wants to be liked by his subordinates (absolutely fatal, of course, in this environment).

And there’s a new antagonist, a onetime U.S. agent played by Hugo Weaving in a performance combining coiled malevolence with a sharp sliver of comic relief.

The series has always had an unusual knack for mixing nasty satire with genuine emotional heft, and neither of these approaches lets up for Season 4. There’s an unbearably poignant subplot involving River’s grandfather, David Cartwright (Jonathan Pryce, doing just tremendous work), a onetime MI5 higher-up who is now becoming lost in dementia, which not only causes deep pain for him and the people around him but also makes him a national security risk.

Meanwhile, Herron’s hatred of the English establishment is more pointy and implacable than ever. Presumably the men and women of MI5 spend some time protecting the Great British Public, but in Herron’s ongoing depiction of institutional complacency and corruption, most of their efforts go into territorial scraps with other government services or sniping professional sabotage among their own ranks.

Still, as hilariously dark as Slow Horses can be, it’s never without a raggedy sort of hope, and the show continues to advance Herron’s loser-centric espionage counter-narrative.

If a society’s top people are all slick, self-serving sociopaths, then to be a failure has a kind of nobility. If you’re looking for decency, loyalty, small acts of courage and kindness, you’ll find them in the screwups and rejects of Slough House, who in another terrific Slow Horses season, continue to stumble and fumble their way towards true heroism.

And Season 5, thankfully, is already underway.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca