Cloak-and-dagger delinquents continue to deliver

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This article was published 03/12/2022 (1406 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Slough House screw-ups are back as Season 2 of the alt-espionage series Slow Horses gets underway, now with even more screwing up. (On Apple TV+, with new episodes dropping Fridays.)

Based on Mick Herron’s smart, funny, failure-centric British espionage novels, Slow Horses isn’t about cool, competent super-spies. It introduces us to the misfits, the alcoholics, the burnouts and the barely socialized IT guys that MI5 rejects. These so-called “slow horses” get warehoused at Slough House, along with mice and mildew, obsolete computers and old takeaway containers, under the jaundiced eye of Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman), a once legendary field agent.

Fans of the first season will be happy to know the Slough House door still sticks. Lamb is still foulmouthed, flatulent and defiantly unlaundered. (“It’s possible I’ve let myself go,” he says, with some complacency.) Roddy Ho (Christopher Chung) is still hacking into MI5 computers and alienating his officemates. Min Harper and Louisa Guy (Dustin Demri-Burns and Rosalind Eleazar) are still involved in their not-so-secret love affair. Catherine Standish (Saskia Reeves) is once more demonstrating why you shouldn’t underestimate middle-aged women in ladylike dresses, and one-time high-flyer River Cartwright (Jack Lowden) is still trying to get back in the game.

As well, because Slough House has a surprisingly high turnover rate, we have the new guys. Marcus Longridge (Kadiff Kirwan) is good with a gun but obviously has other problems or he wouldn’t be there, while Shirley Dander (Aimee-Ffion Edwards) is dealing with rage issues that might just come in handy later on.

This new season, adapted from Herron’s second book, Dead Lions, starts off in a seedy Soho sex shop, where former spook Dickie Bow (Phil Davis) spots a Moscow hood he knew from 1980s Berlin. Dickie is later found dead, seemingly of a heart attack, but Lamb doesn’t buy the official line and starts poking around. He didn’t even like the guy, Lamb admits, but he was a joe, and that means something.

Soon Lamb has stirred up some old Cold War enemies. There are stories of possible long-dormant sleeper agents in a picturesque town in the Cotswolds, and River is sent on an undercover mission. (“Does he know he’s bait?” Catherine asks.) Meanwhile, Min and Louisa are tasked with providing security for a dodgy, off-the-books meeting between James Webb (Freddie Fox) — River’s nemesis over at Regent’s Park, the official MI5 headquarters — and a Russian oligarch’s second-in-command.

And finally, Diana (“Lady Di”) Taverner (a crisp, cutting Kristin Scott Thomas), the MI5 second-in-command who maintains a begrudging professional bond with Lamb, has her own troubles, trying to juggle a massive anti-capitalism protest with a speech by the ambitious, opportunistic, Boris Johnson-ish politician Peter Judd (Samuel West).

These storylines eventually collide, alternating pacey action sequences with moments of caustic comedy, but because this involves the slow horses we know the whole spook show is perpetually on the edge of falling apart.

That looming threat of failure is one of the real pleasures of the series, fuelling the tension but also keeping the emotional stakes grounded and real. I mean, do we worry about James Bond? (OK, maybe a bit at the end of that last movie, but generally no, we don’t.) But we really feel for these hapless, human, error-prone losers.

It helps that almost all the successful people in Slow Horses are ghastly. Webb looks like a prefect from Slytherin House, and the slick, slippery Judd, who is steadily climbing the greasy pole of power, loves to torment anyone below him. (“Sorry I kept you waiting,” he tells one colleague. “I was busy keeping you waiting.”)

As well, the slow horses, for all their professional flaws and lousy morale and infighting over who’s using whose tea mug, have their own funny brand of loyalty. Lamb himself constantly puts them down, for example, but heaven help anyone else who tries it on.

The performances feel lived-in — almost too lived-in, in the case of Lamb and his disreputable raincoat. The writing is sharp, the direction is tight, and the atmosphere is suitably grotty. Most importantly, the show offers a lesson a lot of other streaming series could learn from: Slow Horses is compact, with all its complicated plotting compressed into six episodes, capped with a conclusion that wraps things up but leaves us wanting more.

And here’s an early holiday present for Slough House fans: We’ll get more. Season 3 has already been confirmed.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca