Slow Horses Season 4 Episode 1 Review: Identity Theft
The best spy show on TV is back.
Warning: contains spoilers for Slow Horses 4.1 “Identity Theft”
Of course it wasn’t him. Despite it seeming entirely in character for Jackson Lamb to look more distressed about running out of Jaffa Cakes than at staring into the meaty casserole that was once River Cartwright’s head, of course they hadn’t killed off this show’s second lead so perfunctorily. The episode being called “Identity Theft” was probably our first clue. The fact that River spends a good proportion of the season four trailer hijacking a motorised bicycle in a French village – something difficult to achieve with neither head nor thorax – was the second.
A third indication was that surely Lamb would have been a tiny bit more upset, no? After all, River’s one of his Joes. On rare occasions, he can even almost approach tolerating him, which for Lamb is the equivalent of being in such a close and loving friendship that you’d willingly donate someone a kidney. (A Jackson Lamb kidney. Oof. The smell alone would knock you sideways. Piss, vinegar and booze, like something you might encounter in a pie from one of the lesser factories.)
Whoever met their end in that bathtub, it wasn’t River, whom we glimpsed in the field – literally – speeding through the French campagne in the back of a taxi. Has he been deployed to investigate the Westacres bombing (unlikely – the Park usually only relents to involve Slough House several resorts past their last) or is he hunting down his grandfather’s surprise visitor?
Season four got off to a lower-key start than season three, and was all the better for it. High-adrenaline Istanbul-based speedboat chases are all very well in other spy thrillers, but we come to Slow Horses for the excellent plotting and the fart-soaked wit, not for glamour. Ho getting pranked in a London chicken shop and then walking away from an explosion not because he’s a cold-as-ice action hero but because he couldn’t hear it over the sound of his headphones and chewing is much more characteristic.
The cheekiness continued when First Desk was called for and Taverner pulled up to the bombsite. Finally, ma’am! But, no. They’ve hired a Tim-Nice-But-Dim (Claude-Nice-But-Flawed?) type to replace Tearney instead. The niceness of James Callis’ character is still tbc in fact, but his dimness is incontestable. Anybody unable to dredge up a sentiment other than “There are no words” in the face of 23 murders committed on their patch needs showing the door. Between that, him getting Diana to do his COBRA homework, falling apart when the bomber’s booby trap exploded, and decorating his office with framed snaps from his ski holidays, he’s clearly the lightest of lightweights and either somebody’s useful idiot or somebody important’s nephew.
Speaking of somebody important, a very warm welcome to Joanna Scanlan as new office manager Moira Tregorian. What foot, we wonder, did she put wrong to go from Regent’s Park to Slough House? And the same question to series four’s other new recruit JK “Chatty” Coe (Tom Brooke).
Not that Standish is gone gone. Lamb won’t accept her resignation, or her cold shoulder, and now that she’s harbouring a killer, she’s officially involved. A good thing too, as her scenes with Lamb are often the most revealing about Gary Oldman’s hard-to-pin-down character (the debate largely boils down to: smelly bastard genius, or smelly bastard genius with almost half a heart?).
Lamb does have another sparring partner this time in the form of new Head Dog Emma Flyte (Ruth Bradley). Duffy’s still in a coma thanks to Marcus, Louisa, and that concrete block, so there’s a new broom, and by the look of Flyte, we can tell precisely where it’s been inserted.
Criminally, Lamb was kept from us for a full 12 minutes before Mick Jagger’s drawl cued him struggling like an upturned tortoise to get off the sofa. It was a low-key start for him too, as he wheezed lumpenly around, pulling underwear out of his bumcrack, releasing guffs with better comic timing than most stand-ups, and appearing to put more effort into the search for Alka Seltzer than the search for Robert Winters’ terrorist cell.
Still, any Jackson Lamb is better than no Jackson Lamb. Oldman is so supreme in this role that it’s somehow more entertaining to watch him debate the nutritional suitability of a breakfast Jaffa Cake than to watch any other screen spy do… well, anything. Leave scaling the Eiffel Tower or skiing down the Matterhorn with a knife clamped between the teeth to everybody else. This spook, this show, and this series, excel in the everyday.
Slow Horses season 4 episode 2 streams on Apple TV+ on Wednesday September 11.
Written by
Louisa Mellor is the Den of Geek UK TV Editor. She has written about TV, film and books for Den of Geek since 2010, and for…