Slow Horses Season 4 Episode 3 Review: Penny For Your Thoughts
Season 4 is shaping up to be Slow Horses' best yet. Spoilers.
Warning: contains spoilers for season 4 episode 3 “Penny For Your Thoughts”.
That had to be the most French kidnapping in history. One minute River was regaining consciousness in a locked room, the next, he was sitting down to a cheeseboard and a juicy Beaujolais Nouveau with the man who’d knocked him out. If that angry mob and their dog hadn’t turned up, those two would have been limbering up for an afternoon game of boules and a jug of pastis in the town square.
Really though, we should call that the most Slow Horses kidnapping in history. River arming himself with a flimsy colander, giving his pursuers the finger before immediately falling on his arse, and then hijacking the world’s slowest bike as a getaway was slapstick worthy of Mr Bean. These spies are not smooth operators (see also: Louisa’s improv sketch with Flyte, Jackson bringing a taxi to a knife fight…) but they get the job done.
Or half done, at least. The French assassin sicced on Bad Sam Chapman is now in the wind, as is his other target David Cartwright. Though our gang didn’t move far forward this episode, we gained some valuable intel about Les Arbres and the Westacres bomber. In short: when Winters promised on that suicide note video that the world would hear from his brothers soon, he wasn’t speaking figuratively…
It turns out that “Robert Winters”, Bertrand (River’s doppelganger, whose brain tissue made such a mess of David Cartwright’s bathroom tiles in episode one), the French assassin hunting Sam, and several others really are brothers. They’re products of a one-man stud farm, set up 30-odd years ago in Lavande, presumably to populate the planet with trained killers to do the bidding of their father Frank Harkness (Hugo Weaving). Harkness presided over a harem of impressionable young girls, impregnated them, stole their babies, kicked them out and turned their kids into his own personal army. That makes him Slow Horses’ most unhinged baddie yet, and also, perhaps its most personal.
Ready for some potentially spoilery speculation? Look away now if you don’t want to know the score.
Bertrand’s mother Natasha told River that Harkness had a Eurovision Contest’s worth of baby mamas – some Russians, a Greek, two French locals and an English girl. An English girl named… Cartwright? After all, why make so much of the physical similarities between Bertrand and River if some light isn’t about to be thrown on our lead spook’s shadowy family history. We know that River’s grandparents raised him. We don’t know whether in order to do so, baby River first had to be rescued from his insane cult-leader dad’s compound.
Is that the grudge that Harkness holds for Cartwright Sr and Bad Sam? Or did those two get up to something else back in the day? David Cartwright’s lack of official records at The Park linking him to France is practically a guarantee that he led a since covered-up op there. His dementia may have been pulling the levers when he said that the bomb and the deaths of those poor people were all his fault, but perhaps not. Could there have been two bombs, in two different decades?
Wherever this plot’s going, thank heavens that it brought Jonathan Pryce and Saskia Reeves together for this week’s scenes. His distress, and her patient calculations were beautifully conveyed by the actors, while Morwenna Banks’ script achieved poignancy without losing the sense of humour for which Slow Horses is loved. Standish absorbing Cartwright’s “just a bloody secretary” insult and using it to appease and manage him felt honest, human and true – quite a coup in the middle of such a heightened genre story.
Elsewhere, Weasel Whelan flexed his muscles to recruit Giti for team ‘Take Down Taverner’. I don’t fancy his chances, do you? Kristin Scott Thomas’ wry, dangerous character has seen off lesser opponents while barely breaking a nail, let alone a sweat. She was both missing from this episode, and missed.
Someone who didn’t miss was Jackson Lamb behind the wheel of that London taxi. Just when it looked as though he was about to casually walk past Shirley, Marcus and Sam getting a kicking, in came the cab-alry. Marvellous. That’s part of the joy of Lamb’s character – he’s so hard to read that nothing is implausible, from callousness to heroics. Standish is right about him being smarter than most.
Standish’s line about Lamb not being the only brain on Spook Street was also a good one, if somewhat undermined by David Cartwright having evaded her by dint of that old spy classic – the back door. It was still enjoyable to see Standish get one over on Flyte, who went up a notch in my estimation by her swift assessment of, and action taken on Ho. Isn’t there a spy-exchange scheme they could sign that character up for? Somewhere remote perhaps – Australia?
Now at the halfway point, this is shaping up to be a Cartwright-centric series, and Slow Horses‘ best yet. The emotional story of David Cartwright’s dwindling mind, and the idea that the sins of the (grand)father may be laid at the feet of his (grand)son is rich ground to explore. Add to that Jackson’s repartee with Flyte, entertaining diversions like Marcus’ ballroom dancing-obsessed gun dealer, and surprise cameos from London cabs, it’s no wonder that the awards world is finally catching up with Slow Horses‘ supremacy. Oldman was robbed of that Best Actor Emmy, though. For this role, he should get one every day along with his morning coffee.
Slow Horses season 4 episode 4 streams on Apple TV+ on Wednesday September 25.
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…