Slow Horses Season 4 Episode 5 Review: Grave Danger
How’s River getting out of this one? Spoilers in our penultimate season four review.
Warning: contains spoilers for Slow Horses Season 4 Episode 5 “Grave Danger”.
Has Patrice le Terminateur gone rogue, or was kidnapping River rather than killing him always the plan? Pat wouldn’t be the first of the Harkness boys to break free of his brainwashing and rebel against their monstrous father. Yves was only supposed to whack someone in the Westacres car park, but instead blew the bloody doors off and took 23 civilians with him, thereby kickstarting the ‘kill Cartwright Sr and Chapman’ clean-up and providing season four with a plot.
It all rests on where River’s being taken now – towards Frank, or away from him. Both are possible because Daddy Harkness wasn’t quite correct this episode when he told Patrice: “It’s you and me, we’re the only ones left.” To quote Yoda: no, there is another. And he’s currently in the boot of that hijacked car having just witnessed his half-brother callously eliminate four Dogs while giving Emma Flyte (who else is coming around to her?) a headache she won’t forget in a hurry.
Wherever Patrice is taking River, that car has one certain destination: the Slow Horses season finale, which, like winter 2024-5, is looming all-too-close on the horizon, far before any of us have had a proper chance to prepare. Almost over? Already? We’ve barely wrinkled our noses at Jackson Lamb’s ‘kitchen compost bin on an unseasonably hot day’ aroma yet.
Better than outstaying its welcome, I suppose, and at least season five is already in the can.
Almost kicking the can this episode was Regent’s Park archive empress Molly Doran (Naomi Wirthner). She held her nerve in the face of Evil Frank, but proved to have cocked up majorly in dishing out former agents’ home addresses like jelly babies. Like Ho falling for that “I greatly enjoy conversing with you so informally” chatbot, Molly fell for Frank’s impersonation of an ex-colleague and led Bertrand straight to David’s bathtub. People eh? Always the weak link.
Was your heart in your throat when Molly prepared herself for that gunshot? Mine stayed roughly where it usually sits. Any sparring partner of Jackson’s is a friend of ours, of course, but we’re barely on nodding terms with Molly, which means that her loss wouldn’t hurt the same as that of say, a Shirley or – heaven forfend – a Standish.
It was nice to follow Molly to her artily decorated home though, even if the visit was interrupted by Hugo Weaving grinding his teeth and chewing up the scenery. I think I’ve worked out what it is about Weaving’s performance that doesn’t quite fit in Slow Horses: there’s no discernible irony there. Every other main character in this show is as good comedically as they are dramatically, but Weaving just gives generic bad guy. There’s no quirk or grounding Mr Kipling Angel Slice, only smug, self-serving evil, which, frankly, we already get enough of from our political class.
They’re a very literal family, the Harknesses. When Yves mentioned his “brothers” in that suicide video, he meant the genetic kind, and when Frank said he wanted to “send a message” this episode it turned out he was talking about the kind you get in an envelope rather than the decapitated-head-in-a-box variety. Five of those envelopes are now sitting on Molly’s bureau addressed to: Mike Peterson, Jim Lanford, Claude Whelan, Jean Fraser, and Natalie Hensley. Whelan aside, any clues as to who those others are?
Whelan’s route out of First Desk was plotted with Ho’s discovery that he’s a fancier of… what’s the correct parlance these days? Let’s go with ‘Winchester Geese’. For all his talk of Activating Accountability and Accessibility, Whelan’s triple-A promise turned out to be a triple load of Arse. He’d banished Moira to Slough House to cover up his kerb-crawling habit, and was all for doing a Watergate on Park records the second it became clear that MI5 IDs had been facilitating Harkness’ death squad all this time. James Callis, I’ll say it again, is extremely good casting for Slow Horses. There’s an actor who can clown.
Speaking of clowns, Coe (Tom Brooke) has finally shown up to the season and is proving to be good fun. He deflated Shirley in a matter of seconds, and with his biting comment that “only a small percentage of people get duped” by chatbots, even momentarily succeeded in making me feel something other than irritation towards Ho. Poor, stupid genius Ho.
The really important business of “Grave Danger” though, happened exactly there: at a graveside. Jackson pushed David’s buttons by taking him to his dead wife’s burial plot and got the answer he needed. The young woman for whom Bad Sam Chapman traded a carful of fake IDs, cash and explosives was indeed Isobel Cartwright – David’s daughter and River’s mother (Anna Wilson-Jones) who made a cameo appearance on the phone to Louisa. Now that Jackson has all the pieces of the genealogy puzzle, fingers crossed that he and his “D-list unit with no sense of purpose” really is as hard to beat as River says.
The Slow Horses season 4 finale airs on Apple TV+ on Wednesday October 9.
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…