Slow Horses is back for a fifth season. But can it maintain the pace?

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Slow Horses (season five) ★★★★

Now in its fifth season, Apple TV+’s excellent spy drama Slow Horses has become an absolute master of pacing, sometimes cantering along, sometimes slowing to a trot, never mistiming its run. The new season opens, almost wordlessly, at a gallop: a young white man eats alone in his apartment, the only decoration being a poster on the wall – “treat your body like a temple, and your woman like a dog” – that immediately lays bare his incel tendencies.

Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman), the dishevelled leader of a team of MI5 outcasts in Slow Horses S5.

He heads downstairs to a white van, opens the back door and retrieves something. He takes a seat on a bench, opposite a brown-skinned campaign worker for the upcoming London mayoral elections. He glares angrily as the man, clueless, says, “I hope Mayor Jaffrey can count on your vote”. And then he opens fire, killing the campaigner and 10 other people.

A terrorist attack or the work of a lone and lonely gunman? White supremacist or something else? An isolated incident or the harbinger of broader chaos to come?

It’s a case tailor-made for the team at Slough House. Or it would be if anyone at MI5 – or The Park, as this band of misfit outcasts wistfully refer to it – thought they were fit for anything more than … well, nothing at all, really.

Hiba Bennani as the mysterious Tara and Christopher Chung as Roddy Ho.

But the slow horses are dragged into the case regardless when their spymaster overlords join the dots between tech-boy idiot savant Roddy Ho (Australian actor Christopher Chung) and the beautiful young woman (Hiba Bennani) he imagines to be his girlfriend but everyone else immediately realises is a “honey trap”, an agent sent to seduce an opposing number to extract information.

Of course, they’re right; no one in their right mind would fancy Ho. He is quite buff, though, as Shirley (Aimee-Ffion Edwards) admits to fellow agent River (Jack Lowden) while they watch dumbfounded as their colleague dances with his new friend. “I’d actually rather sleep with Lamb,” she says, referring to their boss (the farting, belching, chain-smoking, insult-hurling Gary Oldman). “But in a club situation, I can see why someone might use him as a sex toy.”

Jack Lowden as River Cartwright and Tom Brooke as fellow MIF “reject” JK Coe in the new season of Slow Horses.

It’s this mix of high-octane action, humour – sometimes juvenile, sometimes sophisticated, always dark – and human frailty that makes Slow Horses such a compelling watch. Sure, there’s a certain familiarity about it now, but each season feels like a richly textured delight, satisfying unto itself, even more so when stacked up alongside its fellows.

Precise plot points matter less than the overall tone, I feel. You know that Diana Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas) is going to vacillate between wanting to crush Lamb and to reach out for his help as she seeks to move from Second Desk to head of MI5; you know Lamb is going to scold and denigrate his staff, but secretly trust them more than anyone else to do what needs to be done; you know River Cartwright’s efforts to get back into the good graces of The Park are going to inexplicably founder, again.

There are two more seasons in the works (season six will see the return of Hugo Weaving as American spy-assassin Frank Harkness), but we’re rapidly nearing the end of Mick Herron’s run of Slough House novels, on which this thoroughly entertaining production line is based, and that’s not good.

So Mick, if you’re reading – giddy-up. Get writing, and don’t spare the horses!

Slow Horses (season five) streams from September 24 on Apple TV+. New episodes released on Wednesdays.

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