Chris Connor reviews the season 6 finale of Slow Horses…
As it hurtles towards its conclusion, Slow Horses brings one of its most action-packed finales in “Judgement Day”. For all the bravado and scrapes and losses along the way, it doesn’t lose sight of the human element, integral to making the show the success that it is. Even with more substantial shifts to Mick Herron’s source material, the audience is invested in the characters and their arcs.
This season has felt perhaps like the one with the Slough House crew in the most peril, initially from assassins Jim and Jane and in the latter part of the season from Frank Harkness and his goons, seemingly no one is safe from being caught in the crossfire. The main casualty in this episode is Emma Flyte, who many may have expected to become a full-time Slow Horse in season 7. As in the book, she meets her end at the hands of Frank Harkness although not without helping make his plans come a cropper.
The finale doesn’t have the fate of the nation on the line, it is literally Jane and Frank on separate missions to take out the horses. This makes it an incredibly personal fight both sides taking the punches in a brutal, frenetic first half that races by. The beauty of making the episode an hour is to give the storylines breathing room. If there’s one area the show has tripped up this season, it is how overstuffed and rushed it has at times felt.
In London Lamb and Taverner quickly turn the tables on the GRU by sacrificing Cantor in place of Sid Baker. This is one of the clearest examples of Lamb’s ability to read a situation and come out unscathed while delivering a knockout blow in the process. He may have saved Taverner but is she completely out of the woods? The dynamic between Gary Oldman and Kristin Scott-Thomas even after six seasons is a delight, especially to see the pair working as allies.
Just when you think the show is done with drama and Lamb has given his fallen Joes a send off, the show gives us a cliffhanger audiences will have to wait a year to work out the answer to. Is River Cartwright dead? Rumours will continue to fly for the next 12 months and while book readers may know the answer it will be a long wait for the rest of the audience.
Slow Horses’ sixth season is another winner and continues its momentum, built up over the past five years. Even with more additions and adjustments to Joe Country and Slough House it has kept the spirit of the novels and sets the stage for what looks to be an equally frantic seventh season based on Bad Actors, due in 2027, with an eighth already in development. One thing is certain Apple TV and audiences aren’t done with Slough House yet.
Chris Connor
