One might say that Jackson Lamb is the hero television needs right now, not the one it deserves—echoing the words Commissioner Gordon—also played by the singular talent that is Gary Oldman—said in The Dark Knight as he talked about Batman.
Lamb, of course, is a very different kind of hero than Bruce Wayne, though both men share some qualities. Both Lamb and Wayne are always pretending, for one thing. Wayne pretends to be a rich playboy billionaire with not a care in the world while secretly saving Gotham from all manners of evil. Lamb disguises his genius behind a veneer of booze and sweat and junk food, and pretends not to care about the men and women he works with, while fiercely fighting to do protect them from all manners of danger.
Maybe they’re not so different, after all. Lamb and his Slough House crew are back today for the Season 4 premiere of Slow Horses, one of the best shows on TV over the past few years. Oldman is as grotesque as ever. I swear you can smell him through the screen. He’s every bit as hilarious, too, and just as wiley.
Spoilers follow.
Slow Horses picks up not long after the action-packed events of Season 3 and hits the ground running. A terrorist attack at a shopping center leaves numerous dead, and it doesn’t appear to be the work of foreign radicals, but rather some home-grown group, though these don’t appear to be white nationalists like we saw in a previous season.
The first explosion is followed by a second tragedy, though one I certainly saw coming: When police and forensic teams go to the flat where the suicide bomber lived, they clear everything except the windows. When one of the forensics team goes to open the shades, he sets off the booby trap, blowing the apartment to smithereens and leaving even more dead.
All of this is met with a grim resignation by Diana Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas) who remains the capable leader of MI5 even if she’s still not sitting as First Desk. That honor has fallen to Claude Whelan (Battlestar Galactica’s James Callis). He does not take these events in stride.
Elsewhere, the “rejects” at Slough House are mostly goofing around, making bets on how long they can take waterboarding torture—Shirley Dander (Aimee-Ffion Edwards) only lasts seven seconds and Marcus Longridge (Kadiff Kirwan) wins—getting tricked into going to fake Christmas parties that only Roddy Ho (Christopher Chung) is gullible enough to fall for, and tip-toeing around their latest member, J.K. Coe (Tom Brooke) who rarely talks and is constantly angry and agitated. Not sure what his story is yet, but I suspect we’ll find out soon enough.
River Cartwright (Jack Lowden) however, has a problem which he brings to Louisa Guy(Rosalind Eleazar). His grandfather, David Cartwright (Jonathan Pryce) is losing his mind to dementia, he tells her, and he doesn’t know what to do. Louisa tells him that he needs to buck up and take care of his grandfather, who raised him and took care of him his whole entire life. Go see him tonight, she says, and River does and then David shoots him to death with his shotgun in the bathtub.
Or at least that’s what the show wants you to think—sort of—and definitely what River and Jackson Lamb want the rest of the world to think. Lamb shows up to identify the body. “That’s Cartwright,” he says. The big tell this whole time—before the shooting and after—is that the camera never really shows us who David shot. That might have worked to portray David’s state of mind and leave us uncertain, but the same trick is used when Lamb arrives (though the face has also been shot, clearly post-mortem) to obscure who it was that actually died.
Lamb confirms that it’s Cartwright in the most nonchalant way imaginable—much to the disgust of the brand new MI5 security boss, Emma Flyte (Ruth Bradley). Even for a character so determined to trick everyone into thinking he doesn’t care, I suspect that if he’d truly found Cartwright dead in his grandfather’s bathtub, his reaction would not have been quite so glib. I had a moment where I wondered—after all, Olivia Cooke was killed off so early on in this show, who’s to say Lowden isn’t after some other gig, like doubling as Sauron in The Rings Of Power?—but as soon as Lamb showed up I was convinced River was alive.
Lamb, being as savvy as he is malodorous, heads straight to the flat of Catherine Standish (Saskia Reeves) where he breaks the sad news and gauges her reaction. After a few minutes of toying with her, he reveals that he knows that she knows that River isn’t dead and that David is tucked away in her bedroom. She denies it but he goes in and, sure enough, there’s the old man taking a nap. “Where is River?” he asks.
At which point we see River in France tracking down clues about who exactly it was that pretended to be him and snuck into his grandfather’s home, almost certainly with the intention of killing him and making it look like an accident (death by falling asleep in the tub). It seems River showed up shortly afterwards and swapped out his car for his grandfather’s, rushing him to Standish’s for safekeeping since he couldn’t trust him with the police and faking his own death to buy himself time to go rogue and investigate. Lamb, being the reliable bloke that he is, must have surmised all of this at the scene of the crime and decided to cover for River on the spot.
In order to make the ruse work, not only MI5 but also Slough House has to be convinced of River’s death, at least for a few days, so he sends a text to Ho (of all people) breaking the news. The office takes it pretty badly, but none so badly as Louisa, who blames herself. As relieved as she’ll no doubt be when River appears alive and well, I’m sure she’ll also be angry.
All told, this was yet another terrific premiere for Slow Horses which continues to be one of the very best TV shows on streaming right now and yet another hit for Apple TV, which has many of my favorite shows out there. Last night I watched three brand new episodes of three different shows all on Apple TV and each of them was excellent. (On top of Slow Horses, both Bad Monkey and Sunny are still airing and both are fantastic).
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