Season 4 of Slow Horses ended with action, drama, and a death in the Slough House family. But Episode 6 was an anti-climax too focused on setting up future instalments.
Apple TV+ hit Slow Horses is a spy thriller about a group of MI5 rejects battling terrorists and national security threats, under the auspices of their hard-drinking and frequently farting leader Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman).
The Season 4 antagonist was Frank Harkness (Hugo Weaving), a former CIA Operative turned mercenary, who knows where the MI5 bodies are buried.
But his storyline ends in unsatisfying fashion, making it feel like Slow Horses is more concerned with Season 5 and beyond than the end of Season 4. We’re about to detail that finale, so SPOILERS AHEAD…
Slow Horses does Heat
Episode 4 kicks off with River Cartwright (Jack Lowden) brought to Frank Harkness to reveal what we’d all figured out; that Frank is his father.
Sitting across from each other in a restaurant – in a scene reminiscent of the diner scene between Robert De Niro and Al Pacino in Heat – the two men discuss their lives, careers, and broken familial bonds, and you can cut the tension with a knife.
Harkness tries to justify his actions, and offers River a job, while Cartwright is having none of it, secretly messaging his team under the table, which leads to a standoff by Regent’s Canal.
Frank escapes by sticking a grenade in the hood of River’s jacket, which Cartwright manages to throw in the water just before it explodes. A foot-chase then follows, meaning we get to see Cartwright do what he does best, which is run really fast.
A death in the family
While that’s happening, assassin Patrice realizes that River’s father David Cartwright is at Slough House, so heads there to kill him.
Though while he was pretty much the Terminator in the last episode, Patrice is pretty ineffective here, and ends up knocked out then chained to a radiator.
But not before he’s killed Marcus, whose Season 4 arc was pretty miserable: sells a gun, buys the gun back, gets shot to death.
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But back to Patrice, and man of mystery JK Coe talks Dander out of killing him in cold blood, before – in the episode’s best moment – he does the job himself.
Slow Horses channels Se7en
Meanwhile, River and the Dogs chase Harkness into King’s Cross St. Pancras station, where Cartwright finds his father sitting in a restaurant.
Frank is armed, but rather than shoot his son to make another escape, Frank hands over the gun, and channels John Doe in Se7en by calmly giving himself up.
But much like Doe, Harkness has an overarching plan in place, which he tells Tavener during his interrogation. Frank has left a fail-safe in the shape of letters addressed to the heads of services, detailing when the security agencies used his services.
He gives Tavener an ultimatum: she’s got 12 hours to let him go, or those letters appear on the web. Meaning the big bad of Season 4 gets away with the atrocities he’s committed, and walks free, doubtless to appear in a future season of Slow Horses – which is something of an anti-climax.
Setting up Slow Horses Season 5
Frank Harkness is therefore back on the streets, and likely to trouble Slough House again. Meanwhile, one of their own – Moira (Joanna Scanlan) – returns to the fold, blackmailing Claude Whelan (James Callis) to get her job back at MI5, meaning the Slow Horses might now have someone on the inside.
The finale ends with River regretfully checking his father into a nursing home, before having a drink with Jackson Lamb. In silence.
A trailer for Season 5 follows, which is based on Mick Heron’s 2018 novel ‘London Rules.’ The teaser features Emma Flyte explaining what’s going down, and it’s a “destabilizing strategy” that the Slow Horses are facing, whereby their enemy sets out to “compromise an agent, attack the village, disrupt the transport, seize the media, [and] assassinate a populist leader.”
So we’ve got that to look forward to when Slow Horses returns in 2025, when we hope the series will set about tying up loose end Frank Harkness, rather than keeping him in play for future seasons.
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