In Spook Street, the fourth novel in Mick Herron’s Slow Horses series of spy novels, he describes London as “a class-A city … except for the parts that weren’t, which were like someone had taken all the worst bits of everywhere else and shored them up against each other. And the traffic was a f*****g nightmare.”
That’s as good an introduction as any to the bleak, depressing, post-Brexit metropolis wherein MI5’s ragtag B-team once again fling themselves up against yet another catastrophe that’s well above their pay grade. This time around, that mystery entails the so-called Slow Horses of Slough House working to figure out who detonated a bomb in the middle of a busy London shopping center, killing scores of people — and it’s this installment in Herron’s series that also serves as the basis for the fourth season of Slow Horses, Apple TV+’s critically acclaimed spy drama that returns on Sept. 4.
“We’re all targets, just like old times,” Gary Oldman’s slovenly, misanthropic, and deceptively brilliant spymaster Jackson Lamb opines at one point during the new season, the first trailer for which Apple released today (below).
Lamb is the spook who leads an outpost of washed-up spies who’ve all committed nearly career-ending mistakes of one sort or another. When asked whether he’s in charge of the agency’s “rejects,” Lamb dismisses the question in a huff with: “They don’t like being called that.”
What do you call them, then? “The rejects.”
That’s the sort of dry, world-weary ennui that pervades Slough House, which turns everything familiar about the spy genre on its head. Instead of spies that look and act more like superheroes, the Slow Horses herein very much live up to their name by generally sucking at their job — but still managing to surprise from time to time.
One thing that particularly excites me about Slow Horses Season 4 is that we’ll get to spend more time with a heretofore criminally underused side character.
David Cartwright, legendary former spy, and grandfather to tryhard Jackson Lamb understudy River Cartwright, will have a much larger role this time around. The elder Cartwright slowly starts to lose his mind as a result of dementia, something we’ve already seen little hints of before now. The younger Cartwright has to wrestle with his grandfather’s insistence that someone is trying to kill him while at the same getting to the bottom of the shopping center bombing that actually killed scores of people.
And, as if all that wasn’t enough, Cartwright also stumbles onto a conspiracy that connects the bombing to his grandfather’s past. I don’t know about you all, but I’ve certainly been more than ready to visit Spook Street for months now.
