It’s always been the little details that stand out in Slow Horses, the long-running Apple TV+ spy drama that returns on Sept. 4. For one thing, viewers can practically smell the mold and feel the dust that pervades 126 Aldersgate Street in London — also known as Slough House, the depressing outpost to which the so-called Slow Horses of MI5 have been summarily banished in lieu of a pink slip. Save for computer whiz Roddy Ho’s setup downstairs, it’s a low-tech office that stays fastidiously untidy with overflowing trash bins, scattered papers, and takeaway leftovers.
Occupied by clapped-out spooks who’ve “slipped off the fast track,” this grimy workspace near the Barbican tube station is an office with creaking pipes and mildewed walls, where even hand-me-downs would look brand new. Its overseer is gimlet-eyed spymaster Jackson Lamb, played by Gary Oldman as a belching, farting, chain-smoking HR nightmare with a paunch and greasy hair who dresses in ill-fitting clothes and has some of the best lines in the series. “Tell her she best interrogate me in a room with a window,” he says at one point in Slow Horses‘ first season. “I had lamb Bhuna earlier that’s gonna make its presence felt.”
A Cold War relic with seeming disdain for the screwups who work for him, Lamb has the dour worldview of a pensioner angry at Britain’s post-imperial decline; he’s also unrelentingly brilliant. Notwithstanding the grubby facade, he’s usually the quickest to sort out what’s what.
In Slow Horses‘ fourth season, such details add indispensable texture to a story that revels in subverting the tropes of traditional espionage dramas. Unlike those on the big screen, the spies here have dadbods and all manner of flaws and disorders. There’s a gambling addict and an alcoholic. More than one has anger issues. All of them are castaways who sit at the little kids’ table now, where they can only dream of a life less ordinary. When the glamorous Emma Flyte — the new head of MI5’s internal security squad known as “the dogs” — derides Lamb’s team at one point in the new season as “the rejects,” he shoots back that they don’t like being called that.
Asked how he’d describe them instead, Lamb quips without missing a beat: “The rejects.”
The new season, which is debuting with a perfect 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes, is based on Spook Street — book #4 in writer Mick Herron’s critically acclaimed collection of Slough House spy novels. And having finished watching all six episodes that Apple allowed the press to screen early, I’d probably sum up my initial reaction as: This might be the show’s best outing yet.
Aside from the same cynical tone that fans have come to know and love — and the show’s familiar presentation of London as a once-great city rotted out by institutional decline — surprises abound in Season 4. Not the least of which is the emergence of a shady mercenary played by Hugo Weaving who’s connected to the pasts of both River Cartwright and his grandfather (David Cartwright, aka “The Old Bastard”). Other new faces this time around include Claude Whalen, the irritatingly image-obsessed new “First Desk” of MI5, whose ineptitude stands in contrast to the icily efficient head of operations Diana Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas).
And, oh yeah, there’s a mystery to solve — namely, who bombed a posh London shopping center, and why does one of the breadcrumbs point back to the security service? Also, what’s the bombing’s connection to the elder Cartwright, who narrowly survives assassination while also suffering from dementia?
Jack Lowden’s River Cartwright, who thus far has mostly come off as a tryhard Jackson Lamb understudy, has never been better or more heroic than he is this season. The Slow Horses, as a collective, have always exhibited a combination of earnestness and nitwittery; in Season 4, they continue to do the stupid things you’d expect of the B-team. But they’re also hungry, River most of all, in a way that the army of snappily-dressed strivers who work in MI5’s Regent’s Park headquarters will never understand.
In Slow Horses, it’s the unglamorous misfits who confront a dangerous world head-on, one bombing, one hit squad, one gun battle at a time. And regardless of their expectations, it always ends the same way. In Slough House, they remain.
