The spooks who work in Slough House on Apple TV+‘s masterful spy drama Slow Horses have had to grapple during previous seasons with everything from brilliant Russian terrorists to the fallout from a power struggle at MI5. For the new season, which Apple has revealed will debut on the streamer on September 4, it feels only right that the story would move forward by returning to the past — specifically, by spending a lot 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 — which is great news, considering that he’s played in Slow Horses by the fantastic Jonathan Pryce. Season 4 is adapted from Spook Street, the fourth book in Mick Herron’s Slow Horses series of spy novels, which finds the elder Cartwright slowly starting to lose his mind as a result of dementia (something we’ve seen little hints of before now already).
The new season starts off with a literal bang. A bomb that’s killed dozens of people at a stylish retail center in West London also sets off a proverbial chain reaction that brings the sins of many surrogate fathers in this story to the fore. 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 stumbled onto a conspiracy that connects the bombing to his grandfather’s past.
Fans of Slow Horses will remember that it’s the OB (the “old bastard,” David Cartwright) who pulled strings to keep his grandson employed in the security service after a screw-up at Kings Cross Station. In both Spook Street and Season 4 of the Apple series, fate comes full circle, with the younger Cartwright now racing to help the man who raised him when his mother Isobel dumped him on the old man’s doorstep.
Paunchy, chain-smoking Jackson Lamb’s devastating put-downs, the earnestness of River, Slough House’s B-team of spies punching above their weight, and all of it unfolding in dreary, rainy London — I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to pay a visit to Spook Street this September.
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