Slow Horses Season 6, Episode 1 Review and Recap — ‘Circle of Life’

The disturbing opening shot of Season 6 is a statement as much as it is a metaphor for the disregard of some lives: Slow Horses, now written by the show’s longtime co-executive producer Gaby Chiappe, is still twisted. Chiappe might not have the same comedy writing background as Smith (who worked on shows like The Thick of It and Veep) that gave the show a certain edge, but Slow Horses still goes there. Jackson Lamb still day-drinks and burps loudly (juxtaposed against one of the series’ most sentimental scenes showing River and David’s final moments together) and laughs at funerals (to his credit, it was funny watching River eulogize about his grandpa’s deep care for the nation’s train systems as a coverup for his espionage work). Figured as much!

That’s not to say deploying the well-established character traits of each of Slow Horse’s fantastic ensemble is sloppy lever-pulling. For instance, it will basically always be funny when Roddy Ho (Christopher Chung) acts like… well, Roddy Ho. (Also, I’m 99.8% sure that was Ghost of Tsushima he was playing at work.) But I do sort of wish the series was a little more confident off the bat in trusting itself to tell the story it needs to tell with its characters responding as the ridiculous people they are without winking at the audience.

Already, Slow Horses has a lot of balls to juggle, but that’s nothing new. As arguably the most consistent spy series on TV right now, it’s always threaded complex storylines that opt for the less-obvious twist. It’s safe to expect that pretty much everything is a clue right now — What’s the connection between the seemingly irrelevant (for now) raid on the Russian finance botfarm, the spy-killers, River’s father Frank Harkness (Hugo Weaving), and the secret money that the slimy politician Peter Judd (Samuel West) funneled to Diana? — but I don’t expect any of them to piece together as nicely as they’d seem at first glance. But with only five episodes remaining, covering two books’ worth of material, Slow Horses has a lot of ground to cover — like, when are we seeing you-know-who again? — and not much time to do it.