Apple TV+’s hit “Slow Horses,” based on the novels by Mick Herron, has become one of the streaming service’s most beloved shows for a reason: efficiency. In an era when so many shows drag their way through overlong seasons, all five chapters of “Slow Horses” are a lean, mean six episodes, and most of those don’t even run 45 minutes. Wasting no time, Apple has already reached the 5th season of “Slow Horses” since the show launched in 2022, with the 6th season completed and the 7th in production. While the show is still popular, is it too much of a good thing? Has “Slow Horses” started to show signs of fatigue?
Based on the novel London Rules, this is the weakest “Slow Horses” season to date, and yet it’s still pretty darn entertaining. It’s not a steep enough drop to allow for concern that the writers can’t immediately get it back in the 6th outing (and the preview for that at the end of this season is thrilling) but it lacks some of the spark of the best of the show, in part because of a rushed plot and the characters it chooses to highlight and sideline.
The fifth season opens with a traumatized Shirley (Aimee-Ffion Edwards) struggling to get past the death of Marcus at the end of last year. When she sees a car hurtling toward Roddy Ho (Christopher Chung) and pushes him out of the way, she becomes convinced that it was an assassination attempt and not just a rogue bad driver. She takes this belief back to the team at Slough House, and Lamb (Gary Oldman) pretends to talk her out of the idea while also knowing that Shirley’s instincts are still pretty strong. When River (Jack Lowden) and Shirley track Ho to a club and see him dancing with a supermodel far out of his league, they start to wonder if he’s been honey-trapped. And then the shooting starts.
Meanwhile, in the shadow of an election that allows “Ted Lasso” star Nick Mohammed to play one of the candidates, a terrorist group is unleashing chaos on the city of London. First, they open fire in a crowded square, and then they blow up petrol stations. You don’t want to know what happens at the zoo. The unusual Coe (Tom Brooke) connects the dots and realizes that what’s happening is following a destabilization playbook, a way to unsettle an entire population through waves of attacks and chaos. How is it connected to Ho? And how can it be stopped?
Believe it or not, a large portion of this narrative falls on the shoulders of Claude Whelan, the new Director General of MI5, played by James Callis of “Battlestar Galactica” fame. Callis is a strong actor, but Whelan isn’t as interesting a character as Kristin Scott Thomas’ Diana Taverner, Jonathan Pryce’s David Cartwright, or Hugo Weaving’s Frank Harkness from past seasons. He ends up really taking up too much of the endgame, which inadvertently pushes Shirley aside after the first couple of episodes and jettisons the great Rosalind Eleazar’s Louisa for almost the entire year. Again, these are minor complaints for a show that’s still entertaining, and it’s really a product of how richly the characters have been drawn over the first four years that they feel shallower here by comparison.
It’s also a season that feels like it has a bit too much source material for the six-episode structure. Given almost every Apple show is an episode or two too long, it’s startling to say this, but this edition of “Slow Horses” is too short. The writing gets so stuffed with twists and turns in the final two chapters that it feels like it’s sped up nearly to the breaking point, and too many revelations and incidents rush by before it feels like the characters would naturally pause to unpack them.
Through all these minor disappointments, the major stuff that “Slow Horses” does so well remains. Oldman has a particularly great season, doing more of the on-the-ground work than Lamb typically has to do. Lowden continues to impress, and this feels like an important transitional season for him and River, given where it ends. He’s still dealing with trauma from season four and the issues related to his grandfather’s dementia for much of this year, so it makes sense that it would be a bridge to season six. Guest stars Christopher Billiers and Hiba Bennani are effective.
The writing on “Slow Horses” is too consistent for it to completely fumble in its fifth outing. Still, this year reminded me a bit of the fifth season of “Only Murders in the Building,” another show that has perfected its formula so thoroughly that it starts to taste a little overly familiar, even if we still love the flavor.
Whole season screened for review. Premieres on Apple TV+ today, September 24th.
