Review of “Slow Horses” Season 4, Episode 5: “Grave Danger”

Slow horses

Great danger

Season 4

Episode 5

Editor's Rating

5 stars

*****

Photo: Apple TV+

The most exciting thing about the penultimate episode of a season is that TV critics love to use the word “penultimate” and we will at every opportunity. Penultimate. Mmmm… feels great. The second most exciting thing is that if the penultimate episode is done right, as “Grave Danger” emphatically is, it brings tremendous momentum into the finale. Finales are a more difficult undertaking because they have to tie up all the loose ends and bring the whole complicated mess to a satisfying conclusion. But the penultimate episodes are all about crises and possibilities, about decisive action, while still leaving the viewer temptingly in the dark. This starts with a house break-in, ends with a kidnapping and goes completely haywire in between.

However, perhaps the decisive moment takes us away from the event. Claude has called Taverner into his office for a botched PowerPoint presentation that will bore her to tears. He stumbles through the revelations Giti uncovered in his research into the “cold body” passport of the assassin who killed David Cartwright and whose grandson River temporarily made unidentifiable. This passport had traveled via Munich in 2014, where a member of the Chechen intelligence service was killed by a car bomb, and to Paris in 2015, where a Palestinian human rights lawyer was killed. And so forth. Then Claude says something magical:

“As you know, my job is to enable accountability and accessibility. That's the Triple-A Promise! But now that I look at the current situation in the group, my position has shifted a bit to “whatever.” Fuck it all. The whole thing has to be enclosed in a concrete box and thrown into the middle of the sea.”

In addition, Claude also sees Giti, his trusted researcher, as a potential whistleblower. (“She needs to be put in a damn concrete box and stuff.”) Aside from being a hilarious about-face from a leader who seems stubbornly sticking to principles like the “Triple-A Promise,” Claude is now in If If you team up with Taverner, you can move forward together. This unity of intentions occurs throughout the episode, which is an exciting way to condense all the narrative threads and get to the point. Maybe Claude will find time for his big MI5 transparency project another time, but for now no one can suppress the sound of a ticking time bomb.

That bombshell comes in the menacing form of Frank Harkness, who begins the episode by targeting Molly Doran (Naomi Wirthner), the recorder whose position in the archives, deep in the bowels of the park, seems to prevent her from doing so Danger of ever being there. But Frank is under enormous pressure to find David Cartwright and eliminate him before his client dismembers him in a hotel suite, and Molly is his easiest ticket into the system. He needs her fingerprints and access codes, but adds a little sadism to his coercion, saying that no one will miss her because “you built your own dungeon and locked everyone out.” In the end, he spares her life but leaves her pride and their dignity left in ruins.

Unfortunately for Harkness, Lamb and Standish are in control of David, who still insists on keeping everything a secret until he can speak to a First Desk official who no longer exists. Lamb's solution is to force the information out of him by dragging him to the cemetery where his wife is buried, reinforcing the delusion that he shot his grandson. Standish is shocked by Lamb's indecency – which says something about the extent of this indecency – but the gambit works. That young woman from the flashbacks who was released in exchange for money and weapons and later fled on the way home? This was David and his wife's daughter. He has a long and bitter history with Harkness.

Meanwhile, at Slough House, the slowest horses work together on some genuinely helpful detective work, although an unusually loquacious JK Coe describes them as “a D-list unit without a unified sense of purpose” who can't help anyone on the field. Harkness' star assassin Patrice had been wounded in his four-on-one fight with Lamb, Chapman, Shirley and Marcus, but the gang correctly suspects that he would not have been able to go to the hospital to heal his wounds. New office manager Moira alerts them to a database of “backyard doctors” that MI5 keeps, and it turns out that one of them fell down a flight of stairs around the time Patrice may have been visiting him. They end up with CCTV footage of the assassin – which may not be the biggest piece of the puzzle, but it's quality detective work.

But her competence doesn't stop River from getting into new trouble now that he's back in London. Flyte picks him up, arrests him at David's house, and ties him to the back seat of a car, where she can take him to the park for questioning. In their boisterous exchanges on the road, River and Flyte develop real chemistry, both good-looking agents who have strayed from their superiors this season – River with his misadventures in France, Flyte with her hiding information from Taverner. She mocks him for his ridiculous schedule, but seems understanding of the lengths he goes to to protect his grandfather, and the two seem to be on good terms.

But we have to put the “To Be Continued…” label on this relationship because, based on the information he gleaned from Harkness' time at Molly's apartment, Patrice drives a garbage truck straight into the first car in River and Flyte's motorcade and starts shooting with River still tied to his back. (Marcus aptly compares Patrice to the T-800 model of the Terminator, not the liquid metal T-1000.) Patrice kills the dogs in the driver and passenger seats, and Flyte empties her gun at close range, somehow missing every shot. The scuffle ends with Flyte being knocked unconscious and Patrice dragging River into the trunk of a passerby, presumably to torture him into revealing his grandfather's whereabouts.

Every scene moves forward Slow horses Fast forward to the finale, and the dialogue sparkles with urgency and wit. The show is at the peak of its powers at the right time.

• Flyte's first questioning of River reveals little: “What was in France?” “You know, French, baguettes…”

• Marcus' claim that he sold his gun to a dealer who doesn't sell to gangs is undermined when Louis informs him that the dealer actually sells to organized crime and unlicensed bodyguards. (“Boutique arms dealer? Nice. Classy,” Shirley jokes. “Was all that Coke you snorted fair trade?” he replies.)

• The people of Slough House will probably want Coe to talk less. First he angers Shirley about her psychological profile (“You're a deeply unhappy person”), and then he identifies Roddy's hot chat colleague as a bot manipulating him into scams (“Only a small percentage of people get scammed”).

• Good banter between River and Flyte: “Look, maybe my actions were hard to understand.” “Fake your own death, hide your grandfather, shoot the face off a corpse…” “Okay, if you make the list, it will sound even worse.”

• Gotta love the high-level Bond villain plan to create a “deniable assassination squad” from birth. Worthy of a multi-year story arc. Or a spin-off show.