‘Slow Horses’ Season 5 review: Gary Oldman-led sloppy sleuths accomplish another entertaining mission

Slow Horses continues its aversion to sunshine as we return to the perpetually gloomy London city which is gearing up for a Mayoral election. A mass shooting, allegedly carried out by a supporter of the right-wing candidate, opens the fifth season. On the other side of the town, Shirley (Aimee-Ffion Edwards) saves Roddy Ho (Christopher Chung) from getting mowed down in the middle of the street. Convinced that this was a targeted attack, Shirley makes a poor case for her suspicions back at Slough House where the rest of the motley crew still appear to be reeling from the previous season’s events. Gary Oldman returns as the insolent Jackson Lamb, lobbying his choicest insults at River (Jack Lowden), who is at his most exhausted and jaded this season. Meanwhile, Catherine (Saskia Reeves) seems to be the only one assigning any merit to Shirley’s theory.

Nothing in Slow Horses is accidental, so the theory gains legs and finds its way to the mass shooting incident. This is Will Smith’s last season serving as the showrunner for Slow Horses, and his deftness in merging an ambitious number of plotlines to present a cohesive narrative has carried through all the five seasons. The Slough House sleuths find their own irritations to be part of a bigger terrorist threat to London, as the next six episodes unravel chaos across the city.

Slow Horses’ catapult to fame is a result of its careful handling of contrasting genres. Dispersing the tension of deadline-driven espionage drama, with the bone-dry comedic wit, the show takes from both genres greedily and tiptoes on a precarious ledge – careful not to predictably commit to one side. It is probably Smith’s neat balancing act for the fifth time in a row that saves this season from collapsing under its boilerplate ‘Arab terrorists target Western nation’ plot. Though much of the heavy-lifting this season is also done by the more lighter, almost spoofy, scenes. A political assassination carried out by a paint pot can only be a natural addition to a Slow Horses episode.

However over the seasons, what has brought back most audiences is not just the twisted thrills of underground espionage. Granted that Slow Horses doesn’t skimp on that aspect, it is the permutation and combination of the sloppy spooks working against and within an institution they have lost faith in. At the risk of sounding sincere, Slow Horses’ most successful mission has been to hoodwink the audience into following a spy drama when it is in fact three different kinds of character study in a conspicuous trench coat. The only complaint against this season may be that it doesn’t move the needle too far on its best asset. There is some potential though, with the recluse J.K. Coe (Tom Brooke) and Shirley getting more material to work with this season, but it is River, Lamb and Catherine whose stories are begging for a payoff.

All episodes of Slow Horses are available for streaming on AppleTV