Slow Horses Recap: Moving Target
Having established himself as the ultimate cool, implacable bad guy in the Matrix movies, Hugo Weaving has brought an instant credibility to the role of Frank Harkness, whose mercenary operation at Les Arbres operates like its own cruel fiefdom in the bleakest town in France. (Lavande means lavender, but the place looks as though it smells of sulfur and moldy croissants.) Accordingly, Slow Horses has worked hard to feed into his persona, offering a slow trickle of wordless shots or small scenes of Harkness while gassing up his reputation as an assassin, a terrorist, and an all-around maniac. If you want someone killed — or a mall full of people killed, perhaps — then he’s your guy.
So it’s extremely funny to see poor Harkness reduced from a Lee Van Cleef type to Jack Lemmon in Glengarry Glen Ross, desperate to sell a disappointed client on a renegotiated contract. “I will fulfill the contract at a discount,” Harkness assures his client, who is big and important enough to be called “Your Highness.” (The on-site butchering squad evokes the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, allegedly ordered by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in 2018, but that connection may be inadvertent.) Harkness’s client is understandably miffed about the successful mall bombing that he didn’t order and the failed assassinations that he did. Harkness’s sweaty attempt at customer service seems to fall on deaf ears: His client has thoughtfully booked multiple levels of the hotel so his gory execution of Harkness will go unheard.
Yet Harkness does manage a last-second reprieve for himself, under the promise that he’ll make sure to rub out David Cartwright and Sam Chapman before midnight. (“I’ll bring the old fucks back here and chop them up myself,” he growls semi-convincingly.) That starts with upbraiding Chapman’s would-be assassin, who’s still nursing injuries from being run over by a taxicab — this after handling three other agents quite capably. But Slow Horses mostly puts Harkness’s renewed efforts on the back burner while focusing on the mad scramble to secure David Cartwright, who’s an important target for Harkness, Chapman, and the Slough House team — and for Diana Taverner and the Dogs, despite the dementia that seems to be overwhelming him.
After getting out from under Catherine Standish’s watch the last episode, David spends “Returns” in the light of day, eager to arrange a meeting with First Desk for a debriefing. Only the Park didn’t exist at the time David seems convinced he’s living in, so he has wandered off to the “old building,” which is now a luxury hotel that nonetheless has a line open to MI5. In the race to retrieve him, Chapman and Standish get to David moments before the Dogs come in with badges flashing, and they manage to slip away with him with Standish yanking an alarm as a diversion and Chapman tucking him into Jackson Lamb’s cab. That turns out to be Chapman’s last act of derring-do, however, as Harkness’s assassin tracks him down and presumably kills him after he refuses to give up David’s location.
While there are still many questions to be answered about why exactly all this business involving David, Chapman, and Harkness is so important to so many parties, Slow Horses keeps kicking that information down the road in order to ramp up the action. The last half of this episode operates as a tense action-thriller with multiple parties — Slough House, the Dogs, the Les Arbres goons — converging on one another at once. That makes River’s arrival back in London of even greater interest than he could have ever anticipated, because Emma Flyte is looking for answers from him over his adventures in France, and Harkness, seen hanging around the train station, presumably believes that River will lead him to his grandfather. It’s Flyte who succeeds in tracking him down — she’s far more competent than her predecessor — but her plans for him are unclear.
After the egregious ineptitude on display in the past couple episodes, the show doesn’t find much time for comic screwups in “Returns,” which probably speaks to the urgency of needing to wrap up this intrigue in short order. It should be noted, though, that Flyte has emerged as a serious player near the level of Lamb and Taverner, who are usually the only characters who can be relied upon to engage in decent spycraft. In fact, a brief meeting between Lamb and Taverner about the dead assassin at Cartwright’s place reveals some independent thinking on Flyte’s part that bothers her boss. Back at the office, Taverner warns her young charge: “Know that I have your best interests at heart when I tell you that the severance package, if you resign, is far more generous than if I fire you.” She seems to feel legitimately threatened by Flyte.
Not so Claude, of course, who defied his Second Desk by putting Giti back in the archives to look further into the “cold-body program” that is being exploited by Les Arbres. Claude tells Taverner that he intends to debrief David personally and that he also wants to conduct an audit of the agency’s identity programs as part of his quest toward greater public accountability. Taverner calls him a “sanctimonious fool” and believes he’s endangering her efforts to stop another attack like the one at Westacres. The show itself seems to agree with her, given how much of a naïve boob Claude appears to be at every moment, though it’s probably a bad habit for spy shows and movies to keep scoffing at the notion of government agencies needing any kind of oversight. It seems certain that his continued defiance of Taverner assures an epic humiliation to come.
Shots:
• Roddy explaining to Shirley how he let Flyte cuff him to his weight machine: “My one weakness is beautiful women, which is why you’re not a threat to me.” We’ve witnessed several other weaknesses.
• JK remains a wallflower at Slough House aside from the tension his Unabomber look and odd tics bring to his scenes. Presumably, the show has plans to make its new character a more vital part of the closing stretch.
• Lamb with the deep dig at Standish for allowing David out of her sight: “You wouldn’t have lost him if he was a bottle of gin.”
• Chapman offers some details about his past at Les Arbres, where he was brought to extract a young woman and was disturbed by what he saw. (“Place was fucked up,” he recalls. “These women and kids hanging around with these psychos.”) The woman wound up giving him the slip, so that’s another loose thread for the show to tie up.