Slow Horses
Episode 1 Preview And Review
Episode 1 of Slow Horses begins in an airport, as the flight is about to depart for Marrakech. An agent named Cartwright is in the middle of it and believes he sees a terrorist. The woman who oversees this operation, Diana Taverner, gives the green light for the arrest of the suspect. When he’s knocked down, it turns out he’s the wrong guy.
The real culprit is on the other side of the airport, currently waiting to go through biometric passport control. It’s incredibly unreal (as anyone who’s used them will tell you!) given how fast it goes through these doors.
Anyway, our suspect goes into the restroom near arrivals and changes his bags. Screaming with alarms, Cartwright follows him as he disembarks at Stanstead International train station. She makes it just in time and confronts the man….only for him to pull the rope and send the earth sky high.
We then move on to “MI-useless” or Slough House as it is fondly referred to. It’s a vault full of rejected MI5 agents, and Jackson Lamb is running the front operations.
Sid, the golden girl, is the only girl who takes a good look at the Lamb, and the rest seem to be just out for a walk, itching to get their hands dirty and get back to the field. For now, their job consists of all the dirty, dirty work, including sifting through garbage and cleaning up numerous data logs.
Their target is a man named Hobden, though Cartwright is tasked with finding information on Simmonds (we’ll get to that later.) For now, Sid manages to trick Hobden into leaving his guards in the diner. After pouring tea on the laptop, he hurriedly grabs its USB stick and copies the files.
Cartwright eventually returns to his headquarters, facing his past. There he meets Carl Unger (aka Spider), the man who gave him false information during the train station explosion. “A white shirt with a blue tee” were his words, causing Cartwright to get confused and end up at Slough House.
Now, it’s at this point that we learn that the exciting event we saw at the beginning of the episode was actually just a rehearsal.
Back at Slough House, Cartwright starts watching videos of right-wing nut work, claiming that those arriving in England on their boats should face the Navy. Oh and Britain should be kept British. No, it’s not Priti Patel, Home Secretary and Sith in training, it’s actually videos for a sleazy businessman called Greg Simmonds, who came up with a logo that looks a lot like the Tories’. This show isn’t even subtle, is it?
MI5 believe that Simmonds is funding hate groups, and so Cartwright is desperate to find him. But Lamb soon puts him in his place, revealing that he has nothing to do in the office after 5 p.m. If he continues, Lamb promises to make his life hell. River Cartwright returns home and talks to his grandfather David.
Here we learn that he was a communist until he changed sides in his youth. According to David, a list of his donations to the British Patriotic Party was leaked – which Hobden believes MI5 uncovered.
Meanwhile, a young man is kidnapped from the streets that night by a group of hooded thugs. Bagged and bound, he paraded on television that morning, with a right-wing nationalist group called the Sons of Albion taking all the credit. They even promise to behead him before sunrise.
Slough House wants to try and work on the case, but Lamb, believing Hobden to be a part of it, asks them to go back to their desks and get on with their routines. Cartwright is having none of this and decides to take to the streets.
Episode Review
Slow Horses gets things off to a pretty promising start, despite the purely political messaging here. Look, we all know the Conservative Party is evil incarnate, but the fact that this show is bashing you over the head with that message distracts from more important elements like building up the various characters. It’s still early days, so we’ll have to wait and see where this goes next.
There’s definitely an air of Suspense here (AppleTV’s espionage thriller), right down to the kidnappings, the musical score and the conflicted police force. However, this show definitely has an edge with solid acting, some good characters, and a more compelling premise. There’s certainly a lot to like about it, and with another chapter already out today, thankfully we don’t have to wait too long to find out what happens next.