After four years of living with Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman) and Diana Tarvener’s (Kristin Scott Thomas) coldness and detachment from everyone, including the people they interact with the most, it’s worrying when the two try to save lives and end the season shaken by the ones they’ve lost. So it’s easy to point to season 4 as the darkest and most revealing of all in Slow Horses.

For spies who dismiss people as nothing, the reckoning with the past is long and significant, part of that accounting came to David Cartwright (Jonathan Pryce) in the last remnants of his memory, before senility forced River (Jack Lowden) to commit him to a nursing home, breaking both their hearts.

Nothing about the conclusion of this story is happy: the terrorist Frank Harkness (Hugo Weaving) dismisses his soldier-sons without any regret, tries to recruit River into his business, is arrested, and yet remains calm because he knows he has the heads of MI5 in his pocket. He will also interfere in the life of his son, whom he is both proud of and hateful at the same time.

His bold plan for a terrorist attack hired as a side-effect of personal revenge goes wrong when his son and soldier take his own life at the beginning of the season. As a result, the attack is exposed and Frank ends up in debt to the person who hired him and is being pursued by the police and MI5. In the past, he took advantage of River’s mother so that David would supply weapons in exchange for the lives of his daughter and grandson. Since David is a link that identifies him, he needs to eliminate him. As River points out, his grandfather is now demented and doesn’t remember anything, so he’s “gone”. The problem now is that Frank admires his son, and we are far from having said goodbye to the villain.

There are many losses throughout the season and they are all felt hard by Lamb, reinforcing his cynicism and hopelessness when he realizes that even being the best and agile, it is impossible to protect people from the worst. Perhaps the last straw was the death of Marcus Longridge trying to save his colleagues at Slough House. Lamb is tired of seeing people struggling to do the right thing and being defeated by the system. He demands from Diana a posthumous recognition for Marcus both in terms of a pension for the family and a history in the system, which she does not discuss because she is also disappointed with the world, even if she is still practical.

Lamb was most shaken by the death of Sam Chapman, an agent who was like him and who almost escaped, but was killed on Harkness’ orders. Whether this death will change Lamb, we are not yet sure, but it is very strange to see him genuinely devastated.

The big revelation here is the mistaken tendency to underestimate Claude Whelan (James Callis). The new head of MI5, like his predecessor, has personal secrets that make him vulnerable and, just like Ingrid Tearney (Sophie Okonedo) before him, he is ruthless if it becomes a matter of survival. He orders the terrorists to “shoot to kill” as well as River, apparently as a coincidence but also possibly to erase something that puts him at risk. Seriously, even Diana tried to stop him and was shocked by the order given, luckily River really is a lucky bumbler and once again escaped.

Diana was surprised by Claude’s cold blood in this episode, but she still doesn’t know what Frank Harkness left in the blackmail letter to the director (probably something other than a history with prostitutes that was later revealed by someone else).

The farewell scene between River and David at the nursing home is moving. River only has his grandfather as a reference and source of affection, now he is isolated and aware of his biological origin, which makes him even more numb. Lamb has managed to get an “operational bonus” for himself and the nags, still barely maintaining the facade of indifference, but he knows what the agent is going through and, in his own style, offers him a drink “as long as he keeps quiet”.

It’s a hug that only Slow Horses can give us: full of cynicism and nuances. The subtleties of everyone’s performances, but especially Oldman, Lowden, and Pryce, make us laugh and cry at the same time. Their disillusionment, loneliness, empathy, and frustration in the face of obstacles never miss a chance to shine through in the actors’ looks and gestures. David, a shadow of the man he once was, thinks that River committed him to get revenge for the secret about Frank, which increases the grandson’s pain of doing his best to save his grandfather and at the same time feeling resentful for never having been told the truth. And Lamb, who knows David was a cruel man, also recognizes that he was loving enough to save and raise his grandson as a man of integrity, something neither of them were at the height of their careers. Lamb both chafes at and loves River’s idealism, tortuously already He had been mentoring the boy, but when he saw more lives lost, he appreciated his survival skills, silently taking the place left by David in River’s life. Of course, without losing his own way of acting.

We will meet again in 2025, with more confusion, explosions, and deaths. I miss him already!

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