A man stands in a field of shipping containers pitching stackable tiny homes to two investors who are not investors. They break his arm, put him inside one of the containers and set it on fire. That man is Struan Loy, a former Slow Horse, and the joke the show has been making about him for years is that he was too useless even for Slough House, which is the department the Service uses to store the agents it cannot quite bring itself to sack. “Slow Horses” opened its sixth season on Apple TV this morning by killing him in the first few minutes, and the episode is called “Circle of Life.”
Season six runs six episodes, weekly through 21 October, and it is adapted from “Joe Country” and “Slough House,” the sixth and seventh novels in Mick Herron’s Slough House series, which he is still writing. Apple ordered an eighth season yesterday, one day before any of this aired, which tells you how confident they are in a run of episodes almost nobody outside the production has seen. Warning beyond this point there are full spoilers for “Slow Horses” season six episode one, including who dies, what has happened to Slough House itself, a revelation about Jackson Lamb’s past, and who is standing at the back of the funeral.
They break his arm, put him inside one of the containers and set it on fire.”
What makes the opening work is that it is not an action sequence, and the premiere generally refuses to give you one. There is no mission briefing, no operation, no elaborate set piece to establish stakes. Instead the hour introduces four or five apparently unrelated problems and lets the unease come from the growing suspicion that they are not unrelated at all, which is a much harder trick to pull off and the thing this series has always been best at.
The two men who killed Struan Loy do not stop there. They reach Kay White with a warning, and then they turn their attention toward River Cartwright (Jack Lowden). Emma Flyte (Ruth Bradley) gets word to Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman) that something is moving, and she does it against Diana Taverner’s explicit instruction to keep quiet, which is its own small piece of information about where loyalty currently sits inside the Park. Lamb and River, to the show’s credit, work out fairly quickly that Loy’s death was deliberate rather than the industrial accident somebody dressed it up as, and the speed of that is deliberate too, because the season does not want you wondering whether this is a murder. It wants you wondering who is next.
Then the episode produces its best idea, and it is an administrative one. Slough House has been deleted from the official record. Not closed, not defunded, deleted, which means the salaries have stopped and the building is simply a property the Service happens to own. Diana Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas) sends an estate agent round to value the building, and J.K. Coe (Tom Brooke) throws a keyboard at him, which is roughly the level of institutional resistance Slough House is able to mount. Catherine Standish (Saskia Reeves) learns from Moira Tregorian (Joanna Scanlan) that the erasure was not a clerical error but a decision somebody took on purpose. It is a genuinely nasty idea for a spy show, because the threat is not that these people will be killed, it is that they were never officially there, which makes killing them considerably easier and considerably quieter.
The centre of the hour is a funeral. David Cartwright, River’s grandfather and the old Service man the show has orbited since its first season, dies off screen before the episode starts. The Park gives him a quiet Service send-off, and River delivers a eulogy about a grandfather who had a long and unremarkable career in Transport, which is the lie the family has always told and the one nobody in the room believes. Filming a death off screen is a risk, because it denies the audience the scene it expects, but it pays for itself here by turning the episode into a gathering rather than a reaction.
Almost every thread the hour has opened converges at that graveside. Peter Judd (Samuel West) tells Diana that the money keeping her operation running does not come from him at all, but from an anonymous third party, which is a considerably more alarming sentence than it first appears. Roddy Ho (Christopher Chung) quietly tells Lamb that another Slow Horse is dead. And Diana tells Catherine Standish that Jackson Lamb killed Charles Partner, which lands in the middle of a funeral with no ceremony whatsoever and reframes a piece of the show’s own history. Whether Catherine does anything with it is probably the question the season is actually asking, because she is the one person in the building who might.
The last shot belongs to River. He looks up from the grave and sees a man standing at a distance, watching, and the man is Frank Harkness (Hugo Weaving), the American mercenary who happens to be his estranged father and who has been one of the more genuinely frightening things this series has produced. River goes after him, and Harkness is gone before he gets anywhere near, and the episode ends without explaining what he wanted, how long he had been standing there, or whether he came for the funeral or for his son. That is the correct place to stop.
A couple of names on Apple’s announced cast list are worth watching for, given what this episode does. Lenny Rush, who has a BAFTA and is one of the more interesting young performers working in British television, joins this season, and Apple has still not said who he is playing. Jonathan Pryce is on the list as well, which is quietly intriguing when the character he has played since season one dies off screen before the premiere begins, so either the funeral is not the last we see of David Cartwright or the show has something else in mind. Olivia Cooke’s Sidonie Baker was confirmed as returning when the trailer landed in August, and the rest of the regular bench, Rosalind Eleazar and Aimee-Ffion Edwards among them, is intact.
It is worth noting what this hour does not do, because it is the reason the season opener works. Nobody fires a gun, and there is no chase that resolves. The dead man in the cold open is a character most viewers had half forgotten, and the show trusts you to feel the loss anyway, because the joke about Struan Loy was always that he was disposable, and the episode takes that joke and lands it as a threat. If you wanted a premiere that announced itself, this is not it.
There is also a structural question hanging over the season that this episode quietly answers. Season six is adapting two of Mick Herron’s novels, “Joe Country” and “Slough House,” across six hours, where every previous season has taken one book at a time. That is aggressive compression, and it might be the reason the premiere feels so crowded with separate threads, because it may simply be carrying two books worth of setup at once. On the evidence of an hour that never once feels rushed, the compression is working, though we will not really know until the middle of the run.
There is one piece of context worth holding beside all this. Season six is the first written without Will Smith, who adapted Herron’s novels and ran the show from the beginning before leaving after season five, with Gaby Chiappe taking over here. On the evidence of an hour, the tone has survived the handover, and the reason may be that Adam Randall directs this season and Randall won the Outstanding Directing Emmy for “Slow Horses” in 2025. The writing changed hands, but the eye behind the camera did not, and on this evidence that may be the more important of the two.
What Do You Think? Does deleting Slough House from the record work as a season-long engine, or is it a bureaucratic threat the show will have to escalate into something louder? What do you make of Diana choosing a funeral to tell Catherine what Lamb did to Charles Partner? And is Frank Harkness watching that grave a promise the season can keep, or the sort of tease that gets resolved too early?
See you on the next binge!
