A rumpled spymaster walks into a child’s birthday party uninvited, joins the games, helps himself to the buffet and, somewhere between the cake and the Russian security detail, quietly rearranges the fate of an intelligence operation. That is Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman) in “Judgement Day,” the sixth and final episode of the sixth season of “Slow Horses,” which reached Apple TV on Wednesday, October 21st. It is the funniest stretch of an hour that otherwise spends most of its time trying to keep the show’s people alive. Gaby Chiappe wrote it and Adam Randall directed it, and between them they had the awkward job of finishing two of Mick Herron’s novels, “Joe Country” and “Slough House,” inside six episodes.
The result is a finale that mostly works, tense in its quiet scenes and loud in its loud ones, with one long action sequence that might wear on anyone who came for the talking and a last scene that will start arguments all week. Season six has been a chase from its first episode, with two Russian assassins working through a list of people who passed through Slough House while Diana Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas), the First Desk at MI5, tries to explain how her own off-the-books decision started it, and this is the hour where the chase finally runs out of road. Warning beyond this point there are full spoilers for “Slow Horses” season six episode six, including who dies and how the final scene plays out.
A rumpled spymaster walks into a child’s birthday party uninvited, joins the games, helps himself to the buffet and, somewhere between the cake and the Russian security detail, quietly rearranges the fate of an intelligence operation.”
The hour opens with the Russians. Jane (MyAnna Buring), the surviving assassin, is in a graffiti-covered bathroom stall gluing her car-crash wounds shut and marking up a map, and she is now hunting for revenge as much as for orders, because her partner Jim (Kyle Soller) is dead. Elsewhere, River Cartwright (Jack Lowden) has annoyed the Dogs holding him so thoroughly that they toss him out of their SUV near an airfield, but not before he has lifted a phone, which he uses to tell Lamb that J.K. Coe (Tom Brooke) is dead. Vulture noted that the sigh Oldman lets out at that news carries a surprising amount of weight, and it is the closest the episode comes to letting Lamb grieve out loud. His next stop is Taverner, whom he accuses of taking money from the media mogul Damien Cantor (Harry Lloyd) that arrived in rubles, which means the Russians, and Cantor, who has hired the mercenary Frank Harkness (Hugo Weaving), River’s father, are both now after the people Lamb cares about. Taverner plans to hand Sid Baker (Olivia Cooke) over to the GRU and then confess to the Home Secretary. She tells Lamb she is “taking myself off the board,” but he will not let her do either until his people are safe.
Lamb’s plan has two halves. The first takes him to the party, thrown for the daughter of Natasha Carrington (Zrinka Cvitešić), an oligarch’s daughter who has been running the Russian clean-up operation behind the Kazan killing for the GRU boss Vassily Rasnokov. Lamb tells her the GRU needs someone to blame and that she should offer Moscow a “double agent mastermind,” and when she insists no such person exists, his answer, in Decider’s recap, is that he is not asking whether she would buy it, only whether she can sell it. Chiappe told Gold Derby the party was the idea of Sophie Goodhart, who wrote episodes three and five, after the writers decided they needed “something kind of mad.” The second half is Cantor. Taverner empties a restaurant with a bomb threat, tells him what she spent his money on and sends him to an airfield, where the man at the wheel of his car turns out to be Lamb. Cantor phones Harkness to call off the hunt, hoping it will save him. It saves everyone but him, since he is handed to the Russians as a double agent who never existed. Vulture called the confrontation between Lamb and Taverner the most gripping scene of the finale, and the sight of two longtime rivals finally working as allies is probably why.
Meanwhile the rest of Slough House is hiding in Taverner’s glass-walled vacation home on the Suffolk coast: Louisa Guy (Rosalind Eleazar), Catherine Standish (Saskia Reeves), Moira Tregorian (Joanna Scanlan), Shirley Dander (Aimee-Ffion Edwards), Roddy Ho (Christopher Chung), the ex-Dog Emma Flyte (Ruth Bradley) and the teenager Reece Nesmith (Lenny Rush), whose father Harkness killed earlier in the season. Before anything explodes they have a family argument at the table, in which Shirley and Louisa go at each other over a stolen diamond from seasons back. The A.V. Club thought that scene, more than the gunplay, was the real payoff to getting so many characters around one table. Then the glass wall shatters as Harkness and his two mercenaries open fire, smoke fills the house and the Molotov cocktails come out, which Esquire summed up as the Alamo in cable-knit jumpers. The survivors run through the tall grass to a beach, which turns out to be no safer.
The beach is where the episode takes its price. Flyte covers the others, kills one of Harkness’s men, hits Harkness in the leg, and then runs out of bullets, throws her gun at him and is shot dead on the sand. She is the only member of the Slough House side to die in the hour, the A.V. Club pointed out, and Louisa is lucky to be alive after taking a bullet from Jane. Roddy, who cannot hit anything, sees Flyte’s body and runs back to help, and Reece, taught by Shirley, puts a harpoon through the mercenary who has Roddy in his sights. Chung told TV Insider that it was the first dead body Roddy had ever seen in real life, and that this is the moment that humanizes him. Chiappe told Gold Derby the deaths this season come “directly from the books,” with one departure: in the novel Harkness is not the one who shoots Flyte, and giving it to him was partly a reminder not to get sentimental about him.
Back at the house, Cantor’s phone call has stood Harkness down, and he is pouring himself a drink when River rolls down the stairs holding a table lamp with Jane close behind. Harkness shoots her in the head and offers his son a drink. River asks whether he could not just have been a normal dad, Harkness answers with a line the A.V. Club and Vulture both heard as an echo of Norma Desmond, “the jobs that got small,” and River points a gun at him as a helicopter full of MI5 backup lands. He cannot pull the trigger. Chiappe told Gold Derby the scene does not exist in the books, but that nobody could believe River shooting his father at close range, and Harkness leaves with a parting suggestion that River look into what his grandfather got up to.
The politics wrap up as neatly as the violence does not. Taverner goes to the Home Secretary and does not confess to anything, selling out Peter Judd (Samuel West) instead, and walks away unharmed. The survivors gather in a church to drink to their dead, Coe above all. Louisa is hurt but alive and, according to Ready Steady Cut, still uninterested in coming back, and Standish stays sober. The A.V. Club noted that Standish and Lamb get no resolution over his killing her former boss, which fits a show that distrusts catharsis. Before River leaves, Standish tells him his grandfather’s neighbor noticed a light on at the house, a message River reads as code that Sid is waiting for him.
He drives straight there. Sid is upstairs, the shower is running, and River, to the sound of Nick Drake’s “One of These Things First,” makes tea, lights a candle, opens a bottle of wine and moves the crowbar he left on the counter earlier in the day. Then his right hand starts to bother him. He starts to pant, reaches for his phone, and collapses before he can use it, and the season ends on the sight of him on the floor. It is a brutal piece of timing for a man who has just spent an hour surviving gunfire, and the A.V. Club said it lands like “the punchline of a cosmic joke.”
Chiappe told Gold Derby the groundwork was laid earlier in the season, when Jim and Jane come knocking while River and Sid are hiding and Jim sees the crowbar River brought in, and “we have to assume,” she said, that he coated it with a Novichok. She said there was “a lot of debate” about whether viewers would recognize what had happened. The books offer some comfort, because River survives the poisoning in Herron’s novels, according to Decider and Vulture, though Vulture adds that he is mostly a non-presence in “Bad Actors,” the book behind season seven. The season seven teaser has no sign of him, and when Standish asks whether Lamb has heard from River, Lamb says he got a postcard saying “Weather’s lovely in the afterlife,” per Decider and the Independent. Vulture and the Independent both note that Lowden is rumored as a James Bond candidate, though Vulture cautions that the teaser is an editing trick that says nothing either way about the next season. The Times called the finale taut and satisfying. The A.V. Club called the beach battle “the dullest part of the finale.” Together they sound about right: an episode that is at its best when people are talking, and might have been better if it had trusted that more.
What Do You Think? Was Diana Taverner’s survival the right ending for the season, or did the show let her off too easily? Does the beach fight earn its length, or is the A.V. Club right that the talking scenes are where “Slow Horses” lives? And is River Cartwright really gone, or is that postcard line the show having fun with its audience before season seven?
See you on the next binge!
