‘Slow Horses’ Just Gave Us Its Most Harrowing, Powerful Episode Yet

The Season 4 finale of Apple TV’s masterful spy drama Slow Horses was quite possibly the best episode of the entire series. The finale wrapped up the season’s plot nicely while leaving one huge wild card at play. It balanced high-octane action scenes with moments of real tragedy. And it did all this while leaving some breathing room for a moving denouement, giving our heroes one of the best—and most understated—moments of calm in the entire four-season run.

I’ll tell you one thing: The preview for Season 5 at the end really left me salivating. I know Apple is going to make us wait, but they’ve already filmed it so at least we know there’s no impending cancellation on the horizon.

Slow Horses is such a breath of fresh air in a TV landscape dotted with low-effort nonsense. Don’t get me wrong, I have lots and lots of great shows on my docket, but there’s something about the tone of Slow Horses and the economy of its writing and pacing that really makes it shine. The Season 4 finale achieved so much in one episode but never felt rushed. The pacing was perfect, and every storyline had a satisfying—if at times terribly sad—resolution.

What I love about this series is how it can be so funny, so suspenseful and so emotionally poignant all at once without every feeling like I’m suffering from tonal whiplash. Spoilers ahead.

I’ll use an example from the season finale to illustrate this point. At one point during the episode, Frank Harkness (Hugo Weaving) is sitting with his son, River Cartwright (Jack Lowden) at a busy London restaurant offering him a job. He wants River to join his gang of assassins, an offer which River strenuously declines. As they talk, Harkness’s other son—Patrice the Terminator (Tom Wozniczka)—gets a voicemail on Bad Bob Chapman’s (Sean Gilder) phone from Moira (Joanna Scanlan) alerting him to the whereabouts of David Cartwright (Jonathan Pryce): Slough House.

He heads there immediately, and the ensuing gunfight is a desperate battle for survival as the Slow Horses attempt to fend him off. Luckly, Marcus Longridge (Kadiff Kirwan) has retrieved the handgun he pawned earlier in the season, and is able to cover their retreat upstairs. Newcomer J.K. Coe (Tom Brooke) innovates, throwing a boiling electric tea kettle at their assailant. Meanwhile, in the upstairs office, Moira and Catherine Standish (Saskia Reeves) scramble to barricade the door, hiding David and Roddy Ho (Christopher Chung) in the bathroom.

Coe escapes out the back and Longridge, after winging the Terminator, helps Shirley Dander (Aimee-Ffion Edwards) reach relative safety. Then he goes back out to finish the job. There’s an incredibly tense moment when he spots Patrice and a gunshot goes off, but we don’t know who took the bullet. Neither do the cowering members of Slough House. They can see a figure moving through the fogged glass, but can’t tell who it is. Shirley has the semi-loaded revolver pointing at the door when Patrice bursts in and she manages to shoot him, but he doesn’t go down for long. Just as he’s about to shoot her, Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman) shows up, back from Chapman’s office. He tosses the bottle he pilfered there at the back of Patrice’s head and the assassin goes down. Shirley rushes him, pummeling him on the ground and they finally manage to cuff him to the radiator.

She goes to find Marcus, but Lamb tells her not to. She goes anyways, and finds her friend’s body. When she returns, she places the pistol to Patrice’s forehead, enraged. “Do it!” he shouts. The rest of them plead with her not to. Killing an unarmed man in cold blood isn’t like killing out of necessity.

“Marcus wouldn’t have wanted this,” Coe says suddenly, having materialized at some point. Coe, as we all know, rarely speaks but when he does it’s always from a place of remarkably keen observation. “How would you know what Marcus would want?” Dander snipes back.

“I know that he loved you,” Coe replies. “And that he wanted you to love yourself.” This stops her cold, and I admit brought tears to my eyes. I was already feeling the sting of Marcus’s death, but to have his and Shirley’s fractious friendship distilled down to this raw place really hit hard. Angrily, she hands Coe the gun and storms from the room.

After she leaves, Coe examines the weapon and then points it at Patrice. He fires two quick rounds into the killer’s chest and puts one in his forehead for good measure. Then he stands, sets the gun down, lifts his hood over his head and puts his earbuds in, and saunters away without a care in the world. Moira and Standish look on in shock.

This moment perfectly encapsulates everything about Slow Horses that I love. Real human emotion. Edge-of-your-seat action. Humor. Surprise. Incredibly well-written dialogue, and characters who surprise us but never because they act stupid or make choices that don’t make sense. Marcus has always been brave, but his bravery here was also an act of self-sacrifice. Lamb showing up in the nick-of-time and saving the day with a bottle of booze is hilariously on-the-nose (in the best way). Ho refusing to come out of the bathroom because he suspects the all-clear is a trick? Classic Ho.

The final scenes of the Season 4 finale also hit hard. River at last takes his grandfather to a care home, having finally realized that he can’t take care of him on his own. The very near scrape with death both men experienced has made up his mind, but David isn’t happy. “You promised you would never do this to me,” he tells his grandson. “How long do you expect me to live here?” “This is your home now,” River says. When he walks away, his grandfather calls after him. “You promised me, River! You promised me!”

It’s incredibly sad. You really feel for both men. Outside, River gets a call and goes to meet Lamb at a bar, where Lamb hands him paperwork to fill out. “That’s why you brought me here?” River asks, incredulously.

“Well you can stay if you want,” Lamb says nonchalantly. “If you get your own and don’t say a word.” River smiles, orders a drink, and the two men sit in silence together, sharing perhaps their first moment of real camaraderie and companionship together as the scene fades to black and the credits roll.

I often talk about how much I love Gary Oldman in this show, and that’s certainly as true now as it ever was, but this season and this episode in particular really made me appreciate what a stellar cast this show has, and how great so many of the characters are, even in much smaller roles. It’s no easy thing to make every character shine, but this series does so deftly and makes us care about each of them.

I can think of no better way to end the season, and frankly this would have worked as an excellent series finale, though I’m glad it’s not.

The bad guy is caught by his own son, but gets away in the end thanks to MI5 and the CIA’s own misdeeds. Our heroes save the day but at great cost. Our two main protagonists, Lamb and River, grow closer in spite of all their differences, deepening their bond whether Lamb wants to or not. And Moira gets her job back at MI5 thanks to a little soft blackmail of First Desk, Claude Whelan (Jamis Callis) the new thorn in the side of Diana Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas). All told, a brilliant season. Perhaps the best yet.

I suppose I can test that theory by rewatching the first three to tide me over before Season 5. What did you think? Let me know on TwitterInstagram or Facebook. Also be sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel and follow me here on this blog. Sign up for my newsletter for more reviews and commentary on entertainment and culture.