overnights

Slow Horses Recap: Walk Into It

Slow Horses

From Upshott With Love
Season 2 Episode 2
Editor’s Rating 3 stars

Slow Horses

From Upshott With Love
Season 2 Episode 2
Editor’s Rating 3 stars
Photo: Jack English/Apple TV+

One major advantage of Slow Horses telling a single story over six episodes is pace. Nothing has to be stretched out over more time than necessary. No minor plotting strands need to be dangled for future seasons. Everyone is pulling on the same rope — which, in the second season, is figuring out the death of Richard Bough and figuring out the Russian sleeper-agent program (the “cicadas”) that may still be a threat to national security. The show’s tight integration of characters and story developments is as crucial to its success as Gary Oldman’s salty lead performance as Lamb and the collection of likable underdogs under his command.

After the combustible premiere episode of season two, however, “From Upshott With Love” taps the brakes a bit too hard. Perhaps that’s just the grunt work of a second episode: The first is the hook and the second has the difficult job of moving the pieces where they need to be on the board. But by this time last season, we’d already had a lot of crucial action, including the death of a Slough House agent doing off-the-books work for Taverner and a second agent shot in the head while working alongside River. “From Upshott With Love,” by contrast, focuses almost entirely on the identity and whereabouts of the large bald man who killed Richard Bough and may be linked to Alexander Popov and the “cicada” program. Still compelling stuff, but a little pokier than Slow Horses tends to get.

The identity part is solved right away. Lamb casually slips into a grungy language school and rouses the sleeping man who runs the place, pretending to represent one of his creditors. The man allows Lamb to spin out this fiction for a little while before cutting to the chase: “Fuck off or tell me what you want, Jackson Lamb.” Speaking in a thick Russian accent, the man reveals himself to be Nikolai, a KGB defector who claims to have given up all the information he knew about Moscow operations when he was debriefed, but Lamb thinks he knows more. When pressed over drinks, Nikolai claims to have overheard a bathroom conversation between Popov and a “big bald bull” named Andrei about the need to continue to support the cicadas, even after the Berlin Wall had fallen. On that point, Popov seems to have agreed.

The full name of “big bald bull” who likely killed Bough is Andrei Chernitsky, but the lingering question for Slough House is where Chernitsky went after poisoning Bough on the replacement rail bus. For answers, River goes to a cab-dispatch desk pretending to be looking for an uncle with dementia and gets referred to the driver who took Chernitsky’s fare. It turns out that Chernitsky has bribed the driver to keep his whereabouts secret, but a larger bribe from River persuades him to reveal the airfield where the Russian spy was dropped off. River’s instincts tell him that the driver is a shifty character, however, and that a spy as clever as Chernitsky would have planned for this contingency. And sure enough, he finds the cabbie trying to place a secret phone call and gets the number, which Roddy traces to Estonia.

But Lamb, who finally catches up to River, thinks that Chernitsky has planned even deeper than that. There may be contingencies upon contingencies upon contingencies at work here, premised on Lamb believing that Chernitsky assumed that a professional spy would be competent enough to find the driver and get the number, so the Estonia thing is another trap, not his true location. As Lamb tells River with his signature contempt, “If you uncovered the trail, it couldn’t have been that well-hidden.” But that won’t necessarily shut down any plans to follow through on the Estonia clue, because Lamb seems to believe that “sometimes the only way to work out why a trap has been set is to walk into it.” (Lamb will not be the one doing the walking here.)

At a minimum, Slow Horses does well to set up the extreme craftiness and danger of the foes Lamb & Co. are facing here. Keep in mind, the entire season kicked off with Bough dying in pursuit of Andrei, who’d somehow figured out that he’d been followed. And Bough seems a hell of a lot stealthier than poor Min, whose attempt to get a read on the Russian security guys he and Louisa are working with on the Glasshouse meetup winds up backfiring. Min and Louisa are at least smart enough to snuff out Pushkin’s men as dubious characters, but for Min to follow their car on his bike, where he’s huffing out in the open, is as bad a plan as it looks. Andrei couldn’t have anticipated being followed and he still got the upper hand on Bough. Pushkin’s security guys had to suspect that Slough House would want to know more about them, so they’d be on the lookout for exactly the sort of tail that Min attempts.

And that’s really all there is to “From Upshott With Love,” aside from Lamb persuading Taverner to give him the resources he needs to intensify his investigation into the cicada program. (To say she owes him for trying to throw him under a double-decker bus last season is an understatement.) Min getting found out at the end of the episode gives the show a nice surge heading into the next hour. Let’s hope the remaining four episodes keep the accelerator as pinned to the floor as it was last season.

Shots

• Everyone at Slough House has proven to be smarter and scrappier than their crap assignment — and Lamb’s half-fake contempt — would suggest, but damned if Min doesn’t continue to burnish his reputation as the one genuinely inept agent in house. On top of his careless bike chase, he’s been perpetually late in helping Louisa do the job they’ve been assigned to do — in one instance, because he’d rather have a little afternoon sex instead. Get it together, Min!

• Shirley is a new character, but she fits into the surly atmosphere at Slough House quite nicely. When Roddy and River are at loggerheads over a piece of information, Shirley quickly tracks it down, adding, “I’m only telling you so you’ll stop bickering like a pair of absolute cocks.”

• Lamb on his questionable personal hygiene: “I’ve been busy lately. It’s possible I let myself go.”

• “A man who sticks his nose where it’s not wanted gets his head blown off.” Those Russian proverbs are awfully direct.

Slow Horses Recap: Walk Into It