Recap: ‘Slow Horses’ Season 4 Is Less Lively In Episode 2, But Connections Are Revealed

Slow Horses Season 4 continues a string of rather obvious titling practices with Episode 2, “A Stranger Comes to Town”, which is about, among other things, a stranger coming to town.

The stranger is River Cartwright, and the town is Lavande, in France. Or, the stranger is a French assassin and the town is London, though admittedly London isn’t a town so it doesn’t work as well that way around. Nevertheless, it’s an episode about operatives on foreign soil, teasing out the margins of a conspiracy that does indeed connect to a terrorist bombing, though it remains unclear, as yet, exactly how.

Who’s That Guy?

“A Stranger Comes to Town” opens by returning us to David Cartwright’s house, giving some additional context to what we half-saw in the Season 4 premiere, though this time from River’s perspective.

As it turns out River arrived after the shooting. He found David upstairs in the bathroom, crying, believing he had shot his grandson to death. After a bit of initial panic, he gives a pretty good recounting of the events — someone claiming to be River knocked on his door, entered, and suggested drawing him a bath. David believed the imposter was River until he referred to him as “Gramps”, which River would never do. Then he shot him.

David’s a bit worried about having shot an innocent, unarmed man in cold blood, but as River points out, a doppelganger of his grandson didn’t turn up and offer to draw him a bath out of the goodness of his heart. His pockets contain a passport under the name Adam Lockhead, a return train ticket to France, a receipt for Le Blanc Russe, a cafe in Lavande, and a packet of diazepam. River’s theory is that he planned to drug David and drown him.

In his confusion David presses his panic button, putting a timer on the whole affair. River relieved Lockhead of his possessions, planted his own ID and phone on him, and shot him in the face to obscure his identity. That would give him enough time to get David to Standish’s place, where Lamb found him at the end of the premiere.

Office Politics

Speaking of Lamb, he thinks David is hiding the details behind his dementia and putting an act on, which doesn’t seem to be the case to me — or, for that matter, Catherine Standish — but Lamb’s cynicism around the OB is informed by years working underneath him. This connection may also make Lamb himself a target.

Either way, David isn’t very helpful, but luckily Standish went through River’s pockets and found the Adam Lockhead passport, and the receipt from Le Blanc Russe. Lamb, having intuited that River has retraced the assassin’s steps to France, takes his Jaffa Cakes and leaves, returning to Slough House to find the gang mourning River’s apparent demise and his office cleaned and rearranged courtesy of Moira, whom Whelan sent there for reasons that are as yet unclear.

Lamb is less annoyed about Roddy having mistranslated his message — although, to be fair, how else was “identifying River’s body” supposed to be interpreted? — than he is about the office, so he takes Moira out for lunch and cuts through the act. There are, after all, only two reasons a person finds themselves at Slough House — they’re either incompetent, which she isn’t, or have annoyed someone, which she might’ve. Lamb agrees to find out and get her sent back to The Park if she’ll do him a small favor and use her database contacts to find out if David Cartwright ever went to France.

Who Was Robert Winters?

At MI5, a plucky agent named Giti Rahman makes an exciting discovery in the Westacres bombing case. Despite all of his documentation appearing entirely above board, Robert Winters’ passport was seemingly issued by MI5. She takes this to Diana Taverner, who immediately instructs Flyte to isolate her.

Eventually, Diana calls back and tells Giti that it was all a big misunderstanding — Robert Winter, without the “S”, was an MI5 identity; Winters was nothing to do with the agency. Flyte — who is somewhat dissatisfied playing the role of babysitter — is dismissed and allowed to get back on with the Cartwright case. But Diana is, of course, lying.

This is confirmed when Diana drags Whelan into the field for a candid chat on the back of a bus like a couple of teenagers. Winters was what’s known as a “cold body”, a ready-made identity from the end of the Cold War. It’s a collection of all the very legitimate records that comprise a person, given out to — presumably — those who require a new identity with some degree of urgency. The question now is why someone who was gifted a new life by MI5 would drive a bomb into a shopping center and blow themselves up.

Whelan shows his uselessness here. He’s panicking about being out in the field, to begin with, even though all he has to do is get on a bus, and he tries to scold Diana for not coming to him with this in the first instance. She knew he’d blow the whistle to the PM, though, which he claims he’s going to do anyway, but luckily when she visited him earlier she tricked him into signing the authorization to sequester Giti, so it looks like he’s part of the cover-up.

That’ll teach you not to sign documents without reading them.

Kristin Scott Thomas in “Slow Horses” | Image via Apple TV+

David Cartwright Wasn’t the Only Target

David Cartwright’s house is still a crime scene, so it’s weird that the uniformed copper there doesn’t find it odd for a supposedly lost Frenchman to be asking questions about the event. It’s weirder still that the policeman confirms to the Frenchman that it wasn’t the old man who was shot, but the grandson. If you’ve ever wondered what policemen keep under their helmets, rest assured that it isn’t brains.

Anyway, the Frenchman calls his boss, who is still in France, and lets him know the latest. From this conversation, we learn that the dead guy in David’s bath was named Bertrand, and was indeed sent to kill David. We also learn that there is another target that this second Frenchman is tasked with taking out — another old guy who used to work for David. Jackson Lamb, perchance?

River Seine

River spends the entirety of Slow Horses Season 4, Episode 2 in France, retracing the assassin’s steps from the receipt in his pocket and walking straight into an obvious trap.

The only thing River has to go on is the name of a cafe in Lavande and the fact he’s looking for a man who has a passing resemblance to himself. He, like the policeman back in London, doesn’t find it weird that the barista claims to know the guy he’s looking for and points him in the direction of a dilapidated chateau in the middle of nowhere. He doesn’t spot a guy blatantly following him, either.

That chateau is where the French assassin’s boss is lurking. River pokes around and finds the place otherwise deserted and decaying. Of particular note on the premises is what looks like it was once a child’s bedroom, with crude drawings on the wall and a big mural of a forest and some frolicking animals, which River takes a photo of, and a training area with gym equipment, a paper target, and several books about military strategy.

Inside one of those books, River finds a photograph of four men posing proudly over the corpse of a deer they’ve shot. One of them is Robert Winters. And thus, we have our connection.

While River’s leaving, he’s distracted by a fire inside and ambushed by the villain, who almost kills him until he’s saved by the fella who was following him earlier, who barges in brandishing a shotgun, scares the bad guy off, and drags River outside. But River’s savior doesn’t seem to like him very much either, since when River thanks him, he knocks him out with the butt of the shotgun and drives him away from the chateau as the flames engulf it.

And Another Thing…

Some brief additional notes about Slow Horses Season 4, Episode 2 that I couldn’t fit into the recap:

• Marcus has started gambling again. He’s in debt to the tune of ten grand and his master plan is to sell a gun on the black market, put the proceeds down on a “sure thing”, and then use his winnings to save his house and buy back the gun before it hits the streets. Shirley thinks the plan is bananas, and she has a point.