Recap: ‘Slow Horses’ Season 4, Episode 5 Is Firing On All Cylinders

Slow Horses operates at such a consistently high level that it didn’t occur to me until midway through Episode 5 of Season 4, “Grave Danger”, that this is the penultimate episode of the season. The realization crept up on me. The writing is always smart and efficient; the plot is always revealing new pieces to the puzzle. It was the chaos that gave it away. Once I paused and took stock of the very real danger that several characters find themselves in, I realized that the stakes have been dramatically raised.

Controlled chaos is, I think, the secret weapon of Slow Horses. Because even though “Grave Danger” is quite densely packed with stuff happening, none of it is superfluous. Everything exists to drive us at a breakneck pace to the upcoming finale, which will have a fair few loose ends to tie up but a tremendous sense of momentum leading us in. I’m highly confident that Apple TV+’s crown jewel will once again stick the landing. After all, Season 5 is already confirmed.

David Spills His Secrets to Lamb

A lot of the tension comes from the more direct involvement of Frank Harkness, who at the start of the episode threatens to cut off Molly Doran’s finger and gouge one of her eyes out if she doesn’t let him into the Park’s computer network. Frank is frightening not because of what he does – we haven’t actually seen him commit any violence personally – but what he represents. He knows significantly more about England’s intelligence apparatus than seems reasonable, and his pet Terminator assassin, Patrice, is so visibly subservient to him that you have to wonder how cruelly he has exerted his influence to inspire such loyalty.

With Chapman having been killed by Patrice in the previous episode, attention turns to Jackson Lamb and the slow horses, since Chapman likely shared details of Les Arbres and Harkness with them. What Harkness doesn’t realize is that Lamb already has access to David Cartwright, his still-living initial target. With a characteristic lack of finesse, Lamb takes David to his wife’s grave and gaslights him into believing he shot River after all to make David admit what’s really going on.

The revelation is that David sent Chapman to France to rescue his daughter from Harkness. As speculated, the woman Chapman brought back to Blighty was indeed David’s daughter, potentially – though this remains unconfirmed for now – River’s mother. David gave Harkness, whose desire has always been to raise a completely autonomous mercenary outfit from birth, what he wanted, on behalf of the British government, to save a loved one.

Claude and Diana See Eye-to-Eye

Kristin Scott Thomas and James Callis as Diana Taverner and Claude Whelan | Image via Apple TV+

You can see now why this is quite the conspiracy. MI5 armed an international terror cell willingly. Claude Whelan doesn’t have all of this information yet, but he has enough of it to have performed a complete about-face on his personality. His initial intention to establish accountability and accessibility within the Service has been replaced by an immediate desire to bury this whole affair somewhere it’ll never be found. Harkness’s assassins, with “cold body” identities coming straight from the British government, can be linked directly to the assassination of a Chechen intelligence agent in Munich, and a Palestinian human rights lawyer in Paris, and probably a laundry list of other professional killings.

Claude’s rapid unraveling – lent an air of fitting ridiculousness by his trying to explain it all in a PowerPoint presentation that won’t cooperate – finally gets him on the same page as Diana Taverner, who wanted to bury the scandal immediately, having intuited that the truth of it would be something totally out of alignment with Claude’s “triple-A promise.”

“Grave Danger” Lives Up To Its Title

Slow Horses Season 4, Episode 5 is also the point where the Slough House agents actually make themselves useful. Shirley, Marcus, Standish, and Moira – with no help whatsoever from Coe, who only takes his earphones out for long enough to tell everyone how useless and dysfunctional they are – manage to retrace Patrice’s steps after getting run over by Lamb during his attempted assassination of Chapman in Episode 3. Moira makes some calls to check a database of backstreet doctors, and they discover that one of them died recently. From there, it’s a small affair to find CCTV footage of Patrice leaving the scene.

River, meanwhile, who was captured by Flyte at the end of the previous episode, pushes her to circulate the photograph of Harkness and his men, including Robert Winters, far and wide. Flyte doesn’t like or trust River, but she doesn’t particularly trust Taverner either. The whole situation’s a mess, so she does as he asks, even though River won’t share any more details.

“Grave Danger” ends with River and Flyte being put in exactly that. Patrice ambushes their convoy – Harkness was using Molly’s access to track River – and T-bones the lead car in the convoy. In a flurry of gunfire he manages to kill the other Dogs in the car, then knocks Flyte unconscious by smashing her head against the remaining window. In a bit of a hurry, Patrice drags River into a bystander’s car, leaving him in considerable peril just in time for the finale.

Read More: Slow Horses Season 4 Ending Explained