Slow Horses Season 4 doesn’t have a happy ending. It’s actually rather bleak. No justice is done. Painful sacrifices are made. There really seems to be no upside to being a spy, at least not one who works at Slough House. This has been true all season, and really for the three prior to this one, but it’s perhaps truer than ever in Episode 6.
But “Hello Goodbye” is also an expertly crafted hour of television. That’s undeniable. This finale is, if nothing else, a show operating at the absolute top of its game, proving that this is the crown jewel in Apple TV+’s streaming slate. And it’ll remain so for at least another season since there are plenty more stories to tell about Slough House and the Slow Horses.
The Beginning of the End
“Hello Goodbye” begins where the penultimate episode left off, with the remnants of the shootout that claimed the lives of four Dogs, left Emma Flyte unconscious and allowed River Cartwright to be kidnapped by Patrice. Flyte wakes up like she’s just had the longest night out of her life, and reports to Taverner. One man ambushed the entire convoy and made off with who, at this moment, might be the most important individual in England.
It’s difficult to believe, but the CCTV footage proves it. That footage also sends Claude Whelan slightly mad. He not only wants to know where Patrice has gone but gives the green light to shoot River on sight. According to him, MI5 doesn’t know if he has been turned. What’s obvious to everyone from Taverner to the audience is that he’s trying desperately to hush things up.
Daddy Dearest
Meanwhile, River is taken directly to Frank Harkness, who it turns out is his father after all. Admittedly everyone figured this out a few episodes ago, and River himself realized when he first saw the paintings as Les Arbres and was reminded of the cards his mother sent him on his seventh, eighth, and ninth birthdays. Understandably, he’s not thrilled with this arrangement.
Frank offers River a job. He has been impressed by his fieldcraft skills thus far. But River isn’t buying it. He has most of the details figured out already, including Frank’s efforts to raise a private army in his own image, and that Yves, aka Robert Winters, blowing up Westacres was not him declaring war on the West but on his father.
It’s a little bizarre that Frank would make River a pitch like this, but he is quickly running out of options and indeed out of sons, so you can see the logic in a twisted way. This is a man used to people doing exactly what he says, after all. But his oversight is that River has made a career out of doing the exact opposite of what people tell him to.
James Callis and Kristin Scott Thomas | Image via Apple TV+
Chaos
When Slow Horses Season 4, Episode 6 cycles up through the gears, it’s quite remarkable how much chaos erupts in such a small space of time. After Lamb discovers Chapman dead in his office, where he was killed by Patrice in Episode 4, we know from the voicemail on his office phone that the same message — revealing that David has been returned to Slough House — has been sent to his mobile, which Patrice has. He sets out to murder everyone in the building while the Dogs and the police race to River’s location to take out him and Harkness.
This all happens in moments. Frank holds River hostage at gunpoint; Patrice storms Slough House. There’s a lot of shouting and confusion. Frank is able to slip away by planting a live grenade in the hood of River’s jacket; Patrice continues to work his way through the building. River, Louisa, and Flyte pursue Harkness while Shirley, Marcus, and J.K. try to hold Patrice off. It’s carnage, top to bottom, edited for maximum stress.
And then it settles, just like that. I’m not sure most people appreciate how extraordinarily difficult it is to pull off a sequence like this, especially since a large part of it occurs off-screen through implication. Patrice is wounded several times, but you never quite know how badly. Marcus is killed, but you only hear the gunshot. River eventually tracks Frank down — using his advice from earlier about standing still while you’re being pursued — but it feels like River’s talking to the camera for a moment or two before his father is revealed. It’s remarkably efficient storytelling and filmmaking, dotted expertly with moments of humor and emotion and bristling acting.
The Aftermath
A fair amount happens in the aftermath. Patrice is jumped by Lamb and Shirley, chained to a radiator, and eventually shot by J.K., who does the honors so that a grief-stricken Shirley doesn’t have to. Harkness is arrested, interrogated, and subsequently released. He has an insurance policy in place, revealed to Lamb by Molly Duran. He has letters addressed to every MI5 Head of Service revealing that he has been doing their dirty work for them and their contemporaries for years.
The ending of Slow Horses Season 4 is a little bleak in this respect. Not only does the bad guy not get his comeuppance, but what we’re left with is River moving his grandfather into a nursing home operated by the Park, essentially a filing cabinet for former spies with heads full of secrets who are no longer quite sure what they know or why it’s important. David is mortified to be there. He can do nothing but remind River, repeatedly, that he promised him that he’d never do this to him. The sentiment is still echoing through the halls while River leaves.
“Hello Goodbye” ends with River meeting Jackson Lamb in a pub to sign an account of his movements that’ll give Lamb an operational bonus. Neither speaks after that. They both just swig their drinks in silence, their movements synchronized. Like father and son, in a way.
