Summary
Searing wit, simmering trauma, and combustible politics — Slow Horses is back for Season 5 with a few literal bangs in “Bad Dates”.
Season 5 of Slow Horses is based on Mick Herron’s 2018 novel London Rules, so it’s arriving seven years late but right on time given the U.K.’s currently combustible political climate. It isn’t immediately clear in Episode 1 in which precise ways its inciting incident, a seemingly random mass shooting, connects to a wider plot of cultural destabilization, but we’ll get to all that. In the meantime, someone might be trying to kill Roddy Ho. And, perhaps even more improbably, Roddy Ho has a girlfriend.
Like the Westacres bombing in Season 4, the deranged Abbotsfield massacre that kicks off “Bad Dates” takes the shock and awe approach. A man — we later learn his name is Rob Trew — leaves his pokey flat after a lonely breakfast and sits down opposite a well-intentioned man flyering for the current mayor, Zafar Jaffrey, who is on the electoral ballot opposite an archetypal Eurosceptic Conservative MP named Dennis Gimball, whose wife, Dodie, writes a salacious tabloid column. Suddenly, Trew pulls an assault rifle out of his bag and opens fire on everyone nearby, claiming several lives, and then is shot dead by a hidden sniper.
Emma Flyte is on the scene almost immediately, dealing with the faux-feminist overtures of a uniformed copper nicknamed “Fuckability Phil” thanks to a past workplace indiscretion, and played with stellar off-puttingness by Colin Hoult, often used by Ricky Gervais in projects like Derek and After Life to play similarly weaselly characters. It doesn’t take Flyte long to realise that Trew was shot from above and at range — the initial theory is that he took his own life, as mass shooters are wont to do — and to find a suspicious bullet cartridge left behind at the scene.
Questions: How did a loser like Trew acquire a military-grade assault rifle? Why would a professional assassin do something as obvious as leaving behind a bullet cartridge for the authorities to find? What’s the connection between Trews’ bookshelf full of Gimball-penned tomes and his choosing a Jaffrey supporter as his initial victim? Some of these are easier to answer than others. As Flyte explains to Diana Taverner, Trew was radicalised on an incel forum and gifted the weapon to facilitate his crime. And then he was executed, presumably by the same person who led him on. The Gimball fanaticism is easy enough to piece together. As Flyte had said earlier, post-referendum London is already on a knife-edge.
Responsibility for warning Gimball about this falls to Claude Whelan, still First Desk at Regent’s Park, despite Lady Di really running the show. His brief scene with Gimball and Jaffrey at the rehearsal for a debate is our introduction to both politicians, as well as Dodie, whom Whelan annoys by banishing from what is by all accounts an intelligence briefing. You can tell by her face there’ll be hell to pay for that, and she didn’t seem to like Whelan much in the first place.
It isn’t immediately clear in Slow Horses Season 5, Episode 1 how all of this connects to Slough House, the staff of which have other problems. Several are still reeling from the events of the Season 4 finale, in which River’s half-brother stormed the office and killed Marcus. Shirley has PTSD as a result, is paranoid about defending herself against a similar incursion, and wants Lamb to arm her just in case. He doesn’t, obviously, but her emotional fragility doesn’t go unnoticed, even by him.
Given this, the fact it’s Shirley who saves Roddy Ho from being run over by a swerving transit van while he’s dancing his way to work carries a note of ambiguity. Everyone in the office thinks she’s imagining things, but she’s adamant that Ho narrowly survived an attempt on his life. Christopher Chung continues to deliver one of the most insufferably great performances on TV as Ho; divorced from his delusional internal monologue, which is always good for a laugh in the books, he has to act out all of Ho’s particular eccentricities.
Speaking of the books, “Bad Dates” makes some changes to London Rules. Here, Shirley follows Ho to a nightclub, where he meets an improbably beautiful woman for a date, and Catherine Standish follows Shirley, alerting River and Louisa that she needs an assist. In the book, River and Louisa pretend to be interested for a while before ditching Shirley at their earliest convenience. Here, River and Louisa are initially elsewhere, sharing a very awkward goodbye kiss on account of Louisa heading on a six-month leave of absence that she intends to make full-time, and only River responds. He has an argument with Shirley in the nightclub about her nursing a wrap of coke — and jumping off a balcony to assault a man with a bottle she thought was a knife — and storms off. The outcome is the same, since Shirley ends up following Ho alone, but the means of getting there is different to account for character details that the book has more time and space to dig into.
Shirley’s suspicions are justified, as it turns out. The episode ends with Ho leaving his girlfriend in a taxi, at which point she texts someone tipping them off to his whereabouts and the fact that he’s alone and vulnerable. It’ll be up to subsequent episodes to connect this back to the Abbotsfield shooting — presuming Roddy makes it out unscathed, and assuming that we want him to.
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