Summary
Despite being contained mostly to two dingy rooms, “Tall Tales” remains constantly engaging and effortlessly funny, not to mention surprisingly dramatic when it wants to be.
Most of Slow Horses Season 5, Episode 3 takes place in two rooms. One of them is a dingy basement at Regent’s Park, where Roddy Ho has been taken for interrogation by Lady Di herself. The second is Jackson Lamb’s office in Slough House, where the slow horses are under strict lockdown by Emma Flyte and a couple of the Dogs. Somehow, “Tall Tales” doesn’t feel especially hampered by this. In fact, there’s a moment when Gary Oldman turns it on to such an extent that you forget entirely that he’s playing a broad, flatulent caricature, and remember he’s Academy Award-winner Gary Oldman. This is why you cast proper actors in these parts.
Thanks to the fuel sabotage in the previous episode, London is at a standstill. Cars are exploding all over the place. And the terrorists — they speak Arabic in this, even though they’re North Korean in the book — aren’t finished yet. In fact, they have a bomb disguised in a thermos flask that they pay a homeless addict to pitch into the penguin enclosure in Regent’s Park Zoo. What have the penguins ever done?
The penguins are innocent, which is precisely why the story immediately blankets the news. This, according to JK Coe, is Step 4 of the destabilization strategy that the terrorists are using as a guideline. The third step was disrupting traffic, which, it’s safe to say, they’ve already managed. Despite River’s adamance that Coe’s talking paranoiac nonsense, Lamb, of all people, believes him. Three points on the list would have been a coincidence, but four? Never four.
All the lockdown stuff is hilarious. The interpersonal banter between all of the slow horses has always been a highlight in this show, and it’s leveraged to great effect here with everyone in the same room. And Lamb’s efforts to annoy the Dogs, led by a gender-swapped Devon Welles after Flyte leaves to respond to the zoo bombing, are wonderfully childish — if not exactly sanitary. But there’s a more serious undercurrent, since now it has been established that Coe’s destabilization strategy is firmly in play, the next step, which is to assassinate a populist leader, is guaranteed to happen. And Devon won’t pass the message along out of an understandable fear that Lamb is deliberately trying to make her look stupid to the Park.
This means that the slow horses have to escape, which they do thanks to another Jackson Lamb distraction, this one not a feigned bowel movement but a surprisingly serious story about an intelligence agent being horrifically tortured by the Stasi during the Cold War. This includes the woman he loved, pregnant with his child, being burned and beaten to death in front of him. The cruelest twist is that the agent still doesn’t give up the information the Stasi are looking for, since he never had it in the first place. After, Standish wonders aloud if Lamb himself was the agent in the story. He claims to have made it all up, but given his own background as a joe working behind the Iron Curtain, it’s more likely than not.
Now the slow horses have two populist leaders to protect — Dennis Gimball, whom River and Coe are once again teamed up to watch over, and Zafar Jaffrey, who becomes the responsibility of Shirley and Standish. Speaking of Jaffrey, it’s revealed in Slow Horses Season 5, Episode 3 that his son, Irfan, was one of the climate activists roped into sabotaging the fuel. This is different from the book, in which he has a terrorist brother whose return to the UK he is clandestinely trying to facilitate.
In another new-for-the-show subplot, Whelan continues to be harassed by Carl and hilariously tries to retain MI5’s legal counsel in order to get ahead of it. New or not, this feels so in-keeping with Whelan’s general character that it fits right in. Also new: Lady Di herself interrogates Roddy, which is a perfect antidote for his enduring delusion. Kristin Scott Thomas is brilliant in these scenes, her disgust and fascination with Ho absolutely palpable. I’ve already lavished praise on Christopher Chung, but he remains effortlessly detestable.
He also eventually gives away the crux of the matter. To impress Tara, his girlfriend, he hacked into the MI5 database and left her alone while he went to pick up some pizzas. Lady Di is appalled, but panicked more than anything else, since Ho was stupid enough to give a relative stranger unfettered access to the Security Service’s deepest secrets. The pieces are beginning to slot together, but will a complete picture form in time to prevent the terrorists from ticking off the next box in their master plan? Time will tell.
RELATED:
