‘Slow Horses’ Season 5, Episode 5 Recap – We’re All In This Together

“Circus” is a very good episode of Slow Horses, in all the ways we’ve come to expect. It’s laugh-out-loud funny in places, effectively tense in others, and moves along at a real clip. On the level of its basic construction and execution, it’s the clear high-water mark of Season 5 thus far. But it’s also very good in some unexpected ways, since it veers wildly away from the source material to set up what will likely be a reimagined finale. It might have taken until Episode 5 to really get going, but this adaptation of London Rules is providing a richer, more surprising story than the original novel did, albeit with a lot of Jackson Lamb’s most brilliantly acerbic lines trimmed out.

It starts with the change to the terrorists. While in the book they’re North Korean, here they’re clarified as being Libyan, which not only gives them a more relevant beef with Great Britain given the whole ousting of Muammar Gaddafi and subsequent abandment of the nation post-coup, but creates an entirely new backstory for Tara, who is being interrogated at the Park by Emma Flyte. In the book she’s just a patsy with family in North Korea who can be threatened to strongarm her; here, she’s significantly more than that, as we’ll see.

The death of Dennis Gimball has had several unfortunate knock-on effects. One is that it compels the terrorists to continue their mission, despite their in-fighting. The other is that, if River and Coe’s involvement in it comes to light, it gives Regent’s Park justification to shut down Slough House. Luckily, in a very funny debrief which follows a very funny car journey shared by River and Coe, Jackson decides not to tell the Park what happened to Gimball, even though it’s imperative he tells them what’s actually going on, since it’s becoming pretty clear they’ll never figure it out on their own.

Lamb explains to Lady Di and a sceptical Claude Whelan that the terrorists are following an old MI5 destabilisation strategy, and that the next item on the agenda is for the terrorists to blind their enemies. This is a worryingly ambiguous phrase, especially since assassinating a populist leader was really obvious and they only barely managed to stop that — while inadvertently killing a different populist leader — but there’s enough information at hand to help out. Shirley took a partial plate from the van the assassins were travelling in, which Devon Welles, now freed from her temporary containment at Slough House, tracks to the airport. It’s later discovered to contain bullet casings — from the disagreement earlier — and maps of various airports, which is not a good sign.

Lady Di goes over Whelan’s head to pass Flyte the information about the destablisation agenda so she can read it to Tara, who clearly recognises it. While she claims not to have any specific information about what the “blinding” might consist of, she thinks it might pertain to an old Libyan proverb about bodies raining from the sky. Again, not a good sign. Tara also provides the code that she was instructed to feed into the MI5 database through Roddy Ho’s laptop. It’ll only work on his laptop, though, and since he’s “almost as good as he thinks he is”, it’ll take the tech boffins hours to crack his password. Unless he helps, which he’s all too willing to do given that it feeds his already gargantuan ego.

You might have noticed that Slow Horses Season 5, Episode 5 is very much putting the pieces together. There are clues everywhere that MI5 are being led up a blind alley. Crushingly, one of them comes from David Cartwright, now in an assisted living facility on account of his worsening dementia. He has been watching the news and has put the pieces together, obviously recognising the playbook, but his addled minds means the information comes out as gobbeldygook. Not that River’s listening — he’s barely willing to tell his grandfather he loves him, let alone indulge his theories about “something to do with the bees”. River assumes, correctly, that he’s referencing honeytrapping, but he misses the bit where David says quite clearly that “they’ll do it again”.

But the biggest red flag is that putting Tara into the field to lead MI5 back to the terrorists is Whelan’s idea, and he’s determined to go through with it even though everyone keeps reminding him it’s a bad one. Tara is given a coat containing a tracker and instructed to go about her usual means of meeting the terrorists while being watched by not one, not two, but three MI5 teams for her protection. None of them have any idea what she’s really up to. It is, as ever, the slow horses who accidentally figure it out first. In his office, Roddy kept a box of keepsakes from his various “dates” with Tara, and they tie her to every step of the destabilization strategy. She was never a patsy — she’s a key member of the group.

Tara dumps her jacket in the underground and reunites with the terrorists, while, back at the Park, examining the behaviour of the computer code leads infects MI5’s entire database and shuts the whole place down. Just like that, everyone is blind. All part of the plan.

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