Slough House gets a new misfit in this exclusive clip from Apple TV+'s Slow Horses
Newcomer Shirley explains to Jack Lowden's River why you should never tell her she "hits like a girl"
Slough House, the central setting of Apple TV+’s Gary Oldman-starring espionage series Slow Horses, is largely defined by its a status as a sort of holding pen for the U.K.’s more dysfunctional spies, its ranks filled with folks too talented or informed to get rid of, but too tainted by office politics or past mistakes to ever actually promote.
We can now add another name to the House’s roster of misfits, courtesy of a new exclusive clip from the show’s upcoming second season: Shirley Dander, played by Aimee-Ffion Edwards. In the new clip, Shirley lays out for Jack Lowdon’s River Cartwright exactly how she caught her own assignment to Slough House, a story that involves multiple (very deserved, in the telling) punches to the face of a direct supervisor, and some deep umbrage at the idea of being told she “hits like a girl.”
Bona fides established—and with an allusion to the incident that landed Cartwright himself a spot in the House back at the start of the show’s first season—the duo then get down to the business of spycraft, tracking a new target on surveillance cameras and trying to figure out where he might have ultimately disappeared to. (We’re going to assume, given the references to the infamous Georgi Markov poisoned umbrella assassination of 1978, that at least one of the guys that they’re tracking probably wasn’t long for this world.) This is, in other words, a pretty great primer on those things that Slow Horses does well: The blending of enjoyably drawn character work, combined with the nitty-gritty of surveillance and spy work.
Slow Horses debuted its first season back in April of this year; the second season arrives this week, on Apple TV+, on Friday, December 2.