Slow Horses returns to form in the taut, dark "Cicada"

Slow Horses sometimes makes producing a satisfying, funny, thrilling hour of TV look easy. This is one of those times. After last week’s lackluster game of phone tag between our core characters, they’re each given much more narrative drive and much more interesting things to discover as the not-so-super spies start piecing together the weird-ass puzzle they’ve found themselves in.

We pick up immediately after last week, with Rebecca telling Jackson about Min’s murder in all the gory details. These Russians don’t do things by halves, as she witnessed one of them putting him in a chokehold, another ramming him and his bike with Rebecca’s car, then Chernitsky himself sticking Min with the same little poison jab that did in ol’ Dickie Bow. As Jackson gets up to leave, Rebecca reminds him he promised protection for spilling what she knows. He gives her a number, tells her to mention his name and ask for “number 7.” Even someone who’d talked to Jackson for five minutes should have probably predicted what happens next. As he saunters out of Rebecca’s apartment, she calls the number and asks for number 7. “Double noodles?” comes the bemused reply from the other end. Jackson smirks.

Shooting over to Upshott, “Leo” is wining and dining with River and the Troppers and dropping hints all over the place that he knows River is a spy. He even makes a point of telling everyone he was on a bus last week. As Chernitsky gets up to leave, River does some nice low-level spy shit and slips his phone into his jacket before bolting off in pursuit. Kelly’s suspicious and disappointed. How much does she really know?

Louisa, meanwhile, is still Going Through It. Convinced Pashkin was responsible for killing Min, she flirts with him at a hotel bar, utility knife tucked in her purse, earning an invitation up to his room. Just before she gets there, Marcus of all people intervenes. Louisa, always gathering intel, tells Marcus Pashkin is a fake, though to what exact end is going to require a lot more unravelling.

Jackson is also enjoying a good old-fashioned skulk around London, first terrorizing a poor clerk at an export company to figure out what the Russians had shipped in. All roads lead to Nevsky, of course, and when he and Shirley stake out his house, they quickly realize something’s amiss (though not before Shirley admonishes him for a sexist jab which, for once, Lamb doesn’t seem to have an even more pointed comeback to). Investigating Nevsky’s house, they find all manner of red flags: a busted-up security system, dead guards, blood everywhere, a fucking geiger counter, and, most alarmingly of all, a dead Nevsky with some serious radiation burns. Lamb quickly deduces the gunshot wound in Nevsky’s head was likely a self-inflicted mercy given the extent of the poisoning.

None of “Cicada” does much to reimagine the genre, but this is still good work all round from a writing team that, frankly, has had worse source material to work with this time. Am I also just kind of annoyed at how many bald Russians with similar names I had to memorize? Yes, but imagine how River feels.

Speaking of, everyone’s favorite doofus agent barges straight into the hangar where Chernitsky (and Katinsky!) are preparing, well, nothing good by the looks of all the fertilizer and fuel strewn about the place. Suddenly Alex pops up. Alex, of all people, protests to River that this is all just a misunderstanding, that Leo is a family friend. “Your husband is a Russian sleeper agent!” he kindly warns her, before she tases him in the neck and addressed Chernitsky in Russian. The first cicada has emerged, it would seem.

Stray observations

• No Judd or Taverner this week. I have no idea what’s going to go down at this speech/anti-capitalist protest but I hope it in part involves an utter public humiliation of Judd.
• Saskia Reeves does excellent work this week, using Catherine’s mousiness and steeliness at the exact right moments to get some key information from Victor, a keen chess player and even keener drinker, who offers up some intel in exchange for Catherine’s sobriety story.
• Lamb Line of the Week™: When pressed by Louisa about why she can’t kill Paskin, he reassures her, “Right now I am going out of my way to avenge the death of Dickie Bow, a man I didn’t even like! So imagine what I’m gonna do to the man who murdered Min Harper, a man I at least tolerated.”