Slow Horses takes us on another entertaining ride

The core premise of Apple TV+’s witty thriller Slow Horses is pretty simple: The only man who can keep England safe from dangerous terrorists and incompetent, Eton-educated bureaucrats is an obnoxious MI5 agent with poor personal hygiene who drinks on the job, which is partly to mercilessly mock the screwups sentenced to work for him in a shoddy office/career purgatory named Slough House. 

That agent is Jackson Lamb, played by Gary Oldman, and for the past three seasons, he’s led a team of underdogs on missions to save the country from threats, foreign and domestic. He smokes. He farts. He says rude things.

Slow Horses has moved along steadily since it premiered in 2022, with six briskly plotted, smartly written, excellently acted episodes a season, each boasting a self-contained story with minimal soap-opera drama. This new season, its fourth, is no different, and it begins with a literal bang. A suicide bomb in London sparks a race against time, and one of Lamb’s best and brightest is immediately sucked into the aftermath of the attack.

Lamb’s hair is greasier than an order of fish and chips, but he’s a competent, if ethically fuzzy, civil servant navigating a shadowy maze of malignant government incompetents. Slow Horses provides plenty of reliable pleasures—vulgar banter! shocking revelations! cloak-and-dagger derring-do!—but its primary fantasy is that there’s one person out there, somewhere, who knows what they’re doing and is keeping all of civilization from collapsing up its own arse.

Like in Slow Horses‘ previous seasons, these zigs and zags and surprises are both preposterous and plausible. There are kinetic chases through gloomy London’s twisty streets and tunnels and inventive fist fights and cliffhangers that might make you grumble if you’re watching week to week. Season four is based on Mick Herron’s novel Spook Street, another of his Slough House books, and it introduces an all-new villain played by Hugo Weaving—The Matrix’s Mr. Smith himself—a formidable screen presence who is no stranger to menacing characters. Weaving is a hypnotic and charismatic performer, and his growling American accent is pure ASMR fuel.

There is no reason to delve into the plot any more than that; otherwise, it would spoil the whiplash. Who was the suicide bomber? Why is a member of Slough House sneaking into France? What about all these skeletons in MI5’s closet? There are unexpected answers, plus a killing machine with a French accent. The season also features a surprisingly heartbreaking subplot with the great Jonathan Pryce, who has had a small recurring role as a British espionage legend.

But plot beats aside, this season sticks to the formula that makes Slow Horses a dependably entertaining ride, including Oldman’s Jackson sucking on cancer sticks and the U.K.’s tactical security forces failing, time and time again, to defeat Slough House, the Bad News Bears of the intelligence community. As always, Slow Horses has very little fat, and each episode zips.

At worst, spy stories are jingoistic spy-versus-spy adventures, and at best, they reveal the ugliness hiding under patriotism. Former spy Ian Fleming’s globetrotting James Bond is a swashbuckling psychopath in a tux who kills for crown and country, the perfect dream man for an empire in decline. But on the other end of this spectrum are John le Carré’s novels, which elevate the genre. His books are lean, melancholy, and vicious, and his greatest creation, George Smiley, is the flip side of 007, a quiet, reserved, calculating spymaster who oversees a vast network of traitors and spooks. 

Slow Horses is more le Carré than Fleming. It subverts the traditional spy story and reinvents it as a drama about a dysfunctional family. There is vinegary comedy and bone-cracking violence, too. The vibe is cynical but hopeful and mixes le Carré’s masterpiece Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy with Doctor Who. Only its main character, in addition to being a paternal wizard of sorts, seemingly wise and all-powerful, also dresses like Columbo. Jackson Lamb, our trenchcoat-wearing son of a bitch, is familiar and original, an antihero who is the only good Joe in all of Blighty. And the character works because a veteran like Oldman is throwing his considerable talents into the role. Whatever Apple is paying him—well, it’s probably enough, but he’s cooking with fire and is worth every penny.

Oldman is a legend and no stranger to spy movies, having played George Smiley in Tomas Alfredson’s confusing and elegant 2011 adaptation of  Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Oldman has done it all, really—Sid Vicious, Dracula, Winston Churchill—and it’s a testament to his craft that he’s still having fun at this point in his career. And Lamb is a lot of fun. It’s a part that allows Oldman to act broadly and hilariously as a lonely wreck of a man who, deep down, cares too much and also plays to Oldman’s vulnerability. His Lamb is a crude boor, but every so often, he shows his wounds.

The actor is supported by a crackerjack cast here, including Jack Lowden as aspiring super-spy River Cartwright and Saskia Reeves as Catherine Standish, the sharp-witted, alcoholic former secretary to a deceased agency bigwig. This season also adds Joanna Scanlan as a fussy new member of Slough House and James Callis as the bumbling head of MI5. Meanwhile, Tom Brooke is another rookie member of Lamb’s crew, a mysterious, anti-social wack job who may be more than he seems. Kadiff Kirwan and Aimee-Ffion Edwards return as one of the best duos in television, a pair of broken wings who kick ass only when they have to and not a minute before. As comic relief, Christopher Chung continues to be particularly repulsive as socially inept hacker Roddy Ho. And as ever, Kristin Scott Thomas is on hand as Lamb’s boss and MI5’s frustrated second-in-command, and she is effortlessly brilliant, a human glacier.  

This season is slightly darker than previous ones, and Oldman reveals more of Lamb’s inner life—not much, just a peek. There is one scene where Lamb has to pat someone he cares about on the chest lovingly, swiftly. Lives are at stake, but it’s a micro-moment full of pain and heart. And hopefully, there is more of that spirit in season five.  

Slow Horses season 4 premieres September 4 on Apple TV+