It’s date night on a tense, funny, midseason Slow Horses

Because this is, against all odds, a pretty comedic episode of this intermittently funny show, most especially in the crew of damaged personalities currently orbiting poor, beleaguered Catherine Standish. Saskia Reeves continues to exude a saint’s patience as Catherine, now forced to weather the bickering and nattering of Moira (Joanna Scanlan), Shirley (Aimee-Ffion Edwards), and Louisa (Rosalind Eleazar), the latter still pissed about being plucked out of her comfortable corporate retirement thanks to Lamb issuing a “Blake’s grave” emergency call once he realized a hit squad was killing its way through The Park’s refuse a couple of weeks back. This crew isn’t especially key to the episode’s plot—they mostly drive around, piss each other off, and then break into an MI5 safehouse—but, given how tense the rest of these proceedings are, it’s a nice release of that winding spring. (Also, the very real sense of wariness Reed exudes when she sees that the house—actually First Desk Diana Taverner’s vacation home—has a fully stocked wine cellar cuts through all the cloak and dagger bullshit quite nicely—a testament to the sincerity with which the actress plays recovering alcoholic Catherine. There are named characters on this show I’d be less sad to see die than her hard-won sobriety.) 

Speaking of Lamb, meanwhile, he’s off in what is, somehow, the most cartoonish of our various branching plots, as he’s forced to play babysitter to both Roddy Ho and an actual child, the son of a murdered member of the Park’s security team. (Played by recent recruit into the Harry Potter TV universe Lenny Rush.) This material is fine enough, and produces one truly great scene—more on which in a second. But given that Lamb is already halfway to being a cartoon character at the best of times (i.e., the belching, farting asshole with a heart of gold who’s secretly always right), pairing him up with a funny kid really is pushing things to the extreme. I was maybe a little too worried, back in my premiere review, that Slow Horses would be letting its dramatic impulses overtake it this year; instead, it’s its sitcom side that’s been threatening to overwhelm. Rush himself is fine, and sometimes genuinely funny—and Christopher Chung’s Ho is so far past the point of plausibility by now that you simply have to accept that his silliness is baked into the show’s DNA. But this whole tributary is about 20 percent too cute for my taste, in a way that gets as many eyerolls as it does laughs.

The aforementioned exception to the lack of tension, of course, being the most monumental of our various “first dates”: A confrontation between Gary Oldman’s Lamb and Hugo Weaving’s mercenary killer Frank Harkness, in the dining room of what I have to assume is a well-compensated London Shake Shack. Weaving, of course, is also playing a cartoon here: A growling, purring, eternally sardonic master planner whose heart rate never rises above, like, 40. But seeing these two veteran actors toy with each other is a genuine delight, and the kind of confrontation that makes bringing Frank back this season worth it all on its own. Among other things, it’s interesting to see Lamb be legitimately back-footed for once, as he realizes that he’s been barking up the wrong tree about Harkness’ involvement in his Joes’ deaths; when Rush’s Reese gets himself caught, too, it requires one of those Lamb-esque bits of chaotic improv that makes an asset of just how big a dick he can be. (It’s also genuinely cute, not just irritating-cute, to see Reese pick up on Lamb’s “make the biggest nuisance of yourself that you can” methods to effect his escape from Frank.)

As we head into the back half of season six of Slow Horses, then, I’m feeling surprisingly optimistic. Breaking the cast down into groups like this is a great structure for dialing into individual character dynamics, and feels far more focused than the sprawl that afflicted, for example, season five. (Where the series got so bogged down in MI5 business that it often felt like the Slow Horses were barely characters in the story at all.) If I’m still a little nervous about the show’s sudden swerve to bringing back old favorites (Louisa! Sid! Frank!) I’m heartened by the fact that it’s clearly done so for reasons rooted in character, not just fan-appeasing spectacle. There’s a version of this—where Slow Horses brought back River’s bestie, his crush, and his supervillain dad all in one fell swoop—that would feel like the show was finally giving into its protagonist’s delusions of being the main character of the universe. Instead, it’s treating them each as characters and actors in their own rights, even as it gives our “hero” one more thing to run toward before he hits a finish line of inevitable disappointment.

Stray observations

• • Of all our “first dates” here, it’s interesting that the most “successful” was the one that ended with someone dead. R.I.P. Coe; you really seemed to connect with Russian killer Jim before you bled out on a service-station bathroom floor.
• • There’s a whole other essay to be written about how Kristin Scott Thomas’ Diana Taverner shares River’s delusion that she lives in a different spy movie than the one she’s actually trapped in. Despite coming in like an apex predator, she’s spent all season getting kicked around by Harry Lloyd’s media mogul Damien Cantor, and it hits its nadir here as she’s blackmailed by Russian intelligence into signing off on Sid’s death.
• • Leon Annor is very funny as the bowling alley attendant who refuses to let a sheepish River bribe him into using a payphone. 
• • He also gets pretty Macbeth about his cash register: “After that, no man born from his mother can open it.”
• • River’s mad that Sid is so good at lying. “What, like an agent? Like a secret agent?”
• • We have most of the pieces of the overall plot by now: Russia’s leaning on Cantor to pressure Taverner to kill Sid, whose identity was used for a hit on Russian agents on Russian soil. Frank’s in play because Cantor hired him to get the list of agents’s names (which were presumably swapped with those of old Slow Horses), and then to tie up loose ends. I’d be irritated by the convolution, but the sense that nobody actually knows what’s going on, worsened by various desperation moves made by other players, is a feature in a story like this, not a bug.
• • “We’re all missing the vibrate function, Moira.”
• • “Let us not bicker when we should be supporting each other. Girl Power.”
• • “Too much talking.” The Ladies’ Car is a treasure trove of good quotes, but Reeves gets the capstone.
• • When Reese (who, like Rush, has dwarfism) takes too long in the bathroom, Ho asks an extremely Ho question: “Don’t you think it’d be more disableist to think he hadn’t fallen in, when all the while, he’s been in there, struggling to get out of the bowl?” (Ruth Bradley’s Emma Flyte: “What, the fuck, is wrong with you?”
• • “You had a different name then.” “Yeah… Was that my Bowie period?”
  
• • Frank is having a lot of fun in that Shake Shack. “Oh, no, he doesn’t mean that,” he fake-reassures Reese, as Lamb claims he’s happy to leave the kid to die. “That’s just his schtick.”
• • Jim and Jane remain extremely thinly drawn but buoyed by strong performances. I’m inclined to like Kyle Soller anyway, courtesy of Andor, but he brings a real weariness to the ruthless killer thing.
• • “That a push knife?” “Yep.” “Nice.”