This article contains spoilers for season six, episode four of Slow Horses, “Lost And Found.”
Tom Brooke really didn’t want J.K. Coe to die on a toilet. After all, in Mick Herron’s Joe Country, Coe meets his maker outdoors. In the snow. But while the TV adaptation of Herron’s Slow Horses novels is often faithful to its source material, Coe is stabbed to death by Russian GRU agent Jim (Kyle Soller) in a public bathroom while River Cartwright (Jack Lowden) eats a sandwich in a nearby food court. The spot where Coe’s body would be found wasn’t entirely set in stone before the cameras rolled, and director Adam Randall asked Brooke for his input; Brooke suggested somewhere between the cubicles and the urinals “I said, ‘Perhaps in front of this lovely wall might be a bit better?” he tells The A.V. Club.
And that’s where River finds Coe in this week’s gripping episode, “Lost And Found”—the latest addition to a mounting sixth-season body count, and a contribution to one of the Apple TV spy drama’s proudest traditions. Slow Horses excels at marrying mundane backdrops with life-and-death stakes, reinforcing how far the MI5 operatives assigned to Slough House have fallen. Lowden might be in the running to play 007, but James Bond would never find himself queuing for food from a concessions stand at the Beaconsfield Motorway Services while tending to a bloody hand and a bruised ego. River, however, is right at home at this staple of a British road trip, a one-stop spot for gas, sleep, fast food, groceries, electronics, periodicals, coffee, arcade games, and gambling. “I always found them fascinating because they’re these in-between lands,” Randall says of service stations like Beaconsfield. “They’re these strange spaces where it’s impermanent, and people float in and out. They’re so brightly lit. They’re also all very similar. You can use the fruit machines, and then get Burger King. People are there at 3 a.m.” (Lowden, for his part, has spoken several times about his fondness for service stations across the UK)
The British public as depicted in Slow Horses is mostly unaware of the myriad threats that have peppered each season of the series. Yet an array of showdowns in busy spots across London tube and train stations, bars, shopping malls, and community centers ensures the intelligence service cannot keep everything under wraps. That tendency even brought Randall his first serious piece of awards hardware: He won an Emmy last year for Slow Horses’ fourth-season finale, in which River chases his father, former CIA operative Frank Harkness (Hugo Weaving), through the rainbow tunnel at King’s Cross Station. With “Lost And Found,” three distinct neon-lit locations provide the backdrop for a trio of face-offs that leave one agent wounded, another dead, one captured, and Jackson Lamb improvising an escape plan in the middle of a Camden Shake Shack.
“I love those sequences where it just feels lived in, and there are people everywhere,” Randall says. “It’s a busy place, and everybody’s going about their business, and we’ve got this incredibly dramatic story happening, but nobody cares. Everyone’s living their lives. Meanwhile, someone’s stabbed to death, and someone’s getting kidnapped in the car park,” Randall says. “That contrast is fun.”
Slow Horses hires a single director every season; Randall, who is currently directing the show’s eighth season, recalls sitting in on the writers’ room as the story for “Lost And Found” was broken. “When we were talking about doing this season and doing a chase thriller, I was very quickly like, ‘Can we do a service station? Can we do a bowling alley?” He’d always dreamed of using the English urban wilderness for this kind of hunter-versus-hunted scenario: “When you’re driving down the motorway, and you look out, and you think, ‘God, what happens if you ran that way?’”
Like other patrons, River, Coe, and Sid Baker (Olivia Cooke) use the service station’s convenient facilities because they need a break—from the road, and from each other. River’s injured hand needs bandaging, and Sid is still looking for an untraceable phone to call Diana Taverner to find out why another agent used Sid’s name during an off-the-books hit. Only then can they continue their journey to the safe house to meet the rest of the motley crew being targeted by the dogged Jim; his fellow dogged, code-named Russian, Jane (MyAnna Buring); and River’s dad.
But first the trio comes under fire at a bowling alley—a typical Slow Horses setting that allows for the atypical visual palette that Randall and his frequent cinematographer Eben Bolter brought to “Lost And Found.” “Our happy place is night shooting with neon,” Randall says. “Which isn’t very Slow Horses, so it was exciting to think we can do that here.” Even an empty bowling alley allows for “so much mayhem in terms of lighting and noise.” They could go “absolutely wild” with the neon, including the pink signage outside and the array of arcade games that provides cover during this brief shootout.
It isn’t long after Sid and River have entered the bowling alley that Jane begins shooting, but the service station is a much longer stakeout because the Russian agents don’t want to draw attention to themselves. Much thought went into the layout of the service station for Randall to stage these cat-and-mouse scenes: “It’s like ‘Okay, Coe needs to be there, and River needs to be here, and Sid needs to be here, and why can’t Jim and Jane just see them the moment they walk in?’” Many service stations were considered, with Beaconsfield winning out in part thanks to its upper level. “It was the guiding force of finding a location: How can I separate them all?” says Randall. “How can they have different vantage points from one another? How can I have Jim and Jane come in and not immediately spot Coe? How would Sid leave and not bump into them?” Audiences can suspend disbelief, but the filmmaking choices still have to make sense. “You have to believe that Coe spots them, and they didn’t see Coe straight away,” Randall says.
Randall’s first season on Slow Horses was also Brooke’s, making this entire sequence bittersweet for the director. He was also keen to incorporate Coe’s hip-hop soundtrack into his final moments, “There’s a peacefulness to it in some weird way,” Randall says of the tinny sounds emitting from the character’s earbuds. River, Sid, and Coe have gone dark in their sprint to the safe house, so they’re without phones in “Lost And Found”—meaning Brooke had to come up with an old-school workaround to get the music into the scene: The iPod Shuffle Coe was previously seen using in season four. Brooke recalls Randall saying, “You put it on so that you’re not alone, and we’ll hear it when River comes in.” The setting for Coe’s death may not be beautiful (at least not in a conventional sense), but that sentiment sure is.
“Lost And Found” actually gives us two classic Slow Horses scenarios, because no season of the show is complete without River barreling through a crowded space, pushing whichever unsuspecting member of the public happens to be in his way. But in setting up this sprint from Coe’s lifeless body to the imperiled Sid, Randall realized River’s signature move had been overlooked. “I was like, ‘Well, he needs to push past people,” he says. “But you need stunts for that.” Fortunately, one of the supporting actors on the scene was also a stunt man. “I was like, ‘Great, Jack can push past you,” Randall says.
The show could only go so far toward setting the chaos of “Lost And Found” within the actual day-to-day operations of a service station. Beaconsfield’s restaurants and shops were closed to the public during the shoot, the names of which were obscured or genericized during post-production, which Randall admits “ended up being a much bigger visual effects job than anyone had anticipated.” The restroom and parking facilities, however, couldn’t be closed. “You’re not allowed to,” Randall says. If people need to go to the toilet, they have to be able to stop and go to the toilet. You can’t stop people from driving in.” Could there be a more appropriate Slow Horses setup than ready access to a bathroom? Brooke may have objected at first, but his character’s infamously flatulent boss Jackson Lamb has proven it time and again: When you’ve got to go, you’ve got to go.
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