It turns out that the creative team behind Apple TV’s Slow Horses knew exactly how fans were probably going to react to the shock ending of its sixth-season finale, and had another ending in the tank, just in case.
This is per Variety, which had an interview on Friday with Adam Randall, director of “Judgement Day,” the show’s recent finale. Who confirmed that, while the ending we got in the episode—in which Jack Lowden’s River Cartwright has his dreams of romantic bliss with his nearly murdered love interest interrupted by the ol’ “Pick up a poisoned crowbar left on your kitchen counter” routine—is mostly canonical to author Mick Herron’s Slough House books, the team had filmed a much happier one. (Presumably in case the show ended up not being renewed by Apple, which it did, for two more seasons, back in July and then September.)
What I can say is that we had two endings [for Season 6], and one of them was happy, and it was a really lovely ending. Had it been the end of the series, it would have been just a magical end for River’s journey. It was almost like Spielberg-ian, the happy version of it. And we played with that for a while, but we knew, from the book and the next story to tell in Season 7, that we needed the other version of it. It’s difficult because it’s such a dark season and there’s so much death and tragedy in it then to end in such a dark way. I just was like, I hope we don’t lose everybody, really.
Randall also addressed the espionage elephant in the room, i.e., rumors that Lowden is in the running to play James Bond, fueling worries that River’s fate in the finale was an escape hatch for the series in case he got the big job. (A teaser for season 7 that aired with the finale episode had Gary Oldman’s character joking about getting a message from Lowdon’s from “the afterlife,” although the fact that the actor has already been photographed on the set of the show’s eighth season has short-circuited a lot of those concerns.) “I only genuinely know what everybody else knows,” Randall asserted about Lowden’s Bond chances. “Which is that he’d be great, and that I think he’s in contention, but I don’t really know, and he can’t say anything.”
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