Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Slow Horses’ Season 4 On Apple TV+, Where A Terrorist Bomber Flusters MI5 And Lamb Sorts Things Out With The Cartwrights

It’s amazing that one of the best shows on streaming has been able to crank out four seasons in just over two years, especially when other shows can barely put out one in that same timespan. It’s also ironic given that the name of the show is Slow Horses . Is the show’s fourth season as good as the first three?

‘Slow Horses’ Episode Guide: How Many Episodes In Season 4 Of Gary Oldman’s Apple TV+ Series?

Opening Shot: As a bunch of chickens spin on a rotisserie, we hear outgoing voice mail greetings from various members of the Slough House team.

Everything To Know About ‘Slow Horses’ Season 4 On Apple TV+

The Gist: Roddy Ho (Christopher Chung) is calling the team because Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman) told him the group was having a Christmas party at a fast food chicken joint. He gets hold of Louisa Guy (Rosalind Eleazar), who tells Roddy he’s been duped. As Roddy walks down the street eating chicken, a massive explosion takes place; he only is aware of it when people start running.

A terrorist drove a car into the Westacres mall and detonated a bomb. MI5 Deputy Director General Diana Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas) is put in charge of the operation to find out if this was a lone wolf incident or part of a bigger pattern, and her new boss Claude Whelan (James Callis) wants her to be in front of the press on this instead of him.

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In the meantime, River Cartwright (Jack Lowden) is concerned about his grandfather David (Jonathan Pryce). David, a former highly-placed MI5 agent, has been spending his retirement years in his countryside estate, but River thinks he’s gotten more scattered lately, often not recognizing him. When River talks to Louisa about it at a local pub, Louisa encourages him to go visit his grandfather.

We see David at his estate, seemingly paranoid and hearing voices. He sits in the dark by himself when he hears a knock on the door. It seems that River has followed through on his desire to check in. But David checks a photo of him and River and goes up to the bathroom, shotgun in hand. “You’re not my grandson,” he says as he shoots the man in the chest and face.

A groggy and flatulent Lamb is called to the estate by Emma Flyte (Ruth Bradley), the new Head of the Dogs, mainly because River works for him at Slough House. He rather coldly IDs River’s body, even though the man’s face was blown off, and he takes it upon himself to figure out what happened to David, who disappeared. His search brings him to the flat of Catherine Standish (Saskia Reeves), his former administrator who is dying to be released from his employ.

The MI5 trace the car that exploded in the Westacres mall to its driver, who seemed to not cover his tracks when setting things up. As SWAT and forensics search the man’s flat, though, a booby trap bomb goes off, creating even more problems for Taverner and Whelan.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? We cited Misfits and Leverage before the show’s first season, and we’ll stick to those comparisons.

Our Take: Just as we saw in Season 1, Will Smith, who based the fourth season of Slow Horses on Mick Herron’s novel Spook Street , leans more on the characters’ quirks and personalities to carry the show’s action, rather than craft a case that has a ton of twists and turns, at least not at the start. And, just like Season 1, those personalities are so strong that we love seeing them interact with each other, even if the cases they’re working on aren’t that intriguing.

Who doesn’t want to watch Oldman fart his way through the world as the slovenly and bitter Lamb? Even for him, though, his reaction to having to see River’s body seemed a bit cold, given how long River worked for him. Heck, just the fact that it’s a fellow MI5 agent would be enough to get some reaction out of him.

His non-reaction might have been our first clue that something was amiss. It also seemed to be odd that Lowden, the second-billed star of the show after Oldman, would be blown away before the opening credits even rolled. Both of those factors led us to guess what was going on, which may have been something Smith did on purpose. After all, whether River is dead or alive isn’t what’s driving the season; it’s what River is actually doing that matters.

But that’s what also makes us scratch our heads about Slow Horses ; as fun as the characters are to be around, there’s nothing about the cases they’re trying to solve that’s particularly surprising or interesting, at least not at first blush.

As for the agents who work at Slough House — remember, they have all messed up their careers somehow — we don’t see them in real action yet. Louisa and Roddy are in the office interacting with Shirley Dander (Aimee-Ffion Edwards), Marcus Longridge (Kadiff Kirwan), new officemate J.K. Coe (Tom Brooke) and new administrator Moira Tregorian (Joanna Scanlan). We’ll see them helping out Lamb and River at some point, but sometimes it feels like the Slough House antics are more along the lines of a workplace comedy like Parks And Recreation than part of a darkly comic spy thriller.

Sex and Skin: Nothing in the first episode.

Parting Shot: A taxi drives across the French countryside, with an MI5 agent holding a passport and asking “Who are you?”

Sleeper Star: We’ll go with Kristin Scott Thomas because, hell, it’s Kristin Scott Thomas.

Most Pilot-y Line: Marcus waterboards Shirley as part of a bet. The payment? Paper clips. “Paper clips are his gambling methadone,” Shirley says to Moira when she asks.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Slow Horses continues to be entertaining because of the show’s quirky characters, not the least of which is Oldman’s character Jackson Lamb. But we’ll see if the cases being pursued this season will develop into something that’s worthy of the characters pursuing them.

Joel Keller ( @joelkeller ) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com , VanityFair.com , Fast Company and elsewhere.

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