The Greek philosopher Heraclitus said that “no man ever steps in the same river twice.” He clearly never met MI5’s most durable disappointment, Slow Horses’ River Cartwright, who—it appears—is dead in the season 6 finale. But not for the first time.
You’ll remember season 4 of the Apple TV series, when his dementia-ravaged grandfather mistook an intruder for River and blew his face off with a shotgun. River planted his wallet on the body and spent the rest of the episode playing dead. So forgive me if I hold off on the black tie.
Then again, killing River off now would be a tidy bit of housekeeping for an actor whose calendar has a famously 00-shaped hole in it. And, as Heraclitus also held, everything flows towards something else; rivers, as a rule, are always heading somewhere bigger. So River Cartwright’s timely death could open the door for Jack Lowden to, so to speak, die another day in another, not-so-different role. Let’s see.
The episode is split into two converging strands: Lamb’s attempt to cut off the head of the snake and the Suffolk holiday-home siege.
To Lamb first: he has Taverner banged to rights, leaving her in a tight corner. “I am not in Cantor’s pocket,” she yells at him during a meeting in his little yellow Inbetweeners car.
To this, he delivers a line that sums up the whole series: “Oh, come off it. Tell that to his cock. The money you took from [Cantor] – it came from the top and it came in rubles. Now, he’s trying to kill anyone who can prove his connection to this Natasha. The Russians are trying to kill the people they think are responsible for Kazan. And you know who’s in the crosshairs for both? My fucking joes.”
That’s it, folks: we’ve reached the end of another season of Slow Horses.
Natasha Carrington, you’ll remember, is the shady Russian go-between who set up the dodgy media meeting between Damian Cantor and some Russian string-pullers. It’s the meeting that would, in her words to Cantor, “land the biggest media deal in Russian history.” It turns out she’s an oligarch’s billionaire daughter with Kremlin ties.
Taverner finally admits she’s compromised and that her only option is to come clean and confess to treason. But Lamb, as usual, has a plan. “There’s a way out of this… you just have to fucking listen to me.”
Meanwhile, in Suffolk, Louisa, Standish, Moira and Shirley have joined up with Roddy, Emma Flyte (an ex-Dog) and Reese Nesmith (the son of the corrupt ex-Dog whom Harkness killed in episode 1). They’re holed up in Taverner’s holiday home, quaffing plonk and bickering like a family on day three of a caravan holiday. Then River arrives to tell them that Coe is dead and Sid is missing again.
And finally, bang! Harkness—River’s father—turns up with his two new henchmen to shoot the living daylights out of them. Smoke grenades shatter the windows, bullets fly, guns are grabbed and cover is dived for. It’s the Alamo in cable-knit jumpers, with less ammunition.
But back to that in a minute, because Lamb is enacting his plan… at a Russian child’s birthday party. He finds Natasha’s mansion and walks in brazenly for a chat: “I think the GRU has had you running an off-books assassination squad on British soil because the man at the top wanted to settle scores. And now all that’s gone tits up, who do you think is going to take the rap?”
She’s interested. He continues: “What if you could give Moscow the double-agent mastermind behind Kazan?”
“There is no double-agent mastermind,” she says, all skeptical.
“I’m not asking if you can buy it,” he says cryptically. “I’m asking if you can sell it.”
Lamb’s plan is simple: get Natasha to tell Moscow that it was Cantor, not MI5, who set up the Kazan hit. It was his money, after all, that inadvertently paid for it, so the paper trail does most of the talking. This also gets Taverner off the hook. She’ll pin the dirty money on Judd, the corrupt ex-Home Secretary who was holding Cantor’s cash when she confiscated it in season 4, and save her job in the process.
“Lamb hasn’t told the Russians what you used my money for yet, has he?” an increasingly panicked Cantor asks Taverner at a secret meeting in one of his hotels.
“Oh yes, he has,” she says, as icily as a Siberian winter.
And there, for the first time, Cantor loses his cool completely and tries to flee in his chauffeur-driven Bentley. Only Lamb’s in the driving seat. Cantor tries to bargain, to quibble, to prevaricate. No dice. Lamb wants one thing: for Cantor to ring Harkness and revoke Harkness’s license to kill. Cantor does it, believing it’ll save his skin. It won’t. Lamb drops him at a secret military airbase, where a plane is waiting—from Russia with love. He’s flown far, far away to face the “Kalinka,” where a grim fate awaits.
What’s next for Slow Horses?
Back at Taverner’s holiday pile, all hell is breaking loose. The gang has fled the house and holed up on the beach, but things are getting desperate. Louisa has been shot in the stomach (though she will survive), and Emma Flyte has been killed by Harkness after heroically taking one of the henchmen with her (a sad end to a wonderfully hammer-and-tongs performance by Ruth Bradley).
It’s all happening at pace now. Harkness’s surviving henchman finds Roddy, Reese and Shirley hiding behind a dead tree. Just as the henchman is about to shoot Roddy in the head, Reese fires a harpoon (salvaged earlier) into the henchman’s back, and he crumples to the sand with a gurgle.
All that’s left is Harkness, the final boss. But just as he arrives on the beach, with a clear shot, he gets the call from Cantor to stand down. The bloodshed is over—except for River, who is back at the house, where Jane has finally arrived. She’s angrier than a Russian doll who’s just found out she’s the smallest one. She’s come to finish the job.
She ambushes River. There’s a fight: she has a gun, he has a table lamp, and they roll around, gouging, scratching, and biting. She flings him down the stairs. But Harkness is in the kitchen, fixing himself a drink. With a single motion, he shoots Jane in the head as she comes down to finish River off. Whatever else he is, he has no intention of killing his own son. (Another kitchen-sink performance from MyAnna Buring, by the way, sadly cut short.)
What follows is a reunion between father and son about how all parents fuck up their kids, as Larkin said. At one point, Frank actually quotes the Librarian from Hull. Then, as the choppers arrive to rescue the team, Harkness slips out the back door and escapes. Crisis over . . . But that’s not quite the end.
Finally, we return to where this piece began: River’s apparent death at his grandfather’s house, where Sid is waiting for him with a bath running. He knows she’s waiting because she left a note with Standish, worded as if it were from a neighbour, saying that a light had been left on at the house. It’s a cute reference to a story River told her in an earlier episode about how his grandfather always left a light on to let River know that he was home.
She doesn’t know River’s crept in, bottle of red in hand, ready to surprise her and finally pour his heart out. But then, before he can say a word, his literal heart stops. He appears to have a heart attack on the kitchen floor. The last thing we see is his twitching foot through a doorway. Then nothing. Man, this is no time to die—just as he was about to get a bit of how’s-your-spy-who-loved-me…
And so, folks, we reach the end of another season of Slow Horses. Taverner is back on the MI5 throne; Lamb returns to his rightful place among the detritus of Slough House with what’s left of his team.
And River? Well, if he really is dead, there is, I suppose, a quantum of solace to be found in Jack Lowden’s future. Will we see him again on Her Majesty’s Secret Service? His diary appears to have opened up, and I think there’s a lot more to Jack Lowden than meets the GoldenEye.