This review contains full spoilers for Slow Horses Season 6, Episode 5, which is streaming on Apple TV now.
“Sayonara,” the penultimate episode of Slow Horses Season 6, is just about as close to cinema as a single episode of TV can get… for better and worse. Set largely in foggy countrysides, the wide shots are hauntingly beautiful. It’s got big deaths (bye Jim, drowned in a lake) and twists (Jane survives the car crash!), high-stakes political drama (Diana Taverner’s heated committee hearing), classic spycraft (Jackson Lamb vs. Damien Cantor’s Russian contact), and tender moments between its characters (Sid Baker and River Cartwright, Catherine Standish and Reece Nesmith). Heck, it even ends with a grand gesture and huge car explosion. Slow Horses finally gets its Bond moment.
Oddly, it’s also sort of the antithesis to the series itself; since when do the Slow Horses get to have nice things? River (Jack Lowden) makes awful, nonsensical, emotionally driven decisions that seem to pan out mostly fine. The Horses posted up in Taverner’s country home are gorging on cookies and wine. River and Sid get to kiss, for chrissake! Those fleeting moments, however, are actually a bitter reminder that, no, it usually doesn’t turn out so well for the Slow Horses, as the season sprints to its finale that will, as Frank Harkness and his two minions promise, probably literally burn the house down. Diana Taverner’s holiday home, specifically.
Things pick up seconds after the last episode, where Sid Baker (Olivia Cooke) was kidnapped at gunpoint by confirmed GRU agents Jim (Kyle Soller) and Jane (MyAnna Buring), only now we’re seeing things from River’s perspective as he runs after their car. This really is Sid and River’s Big Episode; Sid uses the “River” novelty plate she bought last episode to slash Jane while driving to save herself from getting killed, even if it did put them all in serious danger when the car does a few barrel rolls and settles upside down. River swoops in to save Sid from being drowned and together they kill Jim.
The pair have a few sweet moments together amid the chaos. River finally tells her about his grandpa’s death. They banter about the most romantic ways to die in a black site hangar. They hornily flirt with each other right before Sid is meant to take off on a Russian plane to Bulgaria — a neutral, untracked place where she’d definitely be killed. And there’s River’s big moment, spurred by the power of a woman being into him: He punches out a few Dogs, steals an airfield maintenance truck, and hands himself over to the cavalcade of black cars to keep Sid from getting caught and sacrificed as retribution for Taverner’s off-book hit in Kazan. Maybe in a different life they could have been together, but it almost definitely won’t be this one.
Speaking of Diana Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas), the First Desk is imperiously unwavering under scrutiny. There’s Lamb’s (Gary Oldman) reproach, as he’s pieced together that Diana scrubbed the Slough House records because she did use the identity of Sid, dead on paper and expendable, to cover up the Kazan assassination. Next is MI5’s all-male oversight committee as she’s questioned about the details of the same hit. In fact, she uses each as opportunities to pontificate about how she has the situation under control and how slow-moving and underfunded the service is. She hasn’t cracked just yet — buttressed by arrogance or necessity, I wonder? — and I’ll be curious to see if she makes it out unscathed or goes the way of all her other predecessors in the finale.
At her holiday home, the merry band of Slow Horses is having a grand old time watching TV, drinking, and prepping Molotov cocktails. Lamb has Roddy Ho (Christopher Chung) digging up dirt on Damien Cantor (Harry Lloyd), but it’s Standish (Saskia Reeves) who finally gets something to do that isn’t staring at wine bottles or being mommy to a gaggle of whiners. Funny enough, it comes at a dinner table moment with Reece (Lenny Rush). Both have been grieving the deaths of not-so-great men they nevertheless had complicated relationships with — Standish, her old boss Charles Partner, and Reece, his dad — and neither would like to talk about it. Yet both play their conversation in a way that feels like they’re getting even just a little solace in finding a tiny amount of common ground.
The biggest curtain pull of the episode is one that we’ve been waiting for an explanation on all season (besides “why erase the Slough House records?”): What the hell is Cantor up to? Though it’s still not 100% clear, we know that he’s been courting mysterious Russian contacts for a media distribution deal, allegedly the biggest in Russian history. (Would he be airing Russian propaganda on his network or making the propaganda for the Russian state-run TV? Maybe both?) But Lamb isn’t far behind. He knows Cantor hired Harkness (Hugo Weaving) to take out Andy Nesmith, and Cantor has a strange, regularly scheduled meeting at a children's ballet rehearsal (based on the info gleaned from Ho’s detective work). He tails Cantor’s contact at the theater and then a bookstore, but she loses Lamb — not something a normie could pull off. Now all that remains are the last few pieces of the puzzle left to place.