River Cartwright is dead, apparently. I can’t be quite sure. He definitely looked dead at the end of season 6, having collapsed with a heart attack on his grandfather’s kitchen floor. Especially when his foot stopped twitching. But then, how dead can a fictional British spy ever really be?
No sooner had season 6 ended on that knife edge than we were treated to a teaser trailer for season 7, which you can watch below. The preview opens tantalizingly, with Standish standing in Jackson Lamb’s office asking: “Have you heard something? About River?”
“Yeah, funnily enough I got a postcard,” retorts Lamb. “Weather’s lovely in the afterlife, sunset to die for. Love and hugs…”
So, if that doesn’t open the door for a River to run wild, I don’t know what does.
No matter, we’ve got other fish to spy. Two things to know: the new series is already in the can, and while there’s no official release date yet, industry expectations point to fall 2027.
So, what fresh calamities await our favorite band of double-oh-for-heavens-sakes?
Vassily is on UK soil
MI5’s interminable game of geopolitical tit-for-tat with Russia rumbles on. Diana Taverner reveals that Vassily, the shadowy Russian intelligence chief and her opposite number, “is on British soil”.
“That man sent a Russian death squad to murder my joes,” Lamb complains, referring to the events of season 6.
Until now, Vassily has been little more than a name and a gravelly voice at the end of a secure phone line to Taverner’s office. Now, it seems, he’s out in the open—and making a spectacularly unsubtle mess of things on British soil.
And not just any old patch of sovereign territory. One explosion in the teaser looks suspiciously like the MI5 building at Millbank.
Taverner is going back in the field
Diana Taverner, usually more comfortable pulling strings from behind a desk, appears to be getting her hands dirty. We see her moving furtively through a crowded market in sunglasses and a bomber jacket, before sitting anxiously in a laundrette as Lamb tells her: “It takes some fucking balls going after you.”
The hunter, it seems, has become the hunted. Fear, however, has done little to temper Taverner’s trademark vindictiveness. “I’m going to shop that little fucker Sparrow off at the ankles,” she fumes, before flipping the bird at a drone hovering in front of her on a rooftop.
“Back in the field, then, Diana,” Lamb observes. “Looks like I won’t be having to put up with you for a little while.”
Don’t worry, Slow Horses fans—season 7 is already in the can.
Shirley topples over the edge
Shirley Dander, fast becoming one of Slough House’s most bulletproof inmates, is smashing a bus’s windscreen with an electric iron. It seems she’s losing the plot. Why? We don’t know. Only that Lamb is forcing her into a stint in rehab.
We do know from previous series that she has a soft spot for cocaine—a weakness that almost got her killed multiple times. It’s part of her background backstory from before she arrived at Slough House and the struggle continues across the seasons, exacerbated by the trauma and grief of losing her colleague Marcus Longridge in season 4.
“I’m here to get on top of impulse control issues,” she tells a group circle. One gets the sense she doesn’t really mean it.
Later, she’s seen fistfighting a leather-clad biker in a helmet with a machine gun.
A plot to blow a lot of stuff up
“How long has Rasnikov been in the country getting up to god knows what?” says Lamb over a fast edit of military choppers speeding over an ocean, secret meetings in a neon-lit London market, and barrels of something (presumably explosive) being unloaded at a British dock.
Then Standish saying, “We could be looking at a death toll into the thousands,” over a shot of a hull-full of bombs in a boat.
Some more shooting, some running, rising dramatic music—fast cuts of Slow Horses, and fade to black. “This will be an overdue reckoning,” says a man with a Russian accent.
And that’s all we get.
Who are the new faces in season 7?
Alongside the returning Slough House stalwarts—Lamb, Standish, Shirley Dander, Ho and Taverner—season 7 is bringing fresh blood for the Slow Horse bath. Apple TV+ has added several intriguing names to the ensemble, including:
- Varada Sethu, who was recently seen as Ann Baxter in The Other Bennet Sister, Sethu has also appeared in Andor and Jurassic World: Dominion.
- Tuppence Middleton, whose screen credits include The Forsytes and Downton Abbey: A New Era. She also played Sara Mankiewicz, wife of Gary Oldman’s Herman Mankiewicz, in the film Mank.
- Ethan Moorhouse, who joins the fray after appearing in Masters of the Air and Ludwig.
- Merab Ninidze, who is known for roles in Homeland and a range of international film and television productions.
- Joshua McGuire, whose credits include the financial-crime drama The Gold.
And there’s a familiar face returning to the fold, too: James Callis is back as Claude Whelan, the magnificently slippery former First Desk. In the world of Slow Horses, a man like Whelan is unlikely to make anything easier.
With Russian intelligence operatives, an apparently deceased spy, a possibly compromised MI5 chief and Shirley’s impulse control hanging by a thread, season 7 looks set to deliver another deliciously combustible cocktail of bureaucratic absurdity, geopolitical skulduggery, and spectacularly bad behavior.
Roll on autumn 2027, whether River is there or not.