Slow Horses Season 6, Episode 4 Review — ‘Lost and Found’

This review contains full spoilers for Slow Horses Season 6, Episode 4, which is streaming on Apple TV now.

Slow Horses has added a tad too much starch to its plot-thickening slurry in Season 6’s fourth episode, “Lost and Found.” It’s hardly devoid of standout moments — the entire opening sequence in the neon-hued bowling alley, Frank Harkness and Jackson Lamb (Hugo Weaving and Gary Oldman, finally getting some meaty shared screentime) facing off in the Shake Shack, JK Coe’s (Tom Brooke) bathroom knife fight to the death against Jim (Kyle Soller) — but it’s reached the point in its short six-episode season where Slow Horses feels like it’s scrambling a bit to make sense of its, as MI5 overseer Oliver (Lucian Msamati) put it last episode, “petri dish of intrigue.”

Details

Let’s put it under a microscope and unscramble where we’re at. Frank — who gets a taste of what it’s like to be Lamb, managing two spacey morons — is working for the scuzzy right-wing TV magnate Damien Cantor (Harry Lloyd). We already knew this from their meet-up in Episode 2 where Damien authorized Frank to kill Reece Nesmith (Lenny), but now there’s a twinge more clarity surrounding their circumstances. Damien wants some sort of contract from the Russians, and to prove his value, he was the one who had the dead Dog Andy Nesmith steal the Slough House file at the Park. But Damien wasn’t the one who directed anyone to start killing Slow Horses from that list; he just contracted Frank as the clean-up crew to cover the tracks of the document theft.

We can infer with a high degree of certainty, then, that Damien handed that list over to his Russian contact, who fed it to (or is working for) the GRU, Russia’s intelligence agency. And the GRU used the list to retaliate, sending in Jim and Jane (MyAnna Buring), against Diana Taverner’s retaliation for the recent nerve agent attacks that she’s attempting to re-cover up after the slip-up during her TV interview. For MI5’s assassination in Kazan, Russia, made to seem like a botched robbery, River (Jack Lowden) thinks that Diana (Kristin Scott Thomas) stole Sid Baker’s (Oliva Cooke) identity to make her look responsible on paper, which would explain why the murder duo would be out to get her. (But also: What if it actually was Sid? We still don’t really know for certain where she’s been hiding, other than vague allusions to a village where Diana apparently would visit.)

Diana continues to be not innocent amid all of this in astounding new ways: She picks up the phone call that Damien threatened her with. Vassily Rasnokov, her equivalent in the GRU, is the voice on the other line, and the two intelligence service heads barter over the murders of their agents. Diana agrees that Vassily’s assassins can take out Sid if they agree to stop killing off the rest of the people in Slough House. (And why were all of them targeted anyway?) Diana selling Sid out is an even bigger gut-punch considering Sid has been obsessing over checking in with her, despite River telling Sid she should not trust Diana. River turns out to be right for once as Sid is kidnapped at gunpoint by Jim and Jane at the end of the episode.

Phew, what a mess! Everyone seems to be tied up with the Russians in some way. And this isn’t even getting into Reece’s attempt at blackmailing Frank, the crew of ladies who make it to the safe house that happens to also appear to be Diana’s holiday home (where Standish finds the wine cave…), and Coe’s bummer of a death. Poor Coe, left with his belly sliced open in a bathroom. At least he died as close as a Slow Horse can get to a hero’s death in confronting Jim after saving his colleagues’ asses numerous times this season. That all of these major developments happened in this single episode is also my biggest problem with it. I have no problem breaking out the proverbial cork board to piece together complicated storylines, but all of this plot in one go comes off as ill-paced, especially after a super-solid previous episode.