Slow Horses (Season Three)

Season three of Slow Horses picks up a not clearly defined ‘few months’ after the events of season two. Most people have largely dealt with the death of Min, but Louisa is still grieving in her own way. As you might imagine for a Slow Horse, that’s not entirely healthily. The main story is satisfyingly many-threaded. Trying to tread the line between a review and no spoilers is tricky, so there may be mild spoilers ahead. As we’ve seen in previous seasons, there is a pissing contest between First Desk and Second Desk (in the world Slow Horses that’s the person in charge of MI5 and her deputy). This season adds a pissing contest between the whole of MI5 and the Home Secretary. This may or may not be reasonable, but we’ve certainly seen high tensions between the various police representative bodies and Home Secretaries over the last decade or so, extending that to MI5 is plausible. The way they do it is certainly broadly plausible. The story starts with a tiger team (that’s a friendly group acting as a pseudo-hostile force to test security) using the Slow Horses to get into The Park and steal some embarrassing but not really sensitive data. The Slow Horses are dismissed by everyone else as useless where they’ve actually made one embarrassing rather than critical mistake and are far from useless. Then the tiger team goes rogue and the events really spiral out of control. The bits I found implausible were not the story so much as the major gun fight. But it added a nice layer of dramatic tension at the end. As always, the story has a nice bit of tension between Slough House and The Park, this one adds more layers to that tension, more complexity to the world of MI5 - there’s tension between the old and new spies, tension between the ideas of honourable spies and getting your hands dirty, between public service and the private sector and much, much more. It takes what I can’t help feeling was already a very British series and makes it even more so. If you follow British news and politics a lot of the ideas that underpin this story will feel very, very familiar. I, for one, thoroughly enjoyed it, and some of the things it made me think about, as well as the story. I know there’s a season four coming, and I’m looking forward to it. Bechdel Test: Pass. There are a number of female characters and while some don’t get to talk to each other that much, several of them do, in every episode. They’re very rarely talking about men. Ko Test: Pass. Louise is doing quite a bit of the the heavy lifting here, but she’s not alone this time. Ingrid Tearney, First Desk, gets a lot more time, as you might expect, and is also passing in, I think, every episode. Russo Test: Fail. Mostly we don’t see any sexual activity, except for Louise, who is straight. But no one is out and proud.