‘Slow Horses’ Team on Lamb’s ‘Tough Love’ to River, Slough House in Lockdown & More

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Slow Horses Season 5 Episode 2 “Tall Tales.”]

Slough House is in lockdown! The latest episode of Slow Horses ends with Diana Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas) putting Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman) and his team on ice while she has Roddy Ho (Christopher Chung) brought to the Park for questioning (someone’s been trying to kill him, and his girlfriend is involved). We have a feeling that having the Slow Horses and MI5 officers all in the same place will make for quite entertaining television, though we can’t forget there’s a serious situation going on outside that building (there’s already been a shooting at a campaign spot).

“The Slow Horses, one of their essential problems is they’re never quite involved — they never should be quite involved with what’s going on except they’re always drawn into it because that’s the nature of TV drama,” director Saul Metzstein tells TV Insider. “We even prefigure all that because in the beginning of Episode 1 is a very violent, horrible thing going on, and then the next sequence is an idiot dancing down the street to Robert Palmer, so it’s already set up is that they have a peripheral relationship.”

He continues, “I thought it was a very clever bit of writing to make some feeling by doing the opposite of what you think you want characters to do, and I think by actually stranding them by actually locking them down and making them have to deal, have to even sit there with each other in the room — I mean, one of the things I love about it is they all hate being in the room with all these other guys. And I think of course the basic underlying joke in Slow Horses is that everyone there thinks they’re OK and the other guys are useless. And so any amount of time that they’re put together, to me, is quite valuable. And it’s also just a nice counterintuitive way of making some television where you think we’ve got to have some action but we’re going to have some action by stopping them getting involved in the action. That seemed like quite a nice idea.”

Apple TV+

Leading up to that, the team has finally accepted that Shirley Dander (Aimee-Ffion Edwards) was right and someone was targeting Roddy, first by trying to run him over in the premiere (while he was dancing down the street), then in his apartment. River Cartwright (Jack Lowden), however, had brushed it off and left her to follow Roddy alone, only for her to end up in a dangerous situation. Lamb calls him out on standing down, and River apologizes, wanting to move past the bit where his boss ignores him to when he tells him what to do. But as Lamb sees it and tells him, everyone else is “more functional than you. … Your world stopped when your grandpa went gaga and your dad tried to blow you up. Deal with it or f**k off.”

That’s “quite tough love,” says executive producer Will Smith. “It’s not the best kind of HR guidance, but they’re both frustrated with each other at that point. And that was a thing that both Gary and Jack were looking for. Jack was like, ‘Can I have a moment where I really go at him?’ And then Gary was like, ‘I want to hit back harder.’ And that’s where it ended up, and it’s a great moment.”

He shares that he’s spoken with Slough House series author Mick Herron and Oldman, “and we all agree that there’s 1, 2% more warmth in Gary’s Lamb than there is in the Lamb in the books. So, Gary always feels that Lamb sees potential in River, but he also just knows what it’s going to do to him knows he’s too naive and too idealistic and ‘I’m the cautionary tale, don’t end up like me.’ I think he also resents because he hates River’s grandfather, it’s hard for him to like River. And River also has a sense of entitlement, thinks he’s better than he is. So, Lamb is always trying to slap him down, but also knows that out of all of them there, I think, Catherine [Saskia Reeves] is definitely the sharpest agent, but River is the most effective in the field, and so he kind of has to use River.”

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And he certainly needs River now, given what’s going on and the fact that one of their own has been targeted and is now at the Park. But still, Roddy refuses to accept his girlfriend could be involved. “He’s a perpetual man-child,” points out Chung. “This is puppy dog love, and I think anyone who tries to come between an adolescent and their first real love, say a parent, say Lamb, say Taverner, you’re not going to hear it. It’s never going to go in. ‘All the things that you are saying to me, that’s not how I see the world.’ But the way that he sees the world is completely skewed from reality. So, he refuses to engage with anything that doesn’t support his narrative.”

Elsewhere in the episode, First Desk Claude Whelan (James Callis) is stopped by a man working for a columnist, Dodie Gimbal (Victoria Hamilton), the wife of mayoral candidate Dennis Gimbal (Christopher Villiers), and questioned about a certain security conference in Copenhagen. While he is “really concerned,” it’s strictly personal, says Callis.

“He’s not sharp enough or in some fashion, he doesn’t have the concern of necessarily controlling his own narrative. If he did would be he’d be a different person,” he explains. “The reason that it’s so important is his wife must never know. The service can go like whatever, go hang itself. You can get over that or your colleagues saying that you had an elicit rendezvous with a waitress, with whoever and whatever. That’s along the lines of scandal. If we look today, I mean, talk about a beginner. I’m not sure how long — that wouldn’t even be in the headlines for five minutes before something else happens. So, the real deal is that his wife who can never know. He’s trying to protect that.”

Slow Horses, Wednesdays, Apple TV+