‘Slow Horses’ Sneak Peek: River & Sid’s Reunion Gets Tense

Oh, we’ve really missed River and Sid — and Jack Lowden and Olivia Cooke — together on Slow Horses. TV Insider’s exclusive sneak peek of the Wednesday, September 30, episode reminds us just that.

At the end of the second episode, River was shocked to find his former teammate, Sid, waiting for him in his grandfather’s house; he’d had Roddy (Christopher Chung) trace calls he’d been getting and had assumed they were from his mercenary father, Frank Harkness (Hugh Weaving). Now, in our clip, he gets to confront her about the fact that she’s alive (she’d been shot in the head in Season 1 and was said to be dead).

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asks, sitting at the kitchen table. “I tried calling first, there was no answer, then there’s no reception,” she replies. But he means for the past three years: “Why didn’t you tell me that you were alive?”

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She sits down and asks, “Is this just an excuse for you not visiting me for three years?” But River counters with, “I saw you, Sid. In the hospital. After it. I saw you, and you were… you were dead.”

Sid points out, “I’m not dead!” Not according to the Park, he explains. “You know that I’ve thought that it was my fault, this whole time,” he says. She asks incredulously, “So, I got shot in the head, but you’re the one that’s traumatized?” He insist that’s not what he means, and she adds, “It sounds like what you’re saying. Because that’d be really f**ked up, me getting my brain scrambled and you trying to tell me that I gave you PTSD.”

Watch the full clip above to see more of their back and forth.

Going into Season 6, we knew that Cooke’s Sid would be part of it, both from the books (it’s based on Joe Country and Slough House from Mick Herron‘s series) and the trailer. But unlike in the book, her return comes as the slow horses have gone dark after former members are killed. (In Slough House, River’s hiding her at his grandfather’s while going about his day-to-day life.)

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Co-executive producer Gaby Chiappe told us that change “was a way of being able to splice together or overlay things that happened in Joe Country and things that happen in Slough House. I mean, there are some beautiful scenes that we had to lose because you had to find a new pathway through to get those two books to cohere together and to take elements of one and elements of another and create a proper spine.”

She continued, “So it felt like everything was harnessed and working together. That was part of bringing Sid in where we did, in the way we did, and wanting to get as much out of that as we could while having her appearance be a surprise.”

And while you could argue, as Sid does, that River should have known she was alive — he had Roddy look into some things at the end of Season 1 — enough time had passed that he was no longer sure.