Slow Horses Recap: Concrete Box

The most exciting thing about the penultimate episode of a season is that TV critics love using the word penultimate, and we’ll do it every chance we get. Penultimate. Mmm … feels great. The second most exciting thing is that when the second-to-last episode is done right, as “Grave Danger” emphatically is, it carries a huge amount of momentum into the finale. Finales are a more difficult beast because they have to tie up all the loose ends and bring the whole complicated mess to a satisfying close. But penultimate episodes are all about crises and possibilities, taking decisive action while still leaving viewers tantalizingly in the dark. This one starts with a home invasion, ends with a kidnapping, and goes absolutely haywire in between.

Perhaps the defining moment, however, takes us away from the action. Claude has summoned Taverner into his office for the sort of misbegotten PowerPoint presentation that’s going to bore her to tears. He stumbles his way through the revelations found by Giti’s research into the “cold body” passport of the assassin that David Cartwright killed and his grandson, River, rendered temporarily unidentifiable. That passport had gone through Munich in 2014, where a car bomb killed a member of Chechen intelligence, and to Paris in 2015, where a Palestinian human-rights lawyer was killed. And so on. Then Claude says something magical:

“As you know, my brief is to activate accountability and accessibility. That’s the triple-A promise! But now, reviewing the current situation in the round, my position has shifted somewhat to fuck-that-completely. Fuck it. This whole thing needs to be locked in a concrete box and dropped in the middle of the ocean.”

Adding to that, Claude also sees Giti, his trusted researcher, as a potential whistleblower. (“She needs to be put in a fucking concrete box and all.”) On top of being a hilarious about-face from a leader who seemed to be stubbornly clinging to principles like “the triple-A promise,” Claude is now in alignment with Taverner and they can move forward together. That unity of purpose happens up and down the episode, which is thrillingly committed to tightening all the narrative strands and getting down to business. Perhaps Claude will find some other time for his big MI5 transparency project, but right now, no one can suppress the sound of a ticking time bomb.

That bomb comes in the menacing form of Frank Harkness, who begins the episode by targeting Molly Doran (Naomi Wirthner), the records keeper whose post in the archives, deep in the belly of the Park, would seem to prevent her from ever being in danger. Yet Frank is under enormous pressure to find David Cartwright and wipe him out before his client chops him up in a hotel suite, and Molly is his easiest ticket into the system. He needs her fingerprints and access codes, but drizzles a little sadism on top of his coercion, saying that no one will miss her because “you built your own dungeon and you shut everyone out.” He spares her life in the end but leaves her pride and dignity in tatters.

Unfortunately for Harkness, Lamb and Standish have control of David, who’s still insisting on clamming up about everything until he can speak to a First Desk official who no longer exists. Lamb’s solution is to bulldoze the information out of him by dragging him to the cemetery where his wife is buried and reinforcing the delusion that he shot and killed his grandson. Standish is shocked by Lamb’s indecency — which is saying something about the level of that indecency — but the gambit works. That young woman from the flashbacks who was freed in exchange for money and weapons and then later fled on the way back home? That was David and his wife’s daughter. He has a long and bitter history with Harkness.

Meanwhile, the slowest horses at Slough House collaborate on some truly helpful sleuthing, despite an unusually talkative J.K. Coe calling them “a D-list unit with no unifying sense of purpose” who can’t assist anyone in the field. Harkness’s star assassin, Patrice, had been wounded in his four-on-one battle with Lamb, Chapman, Shirley, and Marcus, but the gang correctly surmises that he could not have gone to the hospital to mend his wounds. The new office manager, Moira, alerts them to a database of “backstreet doctors” that MI5 keeps, and it turns out one of them took a fatal spill down a flight of stairs around the time Patrice might have visited. They end up getting CCTV footage of the assassin — which may not be the biggest piece of the puzzle, but it’s quality detective work.

Yet their competence doesn’t keep River from getting into a new kind of trouble now that he’s back in London. Flyte picks him up and arrests him at David’s house and cuffs him to the back seat of a car, where she can take him to the Park for interrogation. In their frisky exchange en route, River and Flyte develop a real chemistry, both good-looking agents who have strayed from their minders this season — River with his misadventures in France, Flyte with her hiding of information from Taverner. She mocks him for his ridiculous timeline but seems sympathetic to the lengths he’ll go to protect his grandfather, and the two seem to land on a good note.

But we’ll have to slap a “to be continued…” label on that relationship, because Patrice, acting on intel gained from Harkness’s time in Molly’s apartment, drives a garbage truck straight into the first car in River and Flyte’s motorcade and starting shooting with River still cuffed to the back. (Marcus compares Patrice, fittingly, to the T-800 model of the Terminator, not the liquid-metal T-1000.) Patrice kills the Dogs in the driver and passenger seats, and Flyte empties her gun at close range and somehow misses every shot. The melee ends with Flyte getting knocked unconscious and Patrice dragging River into the trunk of a bystander’s car, presumably to torture him into giving up his grandfather’s location.

Every scene propels Slow Horses forward to the finale, and the dialogue pops with urgency and wit. The show is at the top of its game at the right time.

Shots

• Flyte’s initial interrogation of River yields little: “What was in France?” “You know, French people, baguettes …”

• Marcus’s claim to have sold his gun to a dealer who doesn’t sell to gangs is undermined when Louis informs him that the dealer does sell to organized crime and unlicensed bodyguards. (“Boutique arms dealer? Nice. Classy,” jokes Shirley. “Was all that coke you snorted fair trade?” he retorts.)

• The people of Slough House will probably want Coe to talk less. First, he flambés Shirley over her psychological profile (“You’re a deeply unhappy person”), and then he identifies Roddy’s hot chat-mate as a bot manipulating him for scams (“Only a small percentage of people are duped”).

• Good banter between River and Flyte: “Look, maybe my actions have been hard to understand.” “Faking your own death, hiding your grandfather, shooting the face off a corpse …” “Okay, if you’re gonna do the list thing, then that’s gonna make it sound worse.”

• Have to love the high-level Bond villain scheme of raising a “deniable assassination squad” from birth. Worthy of a multi-season arc. Or a spinoff show.