Note: This story contains spoilers from “Slow Horses” Season 6, Episode 1.
Some familiar faces are back in the “Slow Horses” Season 6 premiere, but some are also gone. The Apple TV thriller kicks off its latest run in violent fashion with former Slough House resident Struan Loy (Paul Higgins) making his not-so-triumphant return to the series only to meet a grisly fate at the hands of two ruthless assassins (Kyle Soller and MyAnna Buring), who beat him up and leave him to burn in the shipping container he’d converted into a home.
Those assassins later return to drown another, former Slough House agent and then set their sights on River Cartwright (Jack Lowden), who spends much of the “Slow Horses” Season 6 premiere preparing for the funeral of his grandfather David (Jonathan Pryce). It is at David’s funeral where Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman) not only bursts into laughter but River also sees his estranged father Frank Harkness (Hugo Weaving) watching from the wings.
Frank handles their reunion with the same blunt-force brutality he demonstrated throughout “Slow Horses” Season 4, leaving the agents of Slough House to wonder whether or not his reemergence has anything to do with the unknown assassins currently hunting them. (As the trailers for “Slow Horses” Season 6 have already revealed, fans have even more returns to look forward to in the coming weeks as well.)
Pryce’s David is not the only major “Slow Horses” figure absent from its Season 6 premiere, though. It is also the first episode of “Slow Horses” produced without original creator and showrunner Will Smith, who was forced to step away from the show after its fifth season due to scheduling issues. “The Beast Must Die” creator Gaby Chiappe stepped in to fill Smith’s role this season, a decision that she called both a “thrill” and “obviously nerve-wracking.”
Speaking with TheWrap, Chiappe admitted she was “wary” to say she totally filled Smith’s position. “I don’t feel like I stepped into Will’s shoes. I took over one aspect of the many things Will was doing,” Chiappe said. “In the middle of the process, there was a Will-shaped hole. He did so much. He was across everything, and I took over one part of what he was doing, which was overseeing the scripts.”
Chiappe was quick to credit the foundation that Smith and co. laid throughout the first five seasons of “Slow Horses” for making it easier to take the show’s reigns. She also went out of her way to shout out the source material provided by “Slough House” author Mick Herron.
“It was an amazing opportunity,” Chiappe added. “Will had set the DNA of the show and those actors have been working on it for five years and there’s the books, so it’s like a tuning fork. If you feel your ear going off, you say, ‘I’m not sure that Lamb would say this.’ You just need to listen to two minutes of ‘Slow Horses’ or read a couple of script pages to know the tone [you have to hit].”
Her sentiments were echoed by “Slow Horses” lead Gary Oldman, who described the series’ showrunner transition as “pretty seamless.”
“After five seasons [and] how many books that Mick has written, we’ve got a really solid template,” Oldman explained. “Gabby came in and took the helm and was terrific. It was sad to see Will go because you build a sort of collaborative thing [together]. But we are now so in these characters that, if Gabby was to stumble anywhere, we have enough source material and enough experience with the characters to get it back on track.”
Oldman and the rest of the “Slow Horses” team also benefitted greatly from the presence of director Adam Randall, who helmed the show’s action-packed fourth season and returned to direct the entirety of Season 6. Oldman said Randall’s steady hand behind the camera helped make the set feel more “familiar,” even in the absence of Smith.
“Slow Horses” viewers will likely agree with Oldman’s “seamless” assessment of the series’ showrunner transition. Despite its behind-the-scenes leadership change, “Slow Horses” picks up where it left off in Season 6, with the same effortless confidence that has partly defined it over the last four years. Even more importantly, Randall’s return takes “Slow Horses” back to the emotional and aesthetic darkness of its fourth season.
That is an intentional decision. Not only does it prime viewers for another violent, emotionally and physically brutal journey, but it also allows “Slow Horses” to better reflect the place where Season 6 finds Lowden’s River.
“River is at a really, really low ebb. He’s unanchored. He’s lost everything,” Chiappe told TheWrap. “He’s been losing his grandfather for a couple of seasons, but this is death. He is very, very alone. He feels like he’s got nothing and no one.”
River’s grief over his grandfather’s death stands in stark contrast throughout the “Slow Horses” Season 6 premiere to Lamb’s nonchalance. The latter has no reason to mourn Pryce’s David, but his behavior throughout “Circle of Life” only further reinforces the difference between where River is at this point in his MI5 tenure and the bitter, deeply cynical place Lamb’s has left him in.
“For Lamb, it’s business as usual, whatever that means. David Cartwright’s death is, I think, nothing but a source of pleasure to Lamb. He had really good reason to hate David,” Chiappe noted.
The only thing that seems to engage Oldman’s Slough House overlord these days is the emergence of new threats. Throughout the “Slow Horses” Season 6 premiere, viewers see him put together the clues of Struan’s suspicious death and arrive at the foreboding conclusion of what it means for him and his joes.
“You imagine Lamb always asleep on his desk with his feet on the table, but he’s not really asleep,” Chiappe observed. “He’s like a shark. His antenna’s always up, and I think he’s in that state again at the start of the season… And then something happens to disturb the very outer edges of the spider’s web he sits in the middle of, and that wakes him up. It puts him in a different mode.”
New episodes of “Slow Horses” Season 6 premiere Wednesdays on Apple TV.
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