Slow Horses is back for an ‘impeccable’ fifth season

“It takes a certain swagger to make a thriller about terror attacks, online radicalisation and the rise of the far-right in Britain, and then to make that thriller very funny indeed,” said Rebecca Nicholson in the Financial Times. But “Slow Horses” has returned to the small screen for its fifth season with a “renewed sense of nihilism and wit”.

Following a “fun but functional” fourth series, Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman) and his team of disgraced MI5 misfits are “licking their wounds” at Slough House. River Cartwright (Jack Lowden) is feeling “understandably glum” after discovering the real identity of his biological father, while the rest of the team are “burnt out, disaffected and tired of their friends dying all the time”.

So it’s a “treat” that the latest series focuses on Roddy Ho (Christopher Chung), said Nick De Semlyen in Empire. “Is there a more gloriously entertaining idiot on TV?” The cringy hacker has landed himself in “deep trouble” due to his “mysterious” new love interest who appears to be a honeytrap.

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I found the latest instalment to be “strangely lacking in substance”, said Hannah J. Davies in The Guardian. The “will-they-won’t-they” between two of the leads “adds absolutely nothing to proceedings”, and MI5’s icy second-in-command Diana Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas) is given little to do “apart from frown and drink large amounts of wine”.

It’s possible the show’s producers chose to forgo “foreign dalliances” because of concerns about the environment, “but having watched a scene set entirely at London Zoo’s penguin enclosure, I can’t help but feel that the amount of CO2 emissions expended by the series is proportional to its dramatic chops.” The plot “pinballs around far too much, and far too frivolously”, and even the major plot twist later in the series comes “too late” to “salvage” things.

I disagree, said Anita Singh in The Telegraph. “Slow Horses” is the only show I can think of that can skip from a devastating terrorist attack to the “unfortunate demise” of a group of penguins “without any jarring change in tone”.

The “villains” of the show are never predictable, and Lamb – who is even “tetchier” than normal – “continues to mock political correctness”, delivering his lines with a “zing”. Remarkably, the “impeccable” show isn’t seeing its quality tail off; season five returns with the same “supreme sense of confidence” as the earlier instalments.

The script is “as sharp as they come” and the blend of comedy and action is “handled beautifully”, said Chris Bennion in The Independent. With showrunner Will Smith leaving, and Gaby Chiappe taking over, it remains to be seen whether the next series – which has already been filmed – will reach the same heights. But look at what she has to work with: “the best group of characters on British TV”.