‘Slow Horses’ Season 6 review: Another impeccable season of Britain’s finest caught with its trousers down

No collection of blundering intelligence operatives on television is quite as magnificently useless as the residents of Slough House. Over five seasons, Jackson Lamb, River Cartwright and the rest of MI5’s human refuse pile have survived bombings, kidnappings, botched extractions, terrorist plots, Russian skulduggery, rogue agents, internal coups, political cover-ups, and an array of other catastrophically bad professional judgements. Yet here we are again, six seasons into Apple TV’s glorious, grubby espionage comedy, and almost nothing has changed (complimentary). Slough House is still populated by its spectacular clown car of disgraced spies, except the bodies turning up around them this season suggest their latest disaster might actually have nothing to do with their own incompetence. For once, somebody other than the Slow Horses may be trying to kill the Slow Horses.

Season 6 opens with David Cartwright dead and River (Jack Lowden) preparing for his funeral. Slough House gets no time to process the funeral before the bodies start piling up. When Struan Loy, the incompetent sad sack Lamb (Gary Oldman) fired back in Season 1, is the first to turn up dead, they soon realise that his death is connected to a series of killings targeting former Slow Horses. Two assassins, played by Kyle Soller and MyAnna Buring, are working their way through the old personnel, while MI5 has quietly scrubbed the victims, and the entirety of the existing Slough House from its records.

River is still dealing with David’s death when Olivia Cooke’s Sid Baker turns up alive, having been presumed dead since Season 1. Then Hugo Weaving’s Frank Harkness, River’s estranged father and the former CIA operative turned mercenary who caused such havoc in Season 4, also resurfaces, while Diana Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas), now First Desk at MI5, also finds herself tangled in the fallout. The further River digs, the clearer it becomes that the killings reach into the upper levels of the service, leaving Lamb and his Slow Horses to figure out why someone has suddenly decided that MI5’s discarded agents need to be permanently discarded.

Lowden suffers almost every indignity Slow Horses can plausibly inflict on a human being, while still having to maintain the illusion that River could one day become a properly functioning intelligence officer. River is grieving David, getting chased, shot at and thrown into increasingly stupid physical predicaments, all while finding himself re-smitten with a resurrected old flame; yet Lowden keeps enough composure in his performance to remind you why people keep calling him the next potential James Bond. He certainly has the rumpled poise and physicality for 007. But if he actually does bag the role of cinema’s most iconic spy after playing television’s worst, that will be an extraordinary piece of casting history.

A still from ‘Slow Horses’ Season 6
| Photo Credit:
Apple TV

Oldman has now inhabited Jackson Lamb for so long that the character’s slouch and spectacular contempt for personal hygiene have become as recognisable as his snide barbs. Oldman is still finding new frequencies in this human biohazard, adjusting a pause, a stare, the angle of his head or the miserable little grunt that precedes another verbal evisceration. Lamb can quite literally communicate an entire paragraph of contempt by simply lowering himself into a chair. One would think Oldman would have exhausted every conceivable permutation of being an absolutely revolting bastard by now. Yet, six seasons in, Lamb somehow keeps discovering fresh depths of depravity and even fresher ways to make them funny.

The supporting players are used more sparingly this time, with Roddy Ho (Christopher Chung), Catherine Standish (Saskia Reeves), Shirley Dander (Aimee-Ffion Edwards), and returning Horse Louisa Guy (Rosalind Eleazar) getting fewer opportunities to dominate an episode than in previous seasons. Ho is still Ho, Standish remains the only adult, Shirley is pushed further into the ensemble, and Louisa returns to the fold without being handed a major subplot of her own. What remains impressive is how effortlessly their chemistry snaps back once they are all brought back together.

Taverner, meanwhile, finally looks genuinely rattled, having entangled herself with Harry Lloyd’s Damien Cantor, an obnoxious media mogul whose access to information gives him the kind of leverage that renders even Diana’s usual bureaucratic armour flimsy. Newcomer Lenny Rush is also a terrific presence as Reece Nesmith, bringing a prickly, unpredictable energy to the lot without making the character feel like an obvious comic contrivance.

The supporting cast that really gets its teeth into the season, though, includes Cooke’s Sid Baker and Tom Brooke’s Coe. Cooke is an evergreen delight to watch, and it is genuinely refreshing to have her back in something that lets her be funny and physically present after so long in House of the Dragon. Cooke’s return also gives Lowden some of his best material because the chemistry between them is electric, and their exchanges are among the most charged flirtations on television this year. Meanwhile, Coe remains one of my favourite Slow Horses thanks to his idiosyncratic brand of faux cool, which occasionally gives way to sudden bursts of competence that make his carefully cultivated nonchalance even funnier.

A still from ‘Slow Horses’ Season 6
| Photo Credit:
Apple TV

Gaby Chiappe, who takes over as showrunner after Will Smith’s departure, could have knocked the show’s rhythm sideways, yet Season 6 barely misses a beat. And Adam Randall, who directs the entire season, keeps the six episodes moving with plenty of bite. Its velocity is why the six-episode format suits Slow Horses. There is no need to inflate the material into eight hours of prestige TV when Mick Herron’s world is already brimming with enough assorted MI5 lunacy to keep the plot compelling and endlessly entertaining. The showrunners are fundamentally aware of this and just get on with it.

But what really makes Slow Horses such a gift that keeps giving is that Slough House may be the most convincing miniature of the British state currently on television. This is an institution sustained by a frankly astonishing belief in its own professional and political brilliance, while the evidence consistently suggests otherwise. Lamb and his rejects are simply the least lacquered symptom of a dysfunction running much higher up the British food chain, which is why Slow Horses has become such an effective perennial joke about British power. Six seasons in, the joke still hasn’t run out of ammunition or the reasons to keep firing it. I suspect it never will.

Slow Horses Season 6 is currently airing on Apple TV with episodes dropping weekly

Published – September 20, 2026 04:09 pm IST