Slow Horses Recap: Destabilization Strategy

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Before becoming more involved in the main events during the fifth season, Roddy was a definite outsider at Slough House. He spent his days at his computer, making sarcastic comments to anyone nearby. He was like a one-man heckler, mostly kept around because he could pull up security footage and occasionally break into secure systems. While he avoided fieldwork and wasn’t particularly helpful, his vanity and foolishness weren’t obvious, probably because he wasn’t a central character. He mainly served as a source of comic relief for the writers.

This season, the character Roddy is central to the terrorist plot and has largely set a surprisingly lighthearted tone, even though the season began with a shockingly intense and disturbing opening. This week’s episode advances the story well, particularly the suspenseful lockdown scenes at Slough House, but Roddy is becoming increasingly cartoonish in his foolishness and self-importance, making him feel disconnected from the other, more grounded characters. While he’s not an agent and isn’t expected to be particularly skilled, his behavior during his interrogation with Taverner felt excessively silly and unbelievable.

The last episode ended with Roddy being taken into custody by agents from Regent’s Park due to his possible involvement in recent terrorist attacks. Meanwhile, Flyte and a team are keeping the rest of the Slough House team confined. Roddy is brought to a stark interrogation room, nicknamed “The Fright Cube,” but he refuses to show any fear. Instead, he paces and acts aggressively, putting on a show of defiance for the unseen agents watching him – as if he’s starring in an action movie. He boasts that no prison can hold him, claiming his only fear is a “prison of the mind,” which he says he escaped long ago. When Taverner finally arrives, Roddy playfully imitates Anthony Hopkins’s character from *The Silence of the Lambs*, saying, “Welcome, Clarice.”

Taverner’s line of questioning is powerful because she connects Roddy to The Unseen, an online community of isolated men – the same group that the Abbotsfield shooter belonged to, and likely others who have become angry and violent. She doesn’t believe his claims that his relationship with Tara is genuine, pointing out that it doesn’t match the pattern she’s observed: “You’re not a smooth operator,” she tells him directly. “You’re not like James Bond. You’ve had a string of uncomfortable, short-lived relationships, followed by periods where you become overly dependent and even harass people until they block you.” Actress Kristen Scott Thomas clearly doesn’t want to indulge Roddy’s romantic fantasies; she sees the situation as too critical to waste time.

The truth she finally gets from him is so unbelievable it’s hard to accept. Roddy struggles to connect anything to Tara until he recalls showing off his MI5 hacking skills and then leaving her unattended for just 20 seconds to get a pizza – a surprisingly important detail! It’s common to delude ourselves to avoid facing difficult realities, like convincing yourself someone who took advantage of you actually likes you. However, casually sharing sensitive information, especially with someone now suspected of helping terrorists, is just foolish.

This situation is a major security problem, and it highlights how much less skilled Roddy and the team at Slough House are compared to others – they’re usually so flawed that people don’t take them seriously. While Flyte and her team, particularly the serious Devon Welles, work to cover things up, Lamb and his colleagues must find a way to escape their confinement. There’s a funny, unsuccessful attempt by River to use his phone to keep Shirley working in the field, but stuck at his desk, Lamb resorts to his most dependable – and unconventional – asset: his flatulence, to devise an escape plan.

Lamb returns from dealing with a disruptive situation, and two significant things quickly follow. While still listening to podcasts, Coe proposes a disturbing idea: someone is deliberately trying to cause chaos, starting with an incident at Abbotsfield and continuing with events like car engines being sabotaged and penguins being bombed at the zoo. He believes a political assassination is next, putting both candidates for mayor in danger. Lamb, sensing the tension, then captivates everyone with a story about a friend’s harrowing interrogation by the Stasi. The story is so compelling that it distracts his captors enough for him to subtly signal his team to launch a coordinated uprising among Welles and the other agents present. The plan works flawlessly, prompting Lamb to offer a grudging compliment: “You were actually listening for once.”

Now that the team from Slough House is free to tackle the next phase of the terrorist plot, the show *Slow Horses* is building strong momentum as it moves into the second half of the season. Despite some minor issues with the character Roddy, the storyline has been consistently well-written and engaging, and the tension between Slough House and the Park is likely to escalate. With Roddy out of the picture, the Park has a new, somewhat clueless operative, Claude Whelan, ready to take center stage.

Shots

Honestly, I was immediately thrown by that line – “I don’t understand. Why are all these burning cars still on the road?” It felt so… disconnected. And the way the script points out Whelan, the First Desk at the Park, needs *everything* spelled out for him, like he’s a little kid? It struck me as a bit heavy-handed, you know? Like the writer felt the need to *tell* us he’s clueless instead of *showing* us.

Shirley, reacting to a particularly bad fart from Lamb, exclaimed, “It smells like someone died in your butt!”

During his interrogation, Roddy desperately tried to impress Taverner by listing a series of outlandish aliases: Clint Wolf, dragon slayer, the human tripod, the true king of Gondor, and sometimes, Ice Monroe.

As a film buff, I found it interesting how the show doesn’t just paint the villains, Gimball and his wife, as the bad guys. They also poke fun at Mayor Jaffrey, who shows up to everything spouting predictable political lines and cheesy slogans like “Make London Londerful Again.” The biggest surprise for me was learning Jaffrey’s son was the one sabotaging the fuel – it’s a really clever twist, especially when you realize the kid is taking a stand on climate change that his own father is too weak to take. He even calls his dad a ‘plastic politician,’ which felt pretty spot-on.

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2025-10-08 11:57