The Timing of ‘Slow Horses’ Season 5 Is Not a Fluke

AppleTV+’s Slow Horses has established a wryly grim world of spycraft where the scrappy wash-outs of Slough House battle their Regent’s Park bosses about as often as they fight criminals and terrorists. There’s a sideways irony to the series, a gallows-humor detachment common to the more brutal service industries. No matter what darkness befell them, the misfit toys of MI5 soldiered through four seasons of shaggy-dog espionage. In Slow Horses’ new fifth season, the bill has come due, and our favorite agents are made to grapple with their trying experiences. The sobering inciting incident, a politically-motivated shooting spree, is made all the heavier for American viewers by coming at an especially raw time. With this season focusing on issues of political extremism and the radicalizing power of the internet, Slow Horses is so mercilessly timely that viewers may flinch.

It’s a bold move to put mass murder in your fifth-season premiere. At a campaign office for London’s incumbent mayor, Zafar Jaffrey (Nick Mohammed), a young man named Rob Trew takes out a semi-automatic and shoots the campaign worker speaking with him. He goes on to shoot 10 others in the office before a mysterious gunman ends the rampage with a shot to Rob’s head. Further investigations reveal Trew’s ties to an online message board where young men are radicalized towards violence, and there’s evidence to suggest an insidious plan is afoot. It seems as if someone might be developing potential killers to activate them like sleeper cells before putting them down. It’s a significantly dark premise, perhaps among the darkest plotlines Slow Horses has tackled yet.

It’s really no wonder Louisa (Rosalind Eleazar) has opted for a six-month break, which is probably a permanent leave. The whole team is struggling. River (Jack Lowden) is still reeling from committing his grandfather, David (Jonathan Pryce), to an assisted living home against David’s will. Shirley (Aimee-Ffion Edwards) is using cocaine again after the loss of Marcus last season. Jackson (Gary Oldman) seems more detached than ever, and Catherine (Saskia Reeves) tries to keep everyone working together. Only Roddy (Christopher Chung) seems blissfully unfazed by all the upheaval, which makes him the perfect mark for a shady woman he met on the internet to lure him into some scheme. More than ever, the mood of the show is as frayed as old rope. Slow Horses hasn’t become a total bummer, but it’s certainly weightier this go-round, with heavier issues on its mind.

Issues like political violence, online radicalization, and mass shootings are hard pills to swallow at any time, but feel especially sensitive right now. Media depicting or opining on those issues have a vast field of eggshells to tread in America at this moment. It makes Slow Horses extremely timely, almost painfully so. I felt a familiar sense of dread that gave the episode a more powerful gravity and urgency. The show hasn’t lost its dark wit, but its subject matter viewed in America’s current social climate makes it less of an escape than one might expect from spy fiction.

The timing of all this feels like a fluke, but the fact that Slow Horses premiered on AppleTV+ with these very sensitive issues at the forefront feels notable. The Savant, an as-yet-unreleased AppleTV+ series starring Jessica Chastain as an infiltrator of radical white supremacist groups, is being held in limbo and may never premiere. Apple cited concerns about misrepresenting political ideologies in light of recent events, but that leads me to wonder why they didn’t fear the same for Slow Horses. What made one unsparing view of political violence worse than the other? All the same, Slow Horses is as gripping, propulsive, and darkly funny as ever. It just now comes with some extra baggage for the characters and viewers to sit with.