After River (Jack Lowden) was kidnapped at the end of the previous episode, Slow Horses season 4 episode 3 wastes no time revealing his fate. The young MI5 agent wakes up in a rundown house. Through a window he sees someone waiting on a bench, seemingly watching him.Â
While he isn’t cuffed, River is locked in the room. He hears footsteps coming up the stairs, so he grabs a pot to defend himself. But he’s immediately outmatched when the man who kidnapped him (Eric Savin) bursts in with a shotgun. River doesn’t fight, he just wants to know what’s going on. All the man tells him is that someone is coming to talk to him.
What’s going on with River and what’s happening with the other Slow Horses? Read on to find out.
All eyes on David
David Cartwright (Jonathan Pryce) is still struggling to get a grip on what’s going on. At Standish’s (Saskia Reeves), he talks about River and the bomber before insisting he speak with First Desk to warn them about what’s coming. Standish calms him by saying First Desk is busy reading wires from Berlin, as if it’s still the Cold War, but promising to set up an appointment. This works, but David still rambles on, saying it’s all his fault.
Back at Slough House, Lamb (Gary Oldman) immediately notices a footprint in the entryway, quickly figuring out it belongs to Emma Flyte (Ruth Bradley). Knowing it can’t be good, he tells Louisa (Rosalind Eleazar) to go to Standish’s and get her to move David.
Meeting with Emma in his office, Lamb correctly guesses they finally pieced together the dead body isn’t River. He deflects blame saying River is his agent, and since he clearly wanted to be thought of as dead, Lamb was going to keep it that way as long as he could. Emma handcuffs Lamb for obstructing the investigation and plans to take him to the Park. Guessing he’s a sacrificial lamb (no pun intended) to Taverner after Emma screwed up the River situation, he offers an alternative: telling her where David is. When Emma asks why he would do this, Lamb says, “Because going to the Park is like being in IKEA, you can never get out of the f***ing place.” Emma agrees.
As Emma goes to leave, Roddy (Christopher Chung) tries to hit on her as he feigns a workout on a weightlifting machine. Emma slowly approaches, gets inches away from his face before handcuffing him to the machine, leaving him stuck and embarrassed.
Louisa is on her way to Standish’s apartment but is unable to get a hold of her (remember, River has her phone but also took the SIM card out). As she arrives, she sees Emma has beaten her there. Louisa attempts to remedy this by telling Emma she is being followed and wants her help, but Emma just passes it off to one of her subordinates and heads inside.
Emma uses her authority to get into Standish’s apartment and search for David, but when she can’t find him she quickly loses her cool. Standish asks who told her David was at her apartment, and as soon as Emma says Jackson Lamb she realizes he must have played her.
After Emma leaves, Louisa meets up with Standish. She assumed if Lamb could figure out where David was so easily, someone at the Park was likely to do the same, so she put him in a friend’s apartment. However, when they go to get David, they see the back door is open and David is nowhere to be found. He’s out somewhere in the streets of London.
Whelan makes his move
After getting sideswiped by Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas) on the Robert Winter cold body situation, Whelan (James Callis) attempts to regain some of his power as First Desk. He recruits Giti (Kiran Sonia Sawar) to check archives for any additional cold body “glitches,” asking her to report directly to him; no need to worry Taverner.
Down in archives. Whelan tells head archivist Molly (Naomi Wirthner) what Giti is going to be doing. Molly is tired of being in the middle of these games between First and Second Desk. Claude tries to assert his rank, asking who she thinks is the one with the real power. But she quickly rebukes him by saying Taverner does.
Handcuffs and guns
Marcus (Kadiff Kirwan) is heading out to sell his gun so he can pay his gambling debts, despite Shirley’s (Aimee-Ffion Edwards) protests. Shirley then gets a call from Roddy asking for help. She isn’t interested until he reveals he is handcuffed to his weight machine. JK (Tom Brooke), who is starting to talk more but is still acting weird, joins her.
JK quickly opts to help Roddy out, much to Shirley’s chagrin, who pulls his hood back. JK pulls a knife and holds it to her throat, telling her he was previously handcuffed to a chair for 72 hours and tortured, so seeing Roddy this way is triggering for him. Once free, Roddy tries to fist-bump JK for the help, but JK doesn’t like to be touched (clearly).
Meanwhile, Marcus meets with an illegal arms dealer named Dancer Blaine (Turlough Convery). He’s leery of Marcus, but recognizes he must be in a jam, so he offers £3,000 for the gun; despite his attempts to negotiate, Dancer holds firm and Marcus relents to his price.
The French connection
As River watches more people gather outside the building, a woman (Coralie Audret) enters the house. She and River’s kidnapper come back in, wanting to know who River is and why he has Bertrand’s passport? River explains Bertrand came to his grandfather’s house with the intent to kill him, but David shot him instead.Â
It turns out the woman is Natasha, Bertrand’s mother, while the man is Victor, Bertrand’s uncle. They tell River to leave, but with the growing mob outside seemingly waiting for him (they think he is Bertrand), River reveals he is MI5 and shows the picture he found at the chateau. He wants to know about the man Bertrand is with in the picture, saying he is responsible for the Westacre bombing and he needs to find him before another bomb goes off.
Natasha explains the older man is Frank Harkness (Hugo Weaving). He had sons with multiple women from different countries. River asks if Natasha painted the mural he found, but she says no, one of the other women did. As they talk, even more people gather outside with the mob. Natasha explains the leader of the mob’s daughter was assaulted and put in the hospital by Bertrand. Victor tries to go explain the situation so River can leave, but he is quickly knocked out and the mob attempts to break into the house.
River races through the house and is able to escape through the bathroom window. However, the mob won’t stop that easily, continuing to chase him through the streets. River eventually is able to steal a moped off a local, which allows him to get away.
The next target
Moira (Joanna Scanlan) tells Lamb her contacts at the Park weren’t able to find any evidence David was ever in France. However, his bagman, Sam Chapman (Sean Gilder) was in the early 90s. This is enough for Lamb, telling Moira he’ll follow up on his end and try and get her out of Slough House.
Lamb calls Chapman and tells him they need to meet. However, the Frenchman (Tom Wozniczka) is watching Chapman and is given orders by Frank to follow and kill him. Chapman soon realizes he is being tailed and calls Lamb to abort the mission, but Lamb tells him to keep moving and he’ll get his Slow Horses to help out.
Shirley and Marcus, back from his gun deal, are on it. They think they have eyes on the Frenchman but lose him, until he comes running up and shoves Marcus into a store window. Shirley picks up a shard of glass and goes after the Frenchman.
Chapman makes it to the rendezvous, an old garage, takes out his baton, grabs a wrench and hides. The Frenchman searches the place, gun drawn, when Shirley rushes in and stabs him with the glass shard. He knocks her out and is about to pull the trigger on her when Chapman comes out and fights the Frenchman. Marcus then joins in. Lamb walks by the garage and sees the fight but just keeps walking. The Frenchman eventually gains the upper hand against them and is poised to kill Chapman, but that’s when Lamb bursts in, driving a taxi and running over the Frenchman.
He checks on Chapman and his team before going to grab the Frenchman, but he has disappeared.
New episodes of Slow Horses season 4 premieres every Wednesday on Apple TV Plus.
