Slow Horses Season 5 confirms Gary Oldman still giving, Britain still cooked

REVIEWS · REVIEW

Apple's spy drama returns with another season of institutional rot, terrible people doing competent work, and a leading man who looks like he hasn't slept since 1987.

Gary Oldman, as Jackson Lamb, has now spent five seasons playing a man whose primary character trait is that he refuses to shower, change clothes, or pretend to care about anything except the specific paperwork on his desk. In Season 5, he does all of these things again, and it remains, against all odds, the most compelling television currently available on Apple TV+.

The new season adapts Mick Herron's novel *London Rules* and hinges on a terror attack, a government conspiracy, and the sort of institutional cover-up that has, at this point, become so routine in British spy fiction that it barely registers as plot. A civilian dies. The machinery grinds. Slough House—MI5's dumping ground for the incompetent, the compromised, and the politically inconvenient—stumbles toward the truth while everyone in Westminster lies about it. The wheel turns. Nobody learns anything.

What distinguishes *Slow Horses* from the forty other British spy dramas currently available is that it appears to actually enjoy its own premise. The show knows that its characters are failures. It knows that the institution they serve is rotten. And rather than ask them to transcend these facts through heroism or redemption, it simply asks: what if these people, exactly as they are, had to solve a real problem? The answer, consistently, has been: they would solve it worse than anyone else, but they would still solve it.

Season 5 is no exception. The ensemble—Kristin Scott Thomas, Jack Lowden, Slow Horse alumni, and a rotating cast of people who have disappointed everyone they've ever met—operates at the level of competence that suggests none of them have ever read an instruction manual. They argue. They drink. One of them definitely embezzles something. And somehow, by the end of six episodes, the actual plot of the actual show has been uncovered, the actual conspiracy has been exposed, and Gary Oldman's character remains unchanged, unwashed, and entirely vindicated by events he explicitly did not care about.

**Rating: ★★★★☆**

The season is not perfect. The pacing in episode three drags slightly. One subplot involving a junior officer goes nowhere and could have been cut. But these are footnotes to a show that has now proven, over five seasons, that it understands something most television does not: that competence is boring, that institutions are fundamentally absurd, and that the only honest response to either is a cigarette, a drink, and the kind of facial expression that suggests you're wondering if you left the stove on in 1994.

If you have watched *Slow Horses* before, you already know whether you want to watch more of it. If you have not, this is still not a bad entry point, though you will spend the first two episodes confused about why everyone hates Jackson Lamb so much. By episode three, you will understand. By episode six, you will have become him.

A perfectly competent show about incompetent people doing the job anyway, refusing both redemption and improvement.— Brainrot Arts Desk

Filed by Rylee Bramston — The Brainrot Desk