'Slow Horses' Returns with Season 2 as "Last Stop" Irons Out the Kinks

Slow Horses excels in feeling like it takes place in the real world more than a lot of spy TV, while also extending itself into thriller trappings to make the story and characters really pop. After the first two episodes of Season 2, it’s clear lead writer Will Smith (along with a team brought over from Season 1) have ironed out some of the show’s more obvious kinks, launching us into a thorny mystery that stays just on the right side of pulp and shows remarkable confidence.

We kick off with an older Londoner in his Soho sex shop, who sets off in persuit after a bald man. We don’t know who either of these people are, but the Londoner has just suffered some violent flashbacks to unsavoury spy work after seeing this stranger. We’ll learn this is a retired agent, Dickie Bow (Phil Davis), who left the field obsessed with the idea of “cicadas”, Russian sleeper agents entrenched in British society, but you can already tell Dickie has experience in the field from the methodical, determined way he tracks his target.

This ruthlessness won’t last long; soon Dickie drops dead from heart trouble on a replacement bus service. On the surface, it doesn’t look like homicide, and no-one in the Service thinks it suspicious. Except for our hero, Jackson Lamb.