'Slow Horses' Penultimate Season 4 Episode Brings "Grave Danger"

The penultimate episode of any thriller series is always a great place to review the journey thus far. “Grave Danger,” the fifth episode of Slow Horses’ fourth season, mirrors the second-to-last episodes of the past seasons – the final chunks of crucial exposition are handed over, the stakes are dialed up to maximum voltage, and the plot makes an expected shift to suspense and action, leaving little space for mystery or character plotting. This isn’t a critique, more of an observation of how thriller storytelling works on an episodic level – you gotta have a cliffhanger to make people tune in next week! – but it does mean we can reasonably assess some of the elements that have built up to this structural focal point.

We’ll start with the negatives: it’s safe to say that James Callis’ First Desk Claude Whelan isn’t working as a character. True to form, the latest Slow Horses bureaucratic foil is unsubtle and overperformed. Whelan's sharp turn in this episode from a beacon of institutional accountability to a hysterical rant at burying MI5’s “cold body” false identities being used by a Europe-wide death squad is gratingly obvious and unearned. This character exists to be shot down and humiliated from the off, and we are never given the chance to take his pretty reasonable critiques of The Park seriously. It points to a lack of satirical imagination on Slow Horses’ part.

That’s even before the regressive reveal that he pushed Moira to Slough House because she was close to discovering his habit of visiting sex workers, which undermines the show's claim of giving tired spy fiction a modern upgrade – the trope of a nice, smiley public figure having a seedy, tabloid-fodder vice has been bouncing around for about fifty years. We’re a little past such lowbrow material.