Slow Horses Season 3 with the episode titled “Footprints”. Episode 6 picks up right where the previous one left off with Louisa, Sean, and River amid a shootout at the storage facility. Things get intense as they try to escape with the crucial document.
Meanwhile, back at the farm, Jackson and the team face their own set of challenges. The climax hits hard when Jackson reveals a shocking truth to Catherine about the former director General, Charles Partner. He was a traitor who sold secrets to the Russians.
Jackson dropped the bombshell that Charles only kept Catherine around due to her alcoholism, planning to frame her for his crimes. In the end, the revolution deeply affects her despite her suspicions hearing it from Jackson is heartbreaking.
Combined with her overall disillusionment with MI5, Catherine reaches a breaking point, she decides to quit, expressing her disappointment in MI5 and leaving behind an agency she no longer trusts. Catherine announces her resignation and walks away, symbolizing the end of her association with MI5. It’s a powerful movement that showcases the emotional toll of the revelations of a character.
The episode also sets the stage for future developments, with Rover taking the documents to his grandfather and Diana Taverner becoming the new director general of MI5. The series ends on a note of uncertainty, leaving several storylines open for exploration in potential future seasons.
Release Date
Slow Horses received simultaneous renewals for Seasons 3 and 4 on Apple TV+ back in June 2022, so we will likely see more of our beloved rogue MI5 agents. There’s even a preview for Season 4 if you stick through to the very end of Slow Horses’ third season finale. Regrettably, no release date for Season 4 is mentioned in the teaser.
Apple TV+ hasn’t announced any release date for Season 4 of Slow Horses. However, showrunner Will Smith gave some insight into the release schedule for upcoming episodes. Although season four filming wrapped up in the spring of 2023, it is unlikely that we will watch the Slow Horses take on their next case very soon.
While the first season debuted in April 2022 and the second in December of the same year, season three wasn’t released until November 29, 2023, a full year later. This could imply that we won’t be able to return to Slough House until the end of 2024, at which point we can only imagine, horrified, how disorganized Jackson Lamb’s office—where he also lives—will be.
Cast
Gary Oldman will reprise his role as Jackson Lamb, and most of the team, including Jack Lowden as River Cartwright, Kristin Scott Thomas as Diana Taverner, Christopher Chung as Roddy Ho, Rosalind Eleazar as Louisa Guy, Kadiff Kirwan as Marcus Longridge, Jonathan Pryce as David Cartwright, and Aimee-Ffion Edwards as Shirley Dander, will also return.
Saskia Reeves, who exited Slough House after season 3, is another character we’d hope to see as Catherine Standish, but it’s uncertain for now. James Callis from Battlestar Galactica, Hugo Weaving from The Lord of the Rings, Ruth Bradley from Guilt, Joanna Scanlan, a BAFTA winner from After Love, Bradley from Guilt, and Tom Brooke from Empire of Light are among the new cast members.
Plot
The teaser for Season 4 features glimpses of Lamb, River, Shirley, Standish, Louisa, Roddy, Marcus, and Diana, indicating that the group will be making a big comeback. Ruth Bradley, Hugo Weaving, James Callis, Joanna Scanlan, and Tom Booke are among the new characters that we get to see in the cast.
In the teaser, we witness agents dealing with the device, River running (and subsequently struggling) for his life, his grandfather shouting, and Lamb saying that one of his team members has just DIED.
The revelation that River has a copy of a top-secret file is another unresolved issue from season three of Slow Horses. This happens following Cartwright and Louisa’s miraculous escape from a terrifying situation. Although Lamb also saves Standish, Sean Donovan loses his life while searching for the evidence that might have compromised the British secret services. It reveals proof of major criminality, including the murder of one of their own for disclosing sensitive information.
Recap
When Dickie Bow, an ex-service agent, spots a familiar figure in Cotswold, he instantly flashes back to when he got kidnapped and tortured by Russians as a young agent. Realizing that the bald man is one of those torturers, Dickie tails him. However, he doesn’t know that the bald man is aware of it.
Dickie follows him into a bus and soon suffers a heart attack and dies, but not before leaving a hasty message on his phone. The next morning, Jackson Lamb, the boss at Slough House, the intelligence sect maid of MI5 rejects launches an investigation into Dickey’s death.
On the bus, Dickie had died in Lamb finds Dickie’s phone alongside the message he’d left behind, which is just one word, cicada. The word refers to a group of Russian sleeper agents embedded in British society.
Meanwhile, Min and Louisa, who are in a relationship get drafted by James Spider Webb to guard him during a meeting with Nevsky’s representative Poskin. James intends to create a working relationship with Nevsky, a Russian oligarch who could become the next Russian President.
At Sloughhouse, everyone returns and Lamb asks Roddy to pull up CCTV footage of the bus station so he can learn more about Dickie’s death. As they study the footage, Roddy notices Dickie rubbing his arm before his death. So the team re-watches closely and spots a mysterious bald man touching Dickie on the same arm. Afterward, the team concludes that the man must have injected Dickie with a poison, triggering his heart attack.
Later that night, during a conversation with his grandfather, David, River learns Dickie had once used the word Cicada years ago after his kidnapping, but no one in the agency believed him due to lack of evidence. After that River meets up with Lamb and is tasked with finding out more about the bald man.
From Upshott With Love
To learn more about the Cicada lamb visit Nikolai an ex-KGB agent who believes that the Cicada and Popov, their spymaster, are real. Meanwhile, River tracks the bald man down to a taxi booth and gets the number of the driver who drove the bald man to his destination.
On the other hand, Min and Louisa meet up with Kyril and Piotr, Pashkin’s guards to discuss the bug sweep in the Glass House boardroom where Spider and Pashkin will meet. After the discussion, Min tails Pashkin’s guards out of suspicion, but they discover he’s following them and shake him off their tails.
Conversely, Nikolai tells Lamb that years ago he’d overheard Popov tell Andre Chernitsky to take care of the cicadas after their last mission. When Lamb asks Nikolai for Andre’s description, he realizes it matches that of the bald man they’re looking for.
When River then tracks the taxi driver to a cafe, he eventually learns that Andre was dropped off at a flying club in Upshot. Later, Lamb meets up with Diana Taverner, the operating director of MI5, and tells her about the cicadas, but she refutes his claim.
As soon as River gets to the flying club, he asks Roddy to track Andre’s number, who in turn locates the number in Estonia. When River later meets with Lamb to give him a report of the investigation so far, Lamb gives him an additional task to find out what Andre was doing in the upshot, as well as unearth the Cicada. Later that night, Min gets caught by Piotr at gunpoint, and his unwavering suspicion causes him to taunt the Russians again.
After catching Min on their tail the second time, Kyril and Piotr let him off the hook after a drink together at their place. Meanwhile, River arrives in upshot, as journalist Jonathan Walker rents a room in a pub. Back at Slough House, Lamb reveals to Catherine that his real plan is to use River as bait to bring out a Cicada agent and Andre as well. Their conversation is interrupted by a phone call from Duffy informing Lamb of the death of one of his agents.
Lamb and Catherine discover Min dead after he gets into a car belonging to a certain Rebecca while intoxicated. Upon arriving back at Slough House, Lamb gives Roddy Min’s watch so he can see where he was last seen before the disaster and afterward investigates Rebecca as well because he doesn’t think Minn’s death was an accident.
