Season 4 finale of ‘Slow Horses’: Marcus Dies, Frank Escapes

SPOILER ALERT: The following story contains plot details from “Hello Goodbye,” the season 4 finale of “Slow Horses.”

‘Slow Horses’ is generally not a sentimental show. Deceptively sleazy spymaster Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman)’s idea for taking care of his “joes” is to negotiate their active-duty death arrangement on a bureaucratic technicality. Still, the Emmy-winning Apple show’s fourth season, which concluded Wednesday, was its most personal yet. River Cartwright (Jack Lowden) – a former MI5 golden boy whose exile to the series’ eponymous box of broken toys provided the show’s premise in Season 1 – began his final misadventure by trying to save his dementia-suffering grandfather David (Jonathan) Pryce) – and ended it all by coming face to face with his father, a sociopathic American mercenary named Frank Harkness (Hugo Weaving).

“What I love about Series 4 is that personal story,” says creator and showrunner Will Smith (not that one!), a comedian and frequent collaborator of Armando Iannucci. “It’s a rawer, more brutal and more difficult season.” And he knew exactly who to call to be the face of that new brutality: Weaving, Smith’s own cousin once removed.

Despite the family connection, Weaving – who already played a legendary villain in the ‘Matrix’ franchise’s Agent Smith – had not yet seen ‘Slow Horses’ when he was sent the scripts. The series is an adaptation of British author Mick Herron’s series of spy novels of the same name, with each tightly structured six-episode season corresponding to a specific book. Season 4 is based on “Spook Street,” the Herron installment that introduces Frank as what Weaving calls “a Moriarty figure”: a nemesis who can transcend individual storylines and serve as the kind of recurring antagonist that “Slow Horses” previously lacked . (Unless you count the callous bureaucracy of MI5 itself, as symbolized by Kristin Scott Thomas’s icy Diana Taverner.)

Harkness, a former CIA agent, has developed a unique approach to recruiting his private militia. After fathering sons with several women, he raised them from birth to be perfect killing machines at a complex in Lavandes, France. River’s own mother was tricked into giving Frank influence over David, a former senior official at MI5; To negotiate the release of his pregnant daughter, David gave Frank a cache of authentic British passports issued to false identities known as ‘cold bodies’. One of these cold bodies was behind the season-opening mall bombing – not an ideologically motivated act of terror, but a deadly act of a son against his father.

“He’s usually one step ahead,” Weaving says of his character. “But it is clear that a huge mistake was made regarding the bombings.” It just wouldn’t be very “Slow Horses”. everyone to be too competent, including a Big Bad. Weaving compares Frank to Saturn devouring his sons, the classic myth in which a Titan eats his young to prevent them from replacing him. ‘If we say everyone has a fatal flaw, what would Frank’s be? He is a father,” Weaving said. “So he has to be a caregiver as well as a teacher and a chastener somehow.”

Weaving emphasizes that he didn’t want Frank to come across as a “hideous inhuman beast.” On some level the actor, Frank, emphasizes do love his sons. “I really wanted to make sure that we maintain humanity, even in an extreme situation,” he says. “We have to maintain Frank’s sense of being a human being and a real father, even when his sons do extreme things and kill people on his behalf.” When Frank River offers a job in the middle of a busy restaurant, it is “completely ridiculous” and is closely followed by a death threat. “But you have to feel that there is a real human need for Frank.”

That one-on-one conversation is closely followed by a showstopper of a chase through London’s iconic St. Pancras Station, overseen by season director Adam Randall and secured by location manager Ian Pollington. “Originally in the book it’s by the Thames and the river falls into the Thames,” says Smith. Dunking River in the Thames is a great opportunity for a pun, he adds, “but it’s hugely expensive and also dangerous.” So the production pivoted to a scene where River internalized Frank’s advice to stand still when being chased. He finds his father sitting quietly in a cubicle, where he is peacefully arrested, but not for long. When MI5’s top brass discovers that he has collected kompromat for the entire leadership, Frank is released off-screen, a typically Pyrrhic victory for the Slough House crew.

Meanwhile, River takes David to an assisted care facility, much to David’s anger and resentment. The scene is a painfully ordinary form of familial strife, but with an extraordinary twist: the facility itself is owned by MI5 and is chock full of retired spies. “I just like the idea – and I’m pretty sure that’s in the book too – that it’s safer for them all to be together, so as long as they start talking it doesn’t really matter,” says Smith. Pryce will continue to be a part of the show, opening up an intriguing new avenue for subplots.

Channeling the spirit of page-turning genre fiction, “Slow Horses” is produced at a rapid pace. “I did the room for Series 5 while we were preparing and starting filming Series 4, and then the edits came in for Series 3,” says Smith, using the British term for TV seasons. This pace gives “Slow Horses” a steady release schedule that is at odds with the more relaxed rhythms of modern prestige television.

That means season 5 is already in the works. Smith won’t reveal too many details, but he promises that the next few episodes will follow the impact of the events of season 4 on both River and Shirley (Aimee Ffion-Edwards), who is struggling with the loss of her frequent mission partner Marcus Longridge ( Kadiff Kirwan). ) who is killed by one of Frank’s son soldiers during a tense gunfight at Slough House headquarters. “That’s what I love about what Mick does,” Smith says of killing off characters. “He does not do it lightly and he understands the impact of death.”

As for Frank, Weaving plays his cards close to his chest. “Suffice to say, Frank will be back in another book, and I’m in London at the moment,” he says.