It’s important to remember that River Cartwright doesn’t belong at Slough House — or, perhaps more precisely, that Slough House isn’t always a destination exclusively for fuck-ups. He was once a golden nepo baby, the grandson of a retired MI5 officer (Jonathan Pryce), who was not only expected to thrive in the service but had the tools to do so. But in the very first episode of the show, during an elaborate training exercise at Stansted Airport, he made a terrible mistake that cost him his post and exiled him to Slough House because he couldn’t be fired. We learn later that he was sabotaged by a colleague during the exercise, the victim of politics and treachery rather than an inept young go-getter who wasn’t ready for the big time.
In that sense, River is Jackson’s truest protégé, albeit much younger and freshly scrubbed. We have witnessed Jackson, too, get betrayed by his colleagues, like Diana, but his instincts are almost always impeccable and his only real failures are in the personal relationships that might get him out of the doghouse. During this episode, we have some acknowledgment from people in the know that River is quite good at his job. The clever, well-funded folks who have abducted Catherine for reasons still to be named later have gone to incredible lengths to send River on a crazy mission to infiltrate the Park and steal a vetting file, with a tight clock ticking on her life. The man asked to give River these orders tells him that the lives of his sister and her children are at stake if he fails to do the seemingly impossible. He is the only guy who can get this done.
A large chunk of “Hard Lessons,” an action-packed and intrigue-light episode of the show, is given over to River slipping into the Park on a visitor’s pass and working his way down to the basement file room, past several people who despise him and through multiple levels of security that he has no keycard to access. We once again have an opportunity to admire his dexterity and improvisatory skill, but this isn’t exactly the Langley break-in sequence from the first Mission: Impossible. It’s much more like an old Keystone Cops silent comedy, with River easily outwitting and outrunning the high-toned dolts who are supposed to shepherd him out of the building. It says a lot about the show’s perspective on MI5 that the supposedly qualified agents inside the Park seem unfit to retrieve Jackson’s nonexistent dry cleaning.
Given no time to prepare, River zips into the Park and gets himself an emergency meeting with Nick Duffy, the head of security and the meathead tactical unit known as “The Dogs.” When River arrives in his office, Duffy won’t even let him sit down: “That seat there is for proper fucking grown-up spies,” he says. “Spies who don’t crash Stansted or call in fake fucking Code Septembers.” (Beverly Hills Cop fans will recognize the big “We’re not gonna fall for a banana in the tailpipe” energy here.) River offers a diamond that was lost on a job, and Duffy at least knows enough to treat it with skepticism, demanding that he join him to see if it’s real. River manages to lose Duffy before they get to the lab, but the technician seems annoyed that he couldn’t recognize such an obvious fake when he saw it.
Diana inadvertently comes to River’s aid by pulling him away from Duffy just to question him on why he’s in the building and suggest that he find his way out immediately. (“Keep walking until you get to the sea. And when you get to the sea, keep walking with your mouth open.”) But that just frees River to slip his way through multiple levels of security before finding another dolt named Hobbs, who’s still bitter about the time that River hit him with a fire extinguisher. River somehow convinces Hobbs that he’s at Park to lecture young recruits about how not to end up in a place like Slough House, and eventually gives him the slip by punching him in the face and begging his way into the file room.
As it turns out, River didn’t actually have to do the mission at all. Jackson isn’t convinced that Catherine’s life is in real danger, but he has been working hard to figure out what operation could be sophisticated (and funded) enough to abduct her and surveil the entire Slough House team. After meeting with an old contact, Jackson settles on the idea that the captors are part of a private operation called Chieftain, run by a man named Sly Monteith. And we also learn the not-unexpected news that Sean Donovan is among Catherine’s captors, who at least seem friendly enough to offer her a ham or cheese — or, if she cared to combine them, ham and cheese — sandwich when they’re not putting a gun to her head. Louisa finds out about Sean, too, by spotting a rental car that he hasn’t bothered reserving with a fake name.
Slow Horses is still holding back on revealing the contents of the Footprint file that make them so valuable, but it at least compensates for deferring that question by keeping the action moving at a breathless pace. These first two episodes have felt as busy as the climaxes of previous seasons, because all that running around usually follows more cloak-and-dagger gamesmanship. But “Hard Lessons” continues a shoot-first, ask-questions-later approach to the spy thriller and has a lot of fun doing it. We can hold off on the answers for now.
Shots
• It’s a thriller cliché for our hero to rush through mobs of people in a footrace, inevitably pushing a few aside and getting an annoyed “Hey!” here or there. So it’s particularly funny when River dashes away from the Tube and bumps into a large older man who doesn’t want to move. “What’s the hurry, mate?” he wonders, before River simply punches this stranger hard in the gut.
• This episode’s premium blasphemous insults: First, there’s Jackson to Ho about the quality of his work (“Jesus Christ, you’re about as much use as a paper condom”). Then there’s Ho to the rest of the gang about their ignorance over the wide availability of fake license plates on the dark web. (“This must have been how Jesus felt, surrounded by dickheads.”)
• Okay, so not all the agents at Slough House are brilliant. Shirley and Marcus try to tail the spy who’s been surveilling their building but get found out within seconds and lose him to an unlicensed Mercedes van. “I told you to keep your bloody distance, not scare him off like a pigeon,” says Jackson.
• Duffy does finally get the drop on River in the end and pulls him away. But I think we can bet that River will get out of that pickle pretty easily next week.
