Short takes: ‘Slow Horses’ season one, ‘Invasion’ season one and ‘Foundation’ season one

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Aug. 26, 2023

Author’s note: This post contains what I hope are relatively minor spoilers for Foundation. MEM

Slow Horses is a fun six-episode streaming television series based on Mick Herron’s novels about a group of underperforming British spies who have been consigned to a backwater office in London under the not-so-watchful eye of jaded Cold War veteran Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman).

The plot is set in motion when Slough House’s newest arrival, ambitious hotshot River Cartwright (Jack Lowden), starts wondering why he’s been tasked with surveilling a disgraced right-wing journalist. Cartwright soon stumbles into a plot involving the kidnapping of a foreign university student by right-wing extremists who may have links to Britain’s security apparatus.

Lamb is fond of ordering his charges to do nothing, but he’s spurred into action when one of his subordinates, the strangely capable Sid Baker (Olivia Cooke), is shot and seriously wounded the same night as two other officers in his care end up accidentally killing a nighttime intruder at Slough House. With the kidnap victim facing a dawn execution deadline, Lamb tries to rally his remaining staff members into tracking the terrorists while eluding a cleanup squad that British intelligence has dispatched with a possible eye toward pinning the fast-developing fiasco on the “slow horses.”