Slow Horses Recap: Best Laid Plans

The more we learn about Ingrid, the more questions come up.

It was a bit of a double take watching the opening of this week’s Slow Horses, because it begins almost exactly as the episode before. We follow Ingrid Tearney, a First Desk honcho at MI5, as she pays a visit to Peter Judd, the right-wing MP who’d schemed his way into the powerful Home Secretary position. Last time, Ingrid had arrived with her letter of resignation in hand, expecting (and getting) a dressing-down from Judd, who’d commissioned a Tiger Team to expose embarrassing weaknesses in the Park’s security systems. With a smug Cheshire-cat grin, Judd had put himself in a position to reject Ingrid’s resignation; mainly he seems to have enjoyed tormenting her.

Now the tables have turned hilariously. Judd’s Tiger Team, commissioned through the private firm Chieftain (a firm in which he has a financial stake to boot), has gone rogue, keeping Catherine from Slough House as hostage (a real one, this time) and taking Sturges, a Chieftain operative, as a captive, too. When Ingrid turns up at his office this time, Judd can already guess all things she’s going to say: “That I’ve bitten off more than I can chew? That I’m meddling with things that don’t concern me? That I’m dangerously out of my depth?” All of this is true, but Ingrid is cagey about what happens next. She’s plotting on multiple fronts at once and getting back at Judd isn’t necessarily the highest priority.

So who is Ingrid Tearney?

That’s the major question we’re suddenly confronted with as this season of Slow Horses moves toward its end game. And it’s opening up a lot more questions about her motivations, from her relationships with Diana Taverner and the late Alison Dunn to the private cloak-and-dagger she seems to be playing with Sean Donovan and the “Grey Book” files he’s so desperate to find. As Ingrid, the gifted Sophie Okonedo keeps a rigid poker face that’s ever-so-slightly breached by panic in this episode, as Sean appears to be getting nearer to truths that might be highly damaging to her. The irony of these meetings with Judd in the last two episodes is that the security breach at MI5 seems to be low on the list of concerns for Ingrid. She’s engaged in the deeper game with Sean. The breach at the Park may have left egg on her face, but the info Sean is seeking threatens to be a whole omelette.

Ingrid’s ostensible plan is to allow the Tiger Team to infiltrate the offsite facility and see the Grey Books as they desire because there’s nothing of real value in the facility and the security breach can be made to look bad for Judd and not for MI5. For this mission, she wants to recruit Jackson and Slough House to serve as escorts on the site, which they should want to do because it would result in Catherine’s immediate release. And in the words of Admiral Ackbar: “It’s a trap!” Jackson being Jackson, he recoils from Ingrid’s proposal after taking a short whiff, sensing that his involvement will backfire. “‘Do me a favor and go through this door, and everything will be sweet,’ he tells Ingrid mockingly. “Last time I did that, I walked in and found a severed head on a fucking table. You can clean up your own shit.”

And yet poor River appears ready to fall right in. Ingrid’s proposal should draw plenty of skepticism from him, too, but he cannot resist the delicious incentives to get back in MI5’s good graces and rescue Catherine in the process. When Louisa opts to come along for backup, the two of them have the sort of heart-to-heart that’s been rare on this action-oriented season. River makes a fumbling attempt to reach out to Louisa, who’s been drinking heavily and sleeping around since Min’s death, and suggests that she see a therapist. Her response is to nail him to the wall: “Why don’t you go and talk to someone about your constant need to prove yourself to people? Maybe it’s because you don’t know your dad and your mom abandoned you so you never feel good enough and trying to live up to your grandfather’s legacy only exacerbates your inadequacy.”

Ouch.

Throughout the season, I’d been writing about how the Slough House misfits have been relegated to Jackson’s watch more because of MI5 politics than operational ineptitude, and that’s still mostly true. River would not be in this situation had the late, lamented (and lamentable) Spider not sabotaged his test, and we continue to see examples of Slough House agents doing good work, like the onerous Roddy tracking down the house where Catherine was being kept hostage. Yet this episode does take enough of a pause to reveal the nagging vulnerabilities of characters like River and Louisa, to say nothing of poor Marcus and Shirley, who have placed a bet over whether they’re both fired or just Shirley is fired. (Both are fired, alas.) Jackson weirdly accepts the fact that River has taken the Ingrid assignment that he had turned out, but their contrasting responses to the offer is a sign that River doesn’t yet have what it takes.

“Uninvited Guests” leaves River, Louisa, Sean, and Sean’s co-hort Ben in a predictably terrible spot. For one, Sean surprises everyone by ignoring the designated room for Grey Books files and pressing the group to look elsewhere in the building, presumably for the “Footprint” file that Alison had been carrying around before she died. But then, Ingrid has ordered Duffy and a fleet of his “dogs” to surround the place and “clear the board,” which is apparently British for “kill everyone.” She wants all of them to leave in body bags, perhaps to keep her own career from the zipper.

Shots

• Judd is such a fine parody of a certain type of political climber — shallow, venal, gossipy, status-obsessed. His reaction to Spider’s death reveals the scope of his humanity: “They’ve dumped a fucking body outside my favorite restaurant. It’s going to have a seriously detrimental effect on the restaurant bookings.”

• Allowing Roddy any downtime leads to all sorts of hacker mischief, like changing a highway sign to “Zombie Attack!” just for laughs.

• Marcus cannot believe he’s being fired after Shirley got caught with drugs doing their illegal search, but she’s certain he misunderstood Jackson’s comprehensive insult of them both. “Hemorrhoids is plural,” she says. “You don’t get single hemorrhoids.”

• Nice to see Jonathan Pryce return to River’s grandfather, though it remains to be seen if his early signs of dementia are more significant to the show than merely a character moment for River.