![]() ![]() The final moments are quite a cliffhanger, with a grenade blast sending River flying behind a stack of file boxes, which here look like the castle walls that might save his life. What’s the pitch to recruits? “Come work for us! We might kill you!” Slow Horses makes all of it tremendously fun, but MI5 sure looks like one screwed-up organization. The big concern about the “Footprint” file getting out is that it will make Ingrid look bad enough to cost her a job, and it’s that threat of early retirement that killed Alison and Douglas and innumerable faceless agents. The old MI5 brass was respected, but Diana and Ingrid are engaged in a lethal power struggle where neither of them are concerned about the body count. It also makes real heroes out of the Slough House misfits, whose exile from the Park reads more than ever like a noble response to toxic leadership. None of this seems to have anything to do with British national security, but it’s unquestionably exciting to watch. ![]() When Douglas, who knows mostly nothing, mentions Ingrid, that’s enough for Duffy to shoot him in the head. In the episode’s darkest scene, Duffy interrogates the poor, stammering file clerk Douglas after his team had captured him unarmed during the raid on the facility. And he knows his rivalry with River has shifted to an order to flush him out like a rat and murder him. But he grows into a considerably darker and more formidable presence in “Cleaning Up” because he sets about the task Ingrid has assigned him with no conscience. Until now, Duffy has mainly been a dumb lunk, the sort of henchman a skilled spy like River can work around with comical ease. With River and Louisa joining Sean and Ben in rooting through the outside facility for the incriminating “Footprint” file, Duffy has been ordered to “clean up,” which is the most polite possible way to say “slaughter every last one of your colleagues.” Diana has been working behind the scenes to give all the support she can to Sean and the Tiger Team in getting what they want - including that one crucial moment where she helped River infiltrate the Park as part of the “test” - and Ingrid has been using the resources at her disposal, chiefly meatheads like Duffy and his “Dogs,” to suppress the threat. So this entire season has been about Ingrid and Diana moving pieces around the board. Ingrid would lose her job if anyone were to find out. If it worked.”) When Ingrid’s plan backfired, and Alison looked to play whistleblower, she had her wiped out, along with hospitalizing other innocents and nearly getting a senior North Korean spy killed, too. (“It could penetrate closed systems,” she says. Now we know: Ingrid had endorsed a device that would hack encrypted computers wirelessly. Not a great look for MI5! Until this episode, we had no idea what Alison Dunn had found in Istanbul that was so important that she was murdered for it, prompting Sean and Alison’s siblings to embark on a desperate, high-risk quest to get to the truth. They’ll find someone younger.”Īnd so it goes, this decadent drink between rivals, as their own agents are out in the field killing each other. ![]() “I’ll never get First Desk if I wait for you to retire. ![]() “Which made me think you were trying to cover your envy with your generosity.” That’s certainly true because the spy games they’re currently playing put that coveted seat up for grabs again. “My most generous gift by some margin,” says Ingrid. The bottle was a gift from Diana after Ingrid got appointed to First Desk. And it’s home because the Park’s leadership is so outrageous and venal.īut a word like cynical doesn’t even begin to describe the delicious cartoon villainy of Diana and Ingrid cracking open a bottle of 18-year-old McCallan and waiting to see who will emerge victorious in a deadly firefight between MI5 agents that they’ve engineered. For Jackson, Slough House is not some purgatory from which he might emerge if he does his job well. This is why he scoffed at Ingrid Tearney’s offer to escort the rogue Tiger Team into the outside facility to look at the Grey Books he didn’t see it as a career opportunity as River eventually would but as another in a series of traps. In previous seasons, we’ve seen how Diana Taverner has occasionally attempted to manipulate Slough House to her own ends, to the point where Jackson accepts such betrayals as part of the job. If Slow Horses weren’t such a briskly entertaining piece of escapism, then it read as an almost unfathomably bleak assessment of the spy game. ![]()
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