Slow Horses Season 2
Overview
The slow horses are back, and this time the threat is very Cold War. Season two adapts Mick Herron's "Dead Lions": when a former agent turns up dead in suspicious circumstances, Jackson Lamb — Gary Oldman, somehow even grubbier than before — starts pulling at a thread involving Russian sleeper agents, the so-called "cicadas," buried in Britain for decades. River Cartwright gets sent to a sleepy Cotswolds village where nothing is as sleepy as it looks, while back at Slough House the team races to work out what a washed-up old spy was actually protecting. What the show does so well is mix genuinely tense espionage with office comedy about people who've failed upward into a job nobody wants. Kristin Scott Thomas continues to steal every scene she's in as Diana Taverner, smiling politely while doing terrible things. The finale is properly propulsive, too. If season one was about introducing this shabby little corner of MI5, season two is where you realise the shabbiest people in the building might be the only ones paying attention.
