The Slow Horses Incompetence Index is a rundown of which characters on the show are doing the worst at their job and/or life following this week’s episode. It will be a competitive situation, as everyone on the show is a complete disaster of a human being in their own special way. That’s what makes it fun.Â
Well well well …
Here we are at the midseason mark and things are starting to come into focus. It turns out, as it usually does with this show, that everything is actually more connected than it first seemed. The bombing that opened the season appears to be just one part of a plot for revenge that also involves the attempted murder of River’s grandpa. And other attempted murders. And maybe it all goes way, way up the ladder at MI5, in ways that have Diana up to her usual schemes. Jackson just hit a guy with a taxi. River almost got bit by a dog. Everything is coming together nicely.
But there will be plenty of time to get to all of that. Three more episodes, to be specific. What’s more important for our purposes here is that there were some truly impressive feats of incompetence this week, both personal and professional. Claude isn’t even number one in our rankings this week. Neither is River. Everyone is operating at the top of their games this season. Or the bottoms. It’s kind of the same thing on this show.
Either way, here we go.
Unranked
Diana (quiet episode for her unless you choose to believe she spent the whole time scheming off-screen, which I do); Bad Sam Chapman (stared down some rowdy teens and survived an attempted murder, so pretty solid); Moira the Office Manager (really starting to like her); Molly in the Records Room (I need one scene every week where she’s just mean as hell to her superiors); Coe (you shouldn’t pull a knife on your coworkers but “still kind of stressed out about being handcuffed to a chair for a few days†is as reasonable an excuse as you’ll get); David Cartwright (I want to give him a bowl of soup); Giti Rahman (too nice, I worry); the big mean dog that chased River (he’s a good boy); mopeds, generally (any port in a storm but it’s really hard to look cool on a moped); Dancer (what if the entire next episode is a standalone one-hour prequel about his black market pawn shop?)
10.
Catherine (Last Week: 5)
I’m being unfair here. I know that. Catherine did a good job in a tough spot, babysitting David and thwarting Flyte and doing it all without her phone, which is with River in France. She used her flaws — seen as naïve and sweet, easily manipulated — to her advantage in a way that we really should give her credit for, both with the way she handled David and the way she handled an unannounced tossing of her apartment.
She did lose David, though. That’s not great. Again, I’m not sure what else she was supposed to do in that spot. Real rock-versus-hard-place situation. But leaving a crafty old spy alone when he’s hellbent on getting to headquarters didn’t work out too well.
9.
Jackson (Last Week: 9)
The biggest takeaway from this episode — for me, at least — is that if you are going to run over an assassin with a stolen taxi in an empty parking garage to save the lives of your team and a man who might provide insight into two interweaving murderous plots, you might as well throw it in reverse and back over him again real quick, too, just in case.
Pretty useful lesson, really.
8.
Louisa (Last Week: 7)
Louisa actually did okay this week, mostly, except for the thing where Jackson is going to blame her as much as Catherine for letting David slip away, which is only going to make her want to quit even more, which she’ll never do anyway because, well, that’s Louisa. She even did a good job delaying Flyte outside Catherine’s place and then absolutely flummoxing the neck-tattooed goon who was dispatched to help her.
I just … I still feel like she’s going to do something really stupid soon. You can see it in her eyes. She’s gonna go to France to try to help River and it’ll be a huge mess. I can’t wait.
7.
Frank Harkness (Last Week: Unranked)
We learned a few things this week about Frank Harkness, the mysterious figure played by Hugo Weaving (!!!) who we saw earlier in the abandoned mansion River ran into and almost burned to death inside. One was that he is the leader of some sort of weird French paramilitary operation made up of children he fathers with various women he then cuts out of their lives. And another was that this group is behind both the suicide bombing and the attempted murders of David Cartwright and Sam Chapman, all of which is apparently related to something that happened many years ago.
But most importantly, we learned that he has now sent out two assassins to murder old men, both of whom failed pretty impressively, with one ending up dead in a bathtub and the other getting run over by the aforementioned stolen taxi.
Frank is going to fit in just fine on this show.
6.
Emma Flyte (Last Week: Unranked)
In the very near future, Emma is going to have to explain the following:
– How she was duped by Jackson into thinking River was dead
– How she had Jackson in custody but let him go in exchange for information that didn’t pan out
– How she let that second thing happen even after that first thing happened
It’s not going to be a fun conversation for her.
5.
Shirley (Last Week: 3)
The thing about Shirley is that sometimes her plans look smart at first glance. Like, grabbing the piece of broken glass to brandish as a weapon after the assassin shoved Marcus through a window? Kind of smart. Resourceful, even. Solid use of your surroundings. But then she tracked him down and jammed the glass into his shoulder and it just … did nothing. I mean, it did buy them time, which counts for something, but it has to feel pretty defeating to think you saved the day and then watch a man calmly pull your weapon out of his torso and look at you like that.
Solid plan, poor execution.
4.
Claude (Last Week: 1)
Claude got played like a banjo by Diana for pretty much the entire first two episodes of this season, and his big plan to subvert her and reestablish control over MI5 involves sending Giti, the only person in the building as clueless as he is, on a covert mission into the records room with Molly, who doesn’t even have patience for good ideas, let alone whatever is going on here.
Sometimes I wonder how Claude gets anything done, ever. He seems like a guy who spends at least 45 minutes a week trying to figure out where his keys are. I adore him.
3.
River (Last Week: 2)
It’s not even that River did anything “wrong†this week, unless you want to count the thing where he very bluntly announced a man was dead thinking it would earn him brownie points, only to discover the person he revealed it to was the dead man’s mother. Which you certainly can. It’s more that he’s a hopeless goof even when he’s successful.
Put it this way: Only River Cartwright could uncover the ties between a suicide bombing and the attempted murder of his grandfather and then escape a gang of thugs who want to kill him because they think he’s someone else and end up falling through a roof and fleeing an angry dog on a rickety moped. He’s like a chef who makes a perfect cake from scratch and then trips on his way back to the kitchen and rips a gas line out of the wall as he’s falling and ends up blowing up the whole restaurant.
2.
Marcus (Last Week: 4)
Let’s check in with Marcus this week:
– Sold his gun to pay off his gambling debts
– Got out-negotiated on the sale by a ballroom-loving black market pawn shop owner
– Pretty much blew Shirley’s tail by sprinting up to her in the market
– Got shoved through a window
– Had to get into an unarmed fistfight with an assassin because he literally just sold his gun to pay off his gambling debts
Other than that, pretty solid display.
1.
Roddy (Last Week: 8)
Look, other people made bigger mistakes in the grand scheme of things, but it’s hard to think of a funnier display of incompetence than “trying to look casual while hitting on a secret agent by lifting weights and using the corniest pickup lines you’ve ever heard and ending up handcuffed to the piece of workout equipment you were trying to impress her with.â€
I really like this doofus. I’m ranking him number one this week, but I’m doing it with love.
More From This Series
- The Steed of Slow Horses
- Slow Horses Got the Chance to Get Comfortable
- Hugo Weaving’s Slow Horses Villain Knew He Was Asking Too Much