Slow Horses Incompetence Index: Cry Me a River

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. 

It is a little weird that we are two episodes into this season’s six-episode run and there’s already been a suicide bombing and a(nother) potential cover-up by British intelligence and an entire country on edge, and the only thing I care about right now is who tried to kill River’s grandpa.

There are reasons for this, most of them having to do with which characters the show makes us care about and which actions we see as pieces that move a plot forward. And it’s not like David Cartwright is some boring civilian, either. He was a spy and it certainly seems as though the people who wanted to (apparently, according to River) drug him and drown him in his bathtub have spy-related reasons for doing so. They also, again apparently, have more names on their list. So that’s interesting. As is the fact that River, a man as handsome as he is stupid, has taken it upon himself to travel to France without backup to get to the bottom of it. I’m surprised he didn’t end up in Brazil by accident. He means well.

But there I go again, ignoring the bombing of a building in London and the thing where the responsible party had an identity crafted by MI5 many years earlier. And the thing where Diana Taverner, herself no newbie to thwarted plots and subterfuge, has taken it upon herself to cover it all up despite the wishes of her feckless new boss. For a show called Slow Horses, things sure do move fast around here.

But we’ll get to all that. Kind of. What we’re actually going to do is rank the people involved by how incompetent they are or were in dealing with it all. We’re going to do it every week until the season ends. If River ever makes it out of the top three, I’ll eat a car tire. No condiments.

Here we go …

Unranked

Coe (too soon to tell exactly what his deal is beyond the silence and finger tapping, which came to an abrupt end near the end of the episode in a way that feels notable); Emma Flyte (she needs more responsibility before I can tell how competent she is); Moira the Office Manager (I like that the thing that broke Jackson and sent him on a mission to restore her good name in the hopes of getting rid of her was her attempt to tidy up his office); Giti Rahman (smiling people who take curious and potentially damaging information to Diana do not last very long on this show); me (I suspect there will come a day when I remember that characters addressing Diana are saying “ma’am� in a British accent and not calling her “mom,� but it appears today is not that day); David Cartwright (his issues have more to do with age-related mental decline than incompetence, but I still think he’s up to something); various French baristas who know kind of a lot about the local geography (not to be trusted)

10.

Diana

Diana’s problem isn’t so much incompetence as it is too much competence, which is just as dangerous in its own way. She was passed over for the top job after all her scheming in the last season and now has to watch a naive little doofus bumble around the office she thought would be hers. She’s mad and hurt and fed up and getting herself too involved in things she should probably just let go. She just … can’t help herself. Ever. She watches these easily manipulated men scream past her on the corporate ladder, and she sighs and tries to move on and then, whoops, there she is tricking them into signing documents that implicate them in a conspiracy she’s covering up to protect all the other idiots who set it in motion. It’s a problem. A decent therapist would have a field day with her if they could avoid being manipulated 20 minutes into their first session. Which they couldn’t.

Again, she can’t help herself. It’s all very classic Diana.

9.

Jackson

The thing about Jackson Lamb is that he loves this stuff. Yes, sure, there’s the cynicism and crankiness about it all, always, but keep looking. River, his most gullible and well-meaning employee, who has a long history of bungling even the simplest of tasks, is on a solo mission to France after faking a bathtub murder. This should be troubling, or at least exhausting, given … everything River has ever said or done. But look at how excited Jackson is about it all. Look at him moving chess pieces around in his soggy brain. He lives for this kind of mess.

8.

Roddy

I like that Jackson now appears to funnel all his office communications through Roddy via cryptic text messages. I like this for a number of reasons — Roddy never interpreting them correctly, Roddy’s ongoing and misplaced sense of self-importance, etc. — but mostly because sometimes the texts will result in the other members of Slough House mistakenly thinking their colleague is dead because Roddy looked at his phone and immediately set about commandeering the computer of the person who is actually very much alive.

This is what I mean about Jackson loving the mess. He could text anyone in the office. Or no one. I think he just likes texting Roddy because he knows it has the highest potential for chaos.

7.

Louisa

Louisa is going to do something stupid soon. I can feel it. She’s just on too much of a roller coaster already between thinking she got River killed by sending him to his grandfather’s house and then finding out River is alive in France and assuredly in over his head because, well, he’s River. I’m surprised she hasn’t left for France already. She doesn’t have a clue how to help and was explicitly ordered to leave him be for now but it’s not like any of that has stopped her before.

Part of me wants her and River to have two adorable children who go charging like idiots into every dangerous situation they encounter at daycare. I would watch that spinoff. Call it Slow Foals and begin production immediately.

6.

Adam Lockhead

It doesn’t say a lot for this man’s undercover skills that he couldn’t pass himself off as River — the dimmest bulb in a box of low-wattage options — for five minutes without getting most of his face blown off in a bathtub by an old man.

5.

Catherine

Two things worth noting here …

ONE: Catherine couldn’t keep River’s death ruse a secret for ten minutes, which is pretty much what you’d expect from Catherine, a sweet woman who wants to help but has always been the goldfish in the shark tank on the show.

TWO: It says a lot about River that he faked his death and ran off across Europe on a big spontaneous rogue undercover mission to investigate who wants to kill his grandpa and the first person he trusted with any of this information was the woman I just described as “the goldfish in the shark tank.�

I love her. I can’t wait for Jackson to get rid of Moira and hire Catherine back.

4.

Marcus

A gambling addiction is serious business that makes otherwise rational people behave irrationally. But even knowing all that, it’s wild to watch Marcus sit there and try to justify how he ended up $10,000 in debt despite the whole “betting paper clips on how long colleagues can withstand waterboarding as a time-killing form of office-related methadone� thing we saw in the season premiere. He’s an adrenaline junkie who needs the action, whether it’s putting sums of money he can’t afford on games of chance or running into a firefight with an automatic weapon. The latter does make for better television, at least.

3.

Shirley

I suspect I would be a lot more sympathetic to Shirley in this situation, the one where she’s trying to help a friend with his addiction issues and is a little hurt and surprised that he went behind her back and lied about it, if she weren’t also a literal spy whose job is reading people and knowing what their next move might be.

Like, yes, she’s being a good friend here, or as close to “a good friend� as she knows how to be. But it doesn’t say a lot about her professional skills that she was deceived by the person sitting across from her for several hours every day.

2.

River

Hard to think of a more perfectly River Cartwright situation than “hops into a car with a strange man who just saved him from a trap he ran into where he was almost stabbed to death during a house fire and then the strange man knocks him unconscious with the butt of a gun and races off as the building burns behind them and the credits begin to roll.�

He’s a sweet boy. I have no clue how he has survived three-plus seasons of this show. My working theory is that we’ll eventually discover he is invincible and this has actually been a show about a man who never knew he had a superpower.

1.

Claude

I did not ever envision a situation where I would have someone ranked above River while making this list but then this goofball went and got himself tangled up in a conspiracy by blindly signing his name to a whole stack of papers that were placed under his nose by the same woman who quite literally just orchestrated a complicated and bloody coup to oust his predecessor.

I mean, come on, Claude.