The familiar yet still oh-so-satisfying Slow Horses formula dictates that Jackson Lamb, the greasy old fartsmith who runs Slough House, treats his underlings with an outward callousness that masks a kinship with them that he’s never allowed anyone to see. And so it’s not terribly surprising that he reacts to the supposed death of River Cartwright, arguably his top young agent, with the same blank weariness with which he chases boxed Jaffa Cakes with Alka-Seltzer. He seems to take it all in stride, even if we assume the loss of a team member is carving a hole in his stomach like, say, eating boxed Jaffa Cakes without Alka-Seltzer. While it’s true that he’s seen it all in his time in the spy business and can metabolize tragedy better than a normal person, the show would be a bore if he didn’t have a human side. It’d be like making Roddy the lead.
And so while we’re reeling — or perhaps not, given the likelihood that the show didn’t kick off the fourth season by killing a major character — Lamb arrives on the scene as his usual dyspeptic self, as if he isn’t about to walk in on the gruesome spectacle of David Cartwright having blown his grandson to bits with a shotgun. First, he pauses to antagonize Emma Flyte (Ruth Bradley), the new head of the Dogs, who’s taking over for the vile Duffy and will have an upside battle, to say the least, in securing Lamb’s trust. (“Well, you’re already an improvement,†Lamb quips. “On account of not being brain-dead and in a coma.â€) Then he scratches his ass and makes his way up the elder Cartwright’s staircase to the bathroom, where River’s corpse supposedly awaits, rendered unrecognizable by a shot to the head to go along with one in the chest. This, too, gets a quip from Lamb. When asked about “identifying marks,†he says, “He used to have a face.â€
But once Lamb finishes examining the scene and returns to his car alone, his expression is wonderfully inscrutable. The way Gary Oldman plays it, Lamb doesn’t quite look like he’s mourning the loss of his agent, but he is clearly shaken by what he’s seen and he’s contemplating it. And though Lamb will puzzle out part of what happened — that River isn’t actually dead and that his grandfather is hiding out in Catherine Standish’s apartment — the fun of “Identity Theft,†the lively first episode of the new season (called “Spook Street,†based on Mick Herron’s 2017 novel), is that he doesn’t break his poker face and the show doesn’t either. Until the big reveal about River’s fate in the closing minutes, most of the characters behave exactly as they would as if he were really killed, and it’s often hilariously revealing. River would probably not want to know how little he’s mourned by some of his colleagues.
Yet that’s not even the big bang that kicks off the season. As Roddy finishes munching on a table full of entrees at Chickado, the fast-food joint where he’s falsely told there’s a company Christmas party, a bomb lights up the London sky behind him. (He misses the blast initially because he’s got Montell Jordan’s “This is How We Do It†on his headphones.) A car bomb has detonated inside the Westacres shopping center, allegedly driven by a 28-year-old freelance IT consultant named Robert Winters, who doesn’t profile as a suicide attacker but who left behind a video that has the requisite “lone wolf†terrorist language in it. Right off the bat, there are indicators that the incident is much bigger than Winters and may not involve him. The address he gave to the car rental place was unoccupied, and his supposed neighbors had never seen or heard of him.
An event of this scale is not Slough House territory, at least not yet, and so Diana Taverner comes onto the scene. Though another new character, Claude Whelan (James Callis), has been promoted to Director General of MI5 or “First Desk,†Taverner is still the alpha of the organization, to the point where Claude seems to sub her in whenever possible. When the Dogs execute a raid on Winters’s apartment, it’s Taverner who’s witnessing the scene play out on a bank of monitors, including a drone camera hovering just outside the door. The Dogs declare the scene clear, making room for forensics to arrive, but when investigators pull the curtains back to get some sunlight in the room, another bomb explodes, killing three agents and wounding others. “What a mess,†Taverner mumbles.
And so we have a common thread here: Professionals shrugging in the face of death. Taverner wants to make sure Claude informs the families of the dead before they find out from the news, but she treats it as mere protocol, the sort of thing MI5 leaders are expected to do when events like these happen. Taverner now looks like Lamb did in the back of the car after seeing River’s allegedly pulverized body: She sees a situation that she’ll have to figure out, not a colleague or colleagues that she needs to mourn. Granted, her actions are not nearly as inhuman as Roddy, the only Slough House member who knows about River’s death, casually disconnecting his computer. But these people are, as they say, built different.
The one person who takes the River news hard is Louisa, who counseled him on his grandfather shortly before the shooting. River confides in Louisa the struggles he’s been having with David, whose memory lapses have suggested growing signs of dementia. There are times, in fact, that his grandfather doesn’t even recognize him. This serves at least one purpose for us as viewers who might be fooled into believing that a dementia-added David murdered his grandson with a shotgun, assuming him to be an adversary. But given River turning up in the French countryside at the end of the episode, it may also be River deliberately setting up Louisa to give his “murder†more plausibility. We don’t know why River has disappeared himself or why he’s in France, but such are the extreme measures he’s been forced to take. If he has to make a sucker out of Louisa, so be it.
“Identity Theft†is a clever opening salvo in that it’s packed with both major incidents and open questions. The plotting in the third season was notably tighter and more dynamic than the previous two, and now the table has been set just as swiftly here. Is there a connection between Westacres and the shooting at the Cartwright house? Seems likely. But for now, it’s good to have the gang back together.
Shots
• Roddy isn’t quite cool enough to pull off seeming unfazed by Lamb directing him to a nonexistent Christmas party: “Yeah, well, you got to be in the game to get played.â€
• Looking over the shooting scene again, you have David with a shotgun saying, “You’re not my grandson,†before killing the alleged intruder. His following that line up with, “Oh my God, what have I done?†makes it seems like he has killed River, but we know that’s not true. So it’s likely that he recognizes the victim, whoever that might be, and feels some remorse. Stay tuned.
• Funny back-and-forth between Emma and Lamb over Slough House: “So you’re in charge of the rejects?†she asks. “They don’t like to be called that,†he replies. “So what do you call them?†“The rejects.â€
• Marcus waterboarding Shirley in the office for a bet over paperclips is a delightful way to bring two key supporting players into the mix when they’re otherwise not important to the episode.
• One new member of Slough House, J.K. Coe (Tom Brooke), gets introduced as a solemn, intense weirdo who never utters a word until a loud “fuck†near the end of the episode. An auspicious start.