Updated

: Sep 17, 2026 12:43am UTC

This review contains full spoilers for Slow Horses Season 6, Episode 1, which is streaming on Apple TV now.

It’s the return of Slow Horses (along with a Season 8 confirmation)! The questions looming over this new six-episode season were how well it would fare after losing its creator and head writer, Will Smith, while tackling two of Mick Herron’s Slough House novels instead of one. So far, Slow Horses seems the same as ever, even if it’s maybe trying a little too hard to prove that it knows how the show’s schtick is supposed to go. Even so, it’s hard to be too nitpicky with a series that cranks out new seasons like clockwork and reliably hits its marks.

“Circle of Life” sets up the chessboard of this season’s central mystery, which sees the Slow Horses being targeted. Someone’s picking off the flunky MI5 spies from Slough House; two former agents — who both seemed to be living quiet, unglamorous lives after the service — have been killed by an unidentified twosome (played by Andor’s Kyle Soller and The Witcher’s MyAnna Buring). The current roster also seems to have been entirely wiped from the Park’s systems, and their paychecks have stopped coming too. In protest, the greasy Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman) goes on “strike,” which mostly means departing to the Italian restaurant below Slough House and uncorking a bottle of red wine before noon.

Diana Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas), now comfortably First Chair after outsting the bumbling Claude Whelan at the end of Season 5, seems to have had a hand in Slough House’s expungement, though isn’t cleanly admitting to anything. Among all of this early drama, River Cartwright (Jack Lowden, maybe soon to graduate from shoddy spy to good spy) is grappling with — rather, trying to completely smother — the grief from the off-camera death of his struggling grandpa, David (Jonathan Pryce), as he plans the funeral.

The disturbing opening shot of Season 6 is a statement as much as it is a metaphor for the disregard of some lives: Slow Horses, now written by the show’s longtime co-executive producer Gaby Chiappe, is still twisted. Chiappe might not have the same comedy writing background as Smith (who worked on shows like The Thick of It and Veep) that gave the show a certain edge, but Slow Horses still goes there. Jackson Lamb still day-drinks and burps loudly (juxtaposed against one of the series’ most sentimental scenes showing River and David’s final moments together) and laughs at funerals (to his credit, it was funny watching River eulogize about his grandpa’s deep care for the nation’s train systems as a coverup for his espionage work). Figured as much!

That’s not to say deploying the well-established character traits of each of Slow Horse’s fantastic ensemble is sloppy lever-pulling. For instance, it will basically always be funny when Roddy Ho (Christopher Chung) acts like… well, Roddy Ho. (Also, I’m 99.8% sure that was Ghost of Tsushima he was playing at work.) But I do sort of wish the series was a little more confident off the bat in trusting itself to tell the story it needs to tell with its characters responding as the ridiculous people they are without winking at the audience.

Already, Slow Horses has a lot of balls to juggle, but that’s nothing new. As arguably the most consistent spy series on TV right now, it’s always threaded complex storylines that opt for the less-obvious twist. It’s safe to expect that pretty much everything is a clue right now — What’s the connection between the seemingly irrelevant (for now) raid on the Russian finance botfarm, the spy-killers, River’s father Frank Harkness (Hugo Weaving), and the secret money that the slimy politician Peter Judd (Samuel West) funneled to Diana? — but I don’t expect any of them to piece together as nicely as they’d seem at first glance. But with only five episodes remaining, covering two books’ worth of material, Slow Horses has a lot of ground to cover — like, when are we seeing you-know-who again? — and not much time to do it.

Verdict

Now under new management, Slow Horses Season 6 kicks off as tonally consistent as ever, even if it occasionally comes off as a little too try-hard at showing just how well it understands the Apple TV show’s moves. It sets up the chessboard for this season’s central mystery — Who’s picking off Slough House spies and why? — and leaves some clues behind. With only six total episodes this season that adapt two books from Mick Herron’s Slough House series instead of one, Slow Horses has a lot of ground to cover and not much time to do it.

In This Article

Slow Horses Season 6, Episode 1 Review

great

Slow Horses doesn’t miss a beat with a new head writer at the wheel in the Season 6 opener.