slow horses recap: 5.03 ("tall tales")
j.k. coe gets his due and roddy ho his delusion
Imagine, if you will, Alice’s rabbit friend hopping around uttering his famous little catchphrase. I know I’m late with this recap. Kinda did not realize what I was getting into when I committed to doing these, but the good thing is that with this one, we’ve now reached the halfway point. And yes, the season finale will be airing tomorrow and I have yet to watch the two episodes preceding it, but you know what, we’re doing it live. I’ve been busy! We’ve been busy! Like, foreign film showings on weekday afternoons are not gonna watch themselves, are they?
But commit I did, for once. So here we are. Here are the previous recaps, btw. Ignore the timestamps. I am doing my best.
Season five, episode three of Slow Horses (“Tall Tales”) finds our band of misfits still on lockdown at Slough House, being babysat by Emma Flyte (rocking a slicked-back low bun that would make me look like a Kirkland Signature ballerina but makes her look devastatingly stylish) and her team, including the charming and hilarious, if I may, Devon Welles, who is understandably in a very take-no-prisoners mood. I would be, too, if I were stuck in the presence of what I presume is the musty odor of Jackson Lamb’s office.
(Uncredited character of the day, by the way, is Lamb’s holey sock, which provoked in me a cringe so strong I had to stand up and take a walk when I first saw it.)
As our rejects stay put (for now), London is falling into even deeper chaos: engines around the city are bursting into flames for reasons heretofore unknown, prompting worsening gridlock and generalized panic among the population (see: Coe’s destabilization theory from last episode gaining credence). And of course as that story develops,1 Roddy Ho is being held at MI5 headquarters in a cell nicknamed—terrifyingly—the fright cube. Luckily, his self-inflicted sense of delusion is so strong, he can’t seem to find in himself the ability to be frightened, and instead entertains himself and, on the other side of the glass, several employees of the Security Office by engaging in a sort of deranged parkour routine and making pronouncements like “the only prison I fear is the prison of the mind … and I bust out of that years ago.”
Being utterly and completely honest when I say: I am deeply jealous of Ho’s ability to live in a world of his own making, of which he is the one and only resident. The peace he must feel. The platonic ideal of blissful ignorance, if you ask me.
It is Diana Taverner, of course, who eventually—and, I’d argue, accidentally—extracts his most damning confession: to impress his soulmate-and-definitely-not-woman-entrapping-him Tara, Ho hacked into the MI5 database (with “the fastest fingers in the West”) and then left her alone (for 20 seconds! while he got the pizza!) with potentially the most sensitive information in the British government. Iconic.2
One could say that Taverner is surrounded by incompetence, and not just Ho’s, because can we briefly discuss Claude Whelan, a man who is technically, by the grace of god and generalized misogyny, her boss? A man who, when hit up with a little case of blackmail, stays on the phone to have a little tiff with the blackmailer instead of directly and professionally hanging up? Who, when faced with very much personal woes, calls upon not his own attorney but instead MI5’s head legal counsel?
Like Arrested Development, Scandal, and The Americans before it,3 Slow Horses oh-so-casually demonstrates the chaos that unfolds when an organization’s leadership is beset by ineptitude and must nevertheless persist.
Do you think Coe studied political science? International relations? Crisis management? I suddenly need his backstory like I need air to breathe. Because not my weird, hoodied, damaged little man calmly laying out the steps to a destabilization strategy, succeeding in quietly and firmly convincing his equally damaged colleagues that the group they’re investigating is following a set playbook with a specific goal in mind.
Let’s recap the destabilization steps we’ve seen so far, shall we? (1) compromising an enemy agent (the Tara and Ho of it all, I fear), (2) attacking the village (the Abbotsfield shooting), (3) disrupting of transports (engine explosions causing increased gridlock in London traffic), and (4) seizing the media (the penguin killings taking over the news).
It is this last occurrence that convinces Lamb that Coe might be on to something, and since the fifth step of the destabilization strategy is the assassination of a populist leader, he and the rest of the Horses try to convince Devon to reach out to Flyte to warn her of the growing threat against Gimball, the conservative xenophobe running for mayor of London.
Despite their efforts, Devon is not persuaded, largely because Flyte fervently (and rightly) warned her against trusting anything the Slow Horses might do or say to escape their lockdown. And so Lamb resorts to the titular tall tale, telling the sad story of an MI5 prisoner in East Germany tortured for information alongside his pregnant (and soon-to-be-dead) wife as a means of (1) distraction and (2) inspiration.4
Our not-so-incompetent-now-are-we babies do in fact manage to get out of Slough House, and just in time, because not only is Gimball’s life likely in danger, but we’ve also just discovered that the green-haired climate activist from the last episode, responsible for the exploding engines, isn’t just trolling the Boots aisles for his next Beauty Don’t, he is also Mayor Jaffrey’s son, intent on taking his father down with him for being too timid in his climate policies. I’d personally also wanna take him down for not preventing the horrendous dye job. But that’s just me. Ruminating away.
Folks … if it’s not one thing, it’s another.
Cut for time:
I do appreciate the show poking fun at how lightly obnoxious some of the PC-coded slogans and talking points are, because truly, truly, I need jail time for whoever came up with Jaffrey’s “Make London Londerful Again.” It’s just atrocious enough to seem real.
Frankly, Nick Mohammed is doing an incredible job playing Mayor Always Say the Correct Thing No Matter How Cringe. (Photo: Apple TV+) The penguin deaths are briefly mentioned above, but there’s something rather bleak—and again, real—about the shock and sadness with which the public reacts to the loss of penguins compared to the quiet resignation of, say, a mass shooting of people. And listen, I say this as someone who was forced to watch March of the Penguins after every state standardized test in high school. The penguin lobby went hard in Florida. I have a deep appreciation for the species. But still. You know.
Shirley’s “it’s like you’ve got a pauper’s grave in your asshole” line … I need to be in this writers’ room sooo bad.
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Did you know that The Newsroom’s (2012-2014) original title was More as the Story Develops? Would’ve been one more crime with which to charge Aaron Sorkin.
Not for nothing, I will be thinking about Kristin Scott Thomas’s delivery of “do you have any connection with the incel community?” for weeks to come.
The rule of three is very important to me and yes, I’m still rewatching The Americans. Let me live.
In last week’s recap, I was curious for more of Lamb’s lore. Well, I think we may have gotten it, in a deliciously roundabout way. There’s a very good chance that the tale he spun to help the team escape was not that of an anonymous MI5 officer in East Germany, but of Lamb himself, as Catherine later suggests to the man himself. He denies it, naturally, but … I trust Catherine’s intuition with my whole heart. That woman, her chic grey hair, and her godawful (I’m sorry!) dresses have seen things.
There aren't words to explain my happiness at this series being back (1.5 episodes to go, grief to follow) PLUS getting to read your recaps. The joy.
Speaking for myself, you can post these whenever you like. You can post the recaps in 2026 and I’ll still be delighted to read them and relive the episode.