Slow Horses Recap: Blind Your Enemy

"One great way to stay ahead of an audience is to turn the most obvious conclusion into a twist. Viewers inclined to theorize their way to some baroque explanation are naturally going to disbelieve what's right there in front of them. While Occam's razor, the principle that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one, is worth applying to nearly all real-world problems, cleverly plotting TV shows like Slow Horses are always trying to keep people guessing."

"That's not to say Slow Horses doesn't have other intricate moves to make on a storytelling front - Tara's entire interrogation session at the Park is an elaborate scheme unto itself - but for the show to settle on Tara's motives being as clear as they looked is ingenious. Now there's no stretching any credulity about Roddy's unlikely ascendance from pitiful incel status, and many of the key players involved are still fooled, despite never believing in Roddy as a lothario they somehow underestimated."

"One person who appears to be right about a lot of things is J.K. Coe, whose speculation about the "destabilization strategy" has borne enough fruit for Lamb to step into the lion's den of the Park and share his findings with Taverner and Whelan. That's all the praise Coe should get, however, given the calamity of Gimball's accidental death. We learn from the opening sequence that if Gimball had lived on the night Mayor Jaffrey was sav"

Slow Horses uses misdirection and staged motives to turn obvious conclusions into narrative twists that fool both characters and viewers. The dynamic between Roddy and Tara invites a simple reading that Tara is out of his league, but that surface reading is deliberately subverted when Tara's refusal becomes part of a larger scheme. Tara's interrogation at the Park functions as an elaborate ploy, and Roddy is positioned as a mark to mislead adversaries. J.K. Coe's theory about a destabilization strategy proves accurate enough to prompt Lamb to confront the Park, while Gimball's accidental death complicates the stakes.

Read at Vulture