This time last year, I wrote glowingly of Slow Horse’s fourth season:

It is rare and difficult for a long-running series to reverse a downward slide. There are simply too many sources of gravity: writers run out of obvious plot lines and have to start re-hashing, Flanderizing, and escaping the confines of the show's existing logic; actors change, and audiences grow tired of what was once novel; it is simply hard to capture lightning and put it back into the bottle, and the commercial demands of the television industry incentivize showrunners to turn their works into shambling ghouls (another year of steady work for the crew, another year of solid residuals, another year of fun with coworkers with whom you've grown fond) rather than a surgical and cohesive narrative arc.

This fifth season does not quite cover itself in glory as much as its immediate predecessor. Lazily, I instead reach to my short review of Season 2:

Not as great as the first season; still tremendously entertaining television, with more than a few twists that I couldn't predict and an underlying thread of competence in set design, pacing, and acting that is hard to deny.

This season felt like reading one too many Creighton or Le Carré novels in short succession: its not so much a lack of quality so much as a lack of novelty, a sense that I’ve seen this all before. Comfort food rather than haute cuisine: which is a tellingly unfair metaphor, because Slow Horses does not at any point pretend that it is haute cuisine.

There’s a bit of an incoherence to everything that feels more sit-commy than I prefer my spy thrillers, especially ones that demand you take their body counts seriously. The centerpiece of the entire thing is Lamb’s Stasi monologue, which depending on your perspective is either paid off or undermined in the final scene; the Libyans make for shallow and uninteresting antagonists, especially compared to last season. Still amped for season six.

★★★