Slow Horses Season 5 Episode 3 Review: Tall Tales

Oftentimes, Slow Horses will demonstrate how Slough House is making it difficult for the Park to do their job. They’re presented as an annoyance to the agency as a whole.

But on Slow Horses Season 5 Episode 3, “Tall Tales,” the Park is the one standing in the way of saving the day.

Slough House has a theory as to what’s going on, and this lockdown is keeping them from being able to check to see if the theory has any merit, and also continuing to dig into Roddy’s girlfriend, Tara. The slow horses are stuck in Jackson’s office while the bad guys continue to orchestrate their master plan.

It’s a new situation for Slough House to be in. While they are used to being discredited and ignored, in the past, they’ve at least been able to speak to someone at the Park if they had a theory — whether or not the Park listened to them is another story — and they’ve been able to leave Slough House whenever they want.

“Tall Tales” backs our favorite misfit spies into a corner where they have to do some out-of-the-box thinking to escape lockdown. Multiple plans of theirs fail, whether due to loud traffic noises or a Park employee who is good at their job, but the slow horses do still manage to come out victorious.

While Slow Horses Season 5 Episode 2, “Incommunicado,” featured the slow horses being their normal, grumpy selves and operating primarily on their own, “Tall Tales” features a bit of teamwork. It’s miraculous, even Lamb is shocked.

Watching everyone slowly realize what Lamb is saying and then executing it flawlessly is so much fun. I had to immediately watch it again afterward. As fun as it is to see everyone bickering with one another, it’s great to witness them all work together.

We spend more time with the bad guys during “Tall Tales,” and it’s still pretty boring. The only upside is that we still don’t understand their endgame, so, like Slough House, we are still trying to put the pieces together.

This does mean the scenes with the bad guys are pointless. There’s nothing gained from our time with them, and it’s not as if we are growing to like them as characters.

Slow Horses could’ve shown us more of Roddy being a nuisance to the Park, and it would have been a better use of that time. We wouldn’t have learned anything new from Roddy being himself, but we would have at least been entertained.

Stray Thoughts

• Roddy’s stupidity knows no bounds. Bless him.
• I can’t wait til Flyte and Diana learn that the slow horses escaped.
• Anyone else feeling like Nate/Jaffrey is actually going to be the target and not Gimball?
• That story was 100% actually about Lamb, which is heartbreaking.
• I wonder what would happen if Coe wasn’t allowed to listen to podcasts.

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New episodes of Slow Horses air on Wednesdays on Apple TV+.

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