Hugin & Munin Journal

Official promotional image for Slow Horses Season 2. Apple TV+ promotional material, used for review and commentary. Season one of Slow Horses asked what happens to intelligence officers MI5 has written off. Season two asks what happens when MI5 has written off the past. Adapted from Dead Lions , the second of Mick Herron’s Slough House novels , Apple TV+’s six-episode second season begins with the death of a former agent and a warning about Russian “cicadas”: sleeper agents planted in Britain during the Cold War and left dormant until they are needed. What looks at first like an old spy following an old suspicion expands into several connected investigations, concealed identities and political schemes. The sleeper-agent plot brings the series’ Cold War inheritance closer to the surface, but its real advance lies elsewhere. The slow horses are no longer merely proving that they retain useful skills. They are discovering that a correct conclusion does not compensa...

Official promotional image for Slow Horses Season 1. Apple TV+ promotional material, used for review and commentary. Adapted from Mick Herron’s first Slough House novel , Apple TV+’s six-episode first season of Slow Horses begins by presenting River Cartwright as the kind of young MI5 agent who normally anchors a spy thriller. He is ambitious, physically capable and racing through an airport during a counterterrorism training exercise that is rapidly going wrong. The sequence appears designed to establish his credentials. Instead, it ends his career. River is sent to Slough House, the neglected office where MI5 deposits officers it cannot quite dismiss. Its inhabitants—the “slow horses”—have embarrassed the Service, antagonised the wrong superior, made serious mistakes or simply become professionally inconvenient. They receive tedious assignments in the apparent hope that boredom and humiliation will eventually persuade them to resign. The cleverness of the pre...