Showrunner of ‘Slow Horses’ Analyzes Season Three Finale
Slow Horses, the wry and flatulent anti-Bond espionage series streaming on Apple TV+, has been exactly the show its relatively cult following has come to love from the day the cast and crew began filming the first episode, says showrunner Will Smith. The British series, which debuted in 2022, follows Oscar winner Gary Oldman’s churlish and disheveled Jackson Lamb as the leader of a team of disgraced and disowned MI5 agents scrappily and shabbily getting the job done. In the season three finale, in what has become a bit of a recurring scene for the series, Oldman plays off the Oscar-nominated Kristin Scott Thomas’ character, MI5 deputy director general Diana Taverner. They dance around each other, revealing character motivations and insights as they revisit the actions that have put them where they are heading into the season to come.
Lamb and Taverner have this respect-hate relationship built on a long history of working in the service together. Each season wraps with a similar scene of their back-and-forth, but Will Smith wanted to avoid the scene becoming stale. “In seasons one and two, we’ve had them always meet on the bench by Regent’s Canal. But in the final episode they both go to meet and the bench is gone. That’s partly because that’s the thing of TV, it has to be the same but different,” he says. “It’s just trying to freshen things up, and I just thought it was fun.”