Slow Horses Season 2 review – The Cold War never ended

🐴 Introduction

🐴 This review is part of our Slow Horses hub — every season reviewed and ranked, plus why the show works so well and what is coming in Season 6.

The second season of anything is where you find out whether you were watching a good show or a lucky one. Season 1 had a perfect premise, a perfect lead performance and a plot that resolved cleanly. The obvious risk was that Dead Lions would repeat the trick with the volume turned up.

It does not. It goes quieter, older and considerably sadder.

An elderly man called Dickie Bow dies on a bus outside Oxford. The coroner says heart attack. Everybody agrees, because a drunk ex-asset dying on public transport is the least surprising thing that happened in England that week. Jackson Lamb does not agree, because Dickie Bow’s phone has one word typed into it, and that word is one Lamb has not heard since Berlin. From that single bus seat, the season unspools into a story about people who were planted in this country forty years ago and simply never went home.

For anyone who came to this genre through Cold War thrillers, this is the season that pays that debt directly. It is not nostalgic about it. Its argument is bleaker: the war ended, and nobody bothered to tell the people who were left in the field.

🧠 Story & themes

There are two operations running, and the show is very deliberate about keeping them apart until it is too late.

The first is Lamb’s, and it is entirely unofficial. He follows Dickie Bow’s last journey into the kind of English village that exists mostly to be described as sleepy, and starts asking questions that nobody has asked for four decades. Oldman playing an investigation with no backup, no authority and no interest in permission is the best thing in the season.

The second is the sanctioned one. Diana Taverner wants to recruit a Russian oligarch, and she needs bodies to run security on a meeting she does not want on the books. So she borrows the Slow Horses, which is roughly as reassuring as borrowing a fire extinguisher from a skip. Louisa Guy and Min Harper get the assignment, and for the first time since their exile they are doing something that resembles the job they trained for. Watching them stand a little straighter is genuinely lovely, which is the show setting you up.

The theme is dormancy. Sleeper agents are the literal version, but everyone here is dormant in some way. The Slow Horses are careers left switched off. Catherine Standish is a life paused. Lamb is a man who has decided the most useful thing he can do with a first-class intelligence brain is stop it from being noticed. The season asks what happens when something long dormant is finally switched on, and the answer is consistently that it hurts somebody.

🎭 Characters & performances

Rade Šerbedžija arrives as Nikolai Katinsky, an old Soviet defector, and gives the season its best guest performance. He plays exhaustion beautifully: a man who has been telling versions of the truth for so long that he has stopped tracking which one he is on. His scenes with Oldman are two very tired professionals recognising each other, and they are the reason the Cold War material has weight rather than nostalgia.

The regular cast expands in the right way. Aimee-Ffion Edwards joins as Shirley Dander, all coiled aggression and terrible impulse control, and Kadiff Kirwan arrives as Marcus Longridge, a gambler whose competence is real and whose judgement is not. They are not comic relief. They are two more people whose one bad habit cost them everything, which is exactly the show’s thesis restated.

But Season 2 belongs, quietly, to Dustin Demri-Burns. Min Harper has been the least glamorous person in Slough House since the pilot: decent, slightly rumpled, trying to be a good dad on a schedule that does not permit it. In episode three the show kills him, off-handedly, on a bicycle, in a way that is not heroic and not even particularly dramatic.

It is the single most important decision the series has made. Up to that point you could half-suspect that the Slow Horses were protected by the format — that being a comedy about failures meant nobody would properly die. After that, every operation carries real weight. The scene where Lamb refuses to let the death be written up as an accident tells you everything about a man who will not say a kind word to anybody’s face.

🎬 Craft: Rain, fog and restraint

Jeremy Lovering directed all six episodes, and the visual grammar shifts noticeably from Season 1’s strip-lit urban grey. This one lives in fog, wet fields, unlit lanes and the specific bleakness of an English village in December, released, appropriately, across December.

That restraint extends to the action. There is a sustained sequence in the back half of the season involving a very small number of people and a very large amount of open countryside, and it generates more tension than most shows manage with a helicopter. Nobody is a superhero. People run out of breath. Somebody makes a bad decision because they are frightened, and it is not corrected by a stunt.

The one honest criticism: episodes three and four ask you to hold two separate operations, a forty-year backstory and a new pair of characters simultaneously, and the season briefly feels like it is managing plates rather than telling a story. It recovers completely, but Season 1 never had that wobble.

👨‍👧 The dad perspective

Same shape as before, and the shape remains close to ideal: six episodes, about 45 minutes each, one long weekend or a fortnight of school-night hours. It picks up directly from Season 1, so this is not a jumping-on point.

What Season 2 adds for a viewer with a family is a strand about the cost of the work on ordinary domestic life. Min is not a spy with a tragic past. He is a bloke trying to arrange weekends with his sons around a job that has already ruined his marriage once. That thread is handled with no sentimentality whatsoever, which is precisely why it lands.

Age guidance: 15 and up, same as Season 1, and the same caveat applies about how casually the violence arrives. There is no gore-spectacle here, but there is a death in episode three that a younger viewer will find genuinely upsetting, because it is meant to be.

Rewatch value: better than Season 1, oddly. Knowing what the word on the phone means turns the first episode into a completely different piece of television. On an Apple TV 4K the night exteriors hold together far better than they do through a budget smart-TV app, which matters more this season than any other.

✅ Pros & cons

Filling the gap between seasons? Prime Video’s 30-day free trial is a decent way to raid the wider spy-thriller shelf, but check the catalogue first — what is on it changes constantly.

Is Slow Horses Season 2 as good as Season 1?

Very nearly. We give it 4.5 out of 5 against a perfect 5 for Season 1. The plotting is more ambitious and the emotional cost is higher, but the middle stretch takes slightly longer to gather itself than the first season did.

Which book is Slow Horses Season 2 based on?

Dead Lions, the second novel in Mick Herron’s Slough House series, published in 2013. It won the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger, and the adaptation follows it closely.

Do I need to watch Season 1 first?

Yes. Slow Horses is a linear story with a fixed cast, and Season 2 opens on relationships and grudges established in Season 1. Starting here would strip most of the emotional weight out of the ending.

What are the cicadas in Slow Horses?

Cicadas are the season’s term for Cold War sleeper agents planted in Britain decades ago and left dormant, living ordinary lives until activated. The word appears on a dead man’s phone in the first episode and drives the whole season.

How many episodes is Slow Horses Season 2?

Six episodes, released weekly on Apple TV from 2 December to 30 December 2022. As with every season so far, each episode runs roughly 45 minutes.