Warning! Spoilers ahead for Slow Horses season 6, episode 5.
Slow Horses’ latest season just reached its thrilling climax in the penultimate episode. Season 6, episode 5, “Sayonara,” picks up with Sid Baker being abducted by the two assassins who have been systematically massacring ex-Slow Horses. River Cartwright races to save her, and manages to stop Jim from drowning her. Then, they’re picked up by the Dogs and taken to a private airfield, where Taverner arranges to have Sid turned over to Russian intelligence in Sofia, Bulgaria.
As Sid is being taken to a plane to be flown to her doom, River decides he can’t stand idly by and let it happen. So, he commandeers a vehicle, Sid hops in the back, and they make their daring escape. Slow Horses has delivered plenty of thrilling action sequences over the years, from fistfights to shootouts to car chases, and River and Sid’s escape from the air base is one of the show’s most exhilarating set-pieces to date.
It escalates beautifully: River takes the car, Sid breaks free and hops in the back, and then a merciless convoy of black, tinted-out hired-goon cars come charging after them. There’s some fun banter between River and Sid, as River drives around in circles and Sid implores him to go another way, and then they’re chased out of the airfield. River smashes through the gate, while Sid tosses a chemical drum to blow up the convoy.
Director Adam Randall, who helmed every episode of this season and previously directed every episode of season 4, makes all the right shot choices, and puts them in the perfect order for maximum thrills and clarity in the edit. He’s got lots of gnarly, fast-moving, up-close-and-personal shots of the cars plowing into each other, but always pulls back to a nice, clear wide shot whenever there’s a major shift in the geography of the action.
All the best action sequences are driven by character and emotion — Ripley’s final stand against the xenomorph queen is driven by her maternal love for Newt; the lobby shootout in The Matrix is born out of Neo and Trinity’s loyalty to Morpheus — and Slow Horses’ explosive airfield escape is no different. It all stems from the fizzling romantic tension between River and Sid, played by a perfectly matched Jack Lowden and Olivia Cooke. The life-or-death stakes encourage them to open up about how they feel.
River’s little flirtation with Sid before she’s taken away is what inspires him to take action, and the emotional climax of the sequence is their first kiss. Just before Sid is taken away, she and River share some cheeky banter about their respective sex lives, and suggest that they could have a future together if Sid wasn’t about to be executed to allow Taverner to save face. For Sid, it was a bit of gallows humor before her inevitable demise, but for River, it was just the motivation he needed to spring into action and save her. He tells the goon watching over him, “She really fancies me,” almost in disbelief, before punching the guy in the face and setting his daring exit plan in motion.
River encourages Sid to flee separately while he allows himself to get recaptured by the Dogs. They’re after her, not him, so he’s happy to take the fall, and tells her to run in the other direction. But before she starts running, he kisses her. That kiss felt more explosive than the actual explosion that happened a few seconds earlier, and put the perfect emotional cap on Slow Horses season 6’s penultimate episode. I can’t wait to see how this all shakes out in next week’s finale, but hopefully there’s a happily-ever-after in River and Sid’s future.
