Aahana Swrup
‘Slow Horses’ Season 5 finale finds the MI5 agents up against an intense ticking time bomb. After Tara successfully honeypots Claude Whelan, the Director General of Front Desk himself, she manages to take down the Park’s entire mainframe. As such, rendered momentarily blind, the agency has no leverage left to play. This becomes especially obvious when their enemies make their exorbitant monetary demands at the threat of carrying out another mass shooting attack. However, when Whelan and Taverner find themselves at the end of their threads, Jackson Lamb and his agents at the Slough House might just have what it takes to save the day. Therefore, as the dust begins to settle, the fates of these agents and their careers become the real question that remains. SPOILERS AHEAD!
The Park Has to Accept Defeat Against Tara and Her Crew
In the aftermath of Tara’s exit from the MI5 Headquarters, the agency remains in tatters. Their systems have been shut down, rendering them without any of their considerable resources. Worse yet, Whelan has to reckon with the fact that the enemy has played him in much the same manner they did Roddy Ho. Still, he grasps at some attempt to track Tara and the others down by reaching out to the Libyan ambassador at the London embassy. Unfortunately for him, the young woman, armed with a gun, seems to have gotten there sooner. Thus, with the embassy held at gunpoint, she now has the perfect leverage to make her demands. Choosing to deal directly with Taverner, she asks for $100 million and safe passage for herself and her crew. If their demands aren’t met in an hour, she threatens to carry out the last stage of the destabilization strategy: attacking a place of worship.
Consequently, with more than 5,000 potential targets on the board and only an hour on the clock, Taverner realizes there’s no real way to fight back against their enemy. As a result, she concludes that they have no choice but to play by the terror group’s rules, compelling Whelan to assemble the multi-million dollar ransom. However, while the Park gives up on a plan of attack, the agents at Slough House remain eager to jump into some last-minute heroics. Fortunately for them, Lamb’s long-winded experiences give him credibility to float a workable theory. Out of the numerous places of worship in the city, there’s only one that a true psychopath would choose for the final act: the multi-faith center at Abbotsfield, currently holding a mourning event for the mass shooting that incited the entire destabilization strategy.
The Horses Prevent the Attack, and Whelan Faces Near-Certain Doom
Once the horses figure out the specifics of the destabilization strategy’s next move, they waste no time and rush to the Abbotsfield multi-faith center. Although their methods are chaotic, the agents manage to rush the assembled crowd out of the premises. Yet, Zafar Jaffrey, the mayoral candidate leading the event, refuses to budge without proper protocol. Therefore, he insists on calling Whelan to confirm the legitimacy of the evacuation. Meanwhile, the MI5 transfers the ransom funds to Tara as instructed through offshore accounts. Nonetheless, even after this transaction takes place, Farouk goes back on his word, insisting that he wants the UK to pay for their crimes in both money and blood. Inevitably, this lands Tara in a precarious position. The Park’s security detail, aka The Dogs, has surrounded the Libyan embassy to allow Tara safe passage as per their agreement.
However, they have orders to apprehend the young woman if the attack goes through. Once Tara realizes she’s backed into a corner, she attempts to make a run for her life. Nevertheless, Lamb’s fortuitous intervention helps the Dogs take her under custody. On the other hand, Farouk and his co-conspirator attack the multi-faith center while Jafferey and his staff stubbornly stay at the premises. As a result, a huge firefight breaks out in which many security guards lose their lives. Still, a skillful shot by Shirley and a sleuthy attack by Coe end up saving the day. Ultimately, the Libyan attackers are all caught. Even so, in the aftermath of a conversation with his grandfather, River comes to a startling epiphany. The agent realizes that one of the men from Tara’s group is still at large. Furthermore, thanks to some files Lamb had been able to procure from Molly Duran, it’s evident that Whelan is the top candidate for the escaped terrorist’s attack.
Slow Horses Season 5 Ending: Does River Return to the Park?
With the second attack on Abbotsfield foiled, MI5 assumes they’re well and truly out of the woods. Nonetheless, a visit to David Cartwright enlightens his grandson to a different truth. Even though the older agent’s memory isn’t what it used to be, he manages to give River a clue about the destabilization strategy through riddles and seemingly off-topic tangents. Thus, the agent realizes there’s another secret step to the strategy: the sting in the tail. That is, once the victims are sure they’re safe and sound, they’ll be hit with another unexpected attack. The possibility of this being true becomes even more likely when River realizes that Shirley’s paranoid research pre-Abbotsfield shooting suggests there were four men in total, alongside Tara, who were involved in the terrorist schemes.
So far, the Park has only managed to catch three of them. Therefore, it stands to reason that one is still out in the open, plotting a retaliation attack now that they’re mission has unraveled unsuccessfully. As it turns out, Lamb knows exactly who his potential target could be: Claude Whelan. Before he was ever the Head of First Desk, the agent was hired as a long-term forecaster to evaluate whether or not a continued investment in Libya would be beneficial for the country. Thus, it was his evaluation that ultimately resulted in the country’s withdrawal from the Middle Eastern nation, opening up space for gangsters and armed militias to take control, leaving the citizens defenseless. Consequently, Whelan had always been at the center of the entire scheme. Now that the scheme has been rendered useless, his death would have to be the final act of revenge.
As soon as River realizes the same, he rushes to find the Director General’s locations, which brings him to the public park the latter likes to frequent for his morning runs. Fortunately, he manages to intervene at the nick of time, rescuing Whelan from what would have been a fateful assassination. In turn, the Director General is expectantly grateful to the Slough House agent. As such, River realizes he can use this favorable outcome to float the idea of his return to the Park, once again restored to glory. He even manages to convince Lamb to make a case for him in his proceeding conversation with Whelan. Nonetheless, as it turns out, the latter’s days in the Service are numbered, and his successor—none other than Diana Taverner—is non-negotiably averse to taking River back to the Park. Ultimately, despite his well-timed heroics, it seems the young Cartwright won’t be leaving the Slough House anytime soon.
Does Whelan own Slough House? Does He Lose His Job?
Even before the rogue terrorist targets Whelan at the Park, it’s evident that the aftermath of the entire incident does not bode well for the Director General. Now that the threat has been eliminated, it’s time for blame and liability to be doled out among the cracks in the system that allowed Tara and her group to succeed brazenly. Evidently, there are two parties to blame here: Whelan and Peter Judd, the former Home Secretary. Therefore, the latter ends up reaching out to the former in an attempt to join forces and fabricate a different scapegoat to save their own skins. Naturally, Lamb and his department of misfits end up getting caught in their scheme. Thus, after surviving his assassination attempt, Whelan visits the Slough House with one endgame in mind.
Whelan is going to pin the entirety of the blame on Roddy Ho, making it seem like the Slough House had learned about Tara and her threat prior to the attacks. As such, Lamb would take the fall for incompetence, and the entire department would inevitably be shut down. Only River, who directly saved the Director General’s life, would get to stay in the Service. Nonetheless, while this would have proposed the ideal solution for Whelan and Judd’s combined problem, Lamb isn’t one to take any blows lying down. After all, he has an effective ace up his sleeve: Gimball’s recording device that Coe and River pocketed from his place of death. Hours before the politician’s unfortunate, and completely coincidental, death, Whelan had paid him a visit.
Gimball’s wife had been blackmailing Whelan, having procured evidence of his relationship with a young escort. In retaliation, the Director General had used his position to uncover some dirt on the couple, thereby levying his own blackmail threat against them. By a twist of fate, Gimball had managed to capture his threatening spiel on his recording device. After his death, that device ends up in Lamb’s hands, arming him against any of Whelan’s attacks. In the end, Lamb uses this same recording to push Whelan to assume the rightful responsibilities of his actions and step away from the Service as a whole. In turn, he ends up saving the future of the Slough House and its agents.
What Happened to Lamb’s Feet? Was He the Agent From the Stasi Story?
At the end of the finale, we see Lamb in his office having a conversation on the phone with Taverner. While the conversation itself is nothing significant, the ending shot of the scene, showing the soles of the older Agent’s feet in full focus, piques certain intrigue. The shot reveals that his feet must have at one point been notably abused and tortured. From deep scars to healed skin showcasing signs of burns, it seems likely that the agent has been a victim of long-winded torture at one point or another. Earlier in the season, Lamb regales his and Emma Flyte’s agents with a story from his past, during a stationing in Germany. He tells the tale of one of his agents whom the Statsi had apprehended.
The Stasi had held this agent hostage for days, putting him through every torture, including the burning of his feet and worse, in an attempt to get some elusive name out of him. When he refused to budge, they brought in a local woman, who had been identified as the English agent’s lover. They put the woman through unthinkable torture as well, until they finally killed her. Her death came with the damning knowledge that she was pregnant with the agent’s child. Still, the latter refused to give up any names. In the end, the Statsi discovered that their captive was so tight-lipped because he had never known about the person they were looking for in the first place. Hence, they let the agent go after putting him through the worst of hell. In the moment, Lamb tells this story as a way to subtly signal the horses to arm themselves with mundane objects and fight back against Devon Welles and the other Dogs. Afterward, when Standish asks him if he was the agent in the story, he rebuffs the claim. Yet, this conclusive shot of his war-weathered feet implies otherwise.
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