I’m surprised to be rating this higher than previous seasons, because it’s based off of one of my least favorite books in the series. I like the series more when it leans into the petty and mundane, and this book feels almost like a blockbuster spy movie with its unstoppable bad guys and conspiratorial plots. That turns out to make for good television, though, and I thought the season finale was particularly good, in a way that raises my opinion of the whole season.

What an excellent series this is. The finale was more violent than I’m comfortable with, but I appreciated that it never glorified the violence; rather, it fit in nicely with the series’s habit of showing that as screwed up as the Slow Horses are, it’s the dignified leadership of this fictional MI5 who are the real monsters. Power corrupts, and all that. I’m wondering how next series will go—I have only vague recollections of the book, and what I do remember is that it’s one of the weirder ones.

I’d been meaning to read these for a while and was happy to find them collected in a single (Libby) volume. Herron is great at adding a lot to his universe full of terrible people, and I wish I recognized all the cameos and continuity nods from the main series. I did appreciate Herron’s lampshading of his characters’ not aging despite a decade of publication history—it was clever without feeling out of place.

I enjoyed this semi-prequel to the Slow Horses series. I’d forgotten some series details along the way and wish there were a series wiki out there to help me catch up. Nonetheless, I remembered enough to enjoy the connections and figure most bits out.

So excited to watch this! link to “Gary Oldman returns as Jackson Lamb in ‘Slow Horses’ Season 3 : NPR”

I only learned about The Sandbaggers last weekend, on an episode of The Incomparable, but I watched the entire first series this week—and loved it. It isn’t perfect: There’s too much 1970s casual misogyny for it to be self-critical in the same way that a modern show set in the 70s would be, and the brown face in one episode is also embarassing. Not setting those aside, I was still impressed with the way the show combined the bumbling hypocrisy of Yes, Minister; the self-serving internal politics of Slow Horses; and the cynical despair of Le Carré into a single, compelling show.

I’ve been looking forward to this since the first season ended. Midway through watching the first season, I’d already begun reading the series, and I may have already finished the second book by the time I saw the trailer for the second series. This season did a great job at making use of the source material while changing and improving things as needed. It’s a fun book series, but I think it’s shaping up to be a better show.

I enjoy Herron’s books, so I enjoyed this article! link to ‘Is Mick Herron the Best Spy Novelist of His Generation? | The New Yorker’

It’s a testament to Apple TV+’s adaptation of Slow Horses that I am now reading the whole book series and that I can only imagine the characters as the show’s actors.