Slow Horses – Season 3 Episode 1 “Strange Games” Recap & Review

Strange Games

Episode 1 of Slow Horses season 3 starts in Istanbul with a woman called Alison heartbroken when she finds out her partner, John, has been rifling through her stuff. He’s on assignment, and needs to find a file called “Footprint”. He hasn’t found it and unfortunately, John is kicked out the house too.

The thing is, Alison is a good actor and she has the file on her – inside the cooking she’s currently preparing. When her partner leaves, she decides to push the operation up and phones her contact, telling them to meet.

Alison hurries to the dock and gets the boat across to her destination. A chase ensues through the streets of Turkey but Alison gets the jump on her pursuer, making it to her meet-spot. She hands over the file for Footprint to a strange man, telling him to “get it out there”. However, he grabs her and throws her off the balcony to the ground below, taking off with the file for herself.

Fast forward one year later and Catherine is on the case for making sure River and the others are still itemizing a whole bunch of boxes that have shown up at Slough House. This is lowest of the low for work and, of course, the Slow Horses are on the case. As for Jackson, he heads off to a Service medical, but his doctor is not happy with his flippant attitude toward drinking and smoking.

By comparison, Catherine is attending group and lo and behold, so too is John. He’s still racked with guilt and he doesn’t speak much, but Catherine can sense his pain, telling him to keep coming back. Outside, John asks her for advice. It’s been 10 years since he was last in London and since then, he’s been trying to recover from the horror of Alison’s death. He’s buried it in drink and reminds Catherine that “there will be reckoning”.

This is enough for alarm bells to ring for Catherine, as she realizes she’s in over her head. She flees out the back when John brings up Jackson Lamb. Unfortunately she’s taken and kidnapped, bundled in the back of a car.

While Ho gets a well-deserved smack in the mouth for trying to blackmail Marcus at a bar into hooking him up with Louisa, Louisa finds herself kicking her “terrible lay” (paraphrasing here, she actually uses a different word!) out the house for eating ice-cream. The thing is, the missing diamond actually happens to be inside.

Back at the office, Jackson quickly realizes that Catherine is missing. He splits the team up to find her, while River realizes he may have messed up after bumping into John and not thinking much of it. Jackson is not happy and has River sort files instead. As for Marcus and Shirley, they notice Catherine hasn’t returned to her apartment that night. Shirley traces her steps all the way through to the bridge, where she notices the CCTV cameras have been disconnected and one of Catherine’s hairpins is on the ground.

Back at the office, River is put in an impossible situation. John rings after sending a picture of Catherine at gunpoint. “Barbican Bridge. One minute, or she dies.”

The Episode Review

Slow Horses is back and now onto its third season, this show doesn’t look like it’s slowing down any time soon. The drama is just as enticing as it was before and the tension is racketed up immediately with that intriguing opener and then the drama in London.

Quite what this project Footprint is remains to be seen but it’s clear that it’s gong to be the crux of the issues going forward from here on out. Either way, everything is left on a precarious knife-edge and with two episodes released today, thankfully we don’t have to wait too long to find out what happens next!