Slow Horses – Season 4 Episode 2 “A Stranger Comes To Town” Recap & Review

A Stranger Comes To Town

Episode 2 of Slow Horses season 4 starts with us looking at the incident at David’s house through a fresh perspective. River shows up at David’s, who’s shocked and holding his gun. The dead body in the bath is the imposter, allegedly someone called Adam Lockhead, and David is paranoid.

River answers a question only he would know, and helps his granddad out. The guy really does look like River though, but when he called David “gramps”, it ran alarm bells. He was also running a bath at the time, which appears to be where he intended to kill David. The Imposter has diazepam in his pocket, so it does look like he was going to drug David before drowning him. There’s also a return ticket to France, along with a receipt for a cafe called Le Blanc Russe in Lavande.

David eventually rings Park, and gets the authorities involved, but River knows they’re on borrowed time now. He has David head downstairs, then he plants his own phone and passport on the imposter, Adam, and shoots him in the head.

Jackson meanwhile, lied intentionally and the gunshot to the face gave it away. He knows River is looking into this and wanted to buy him some time. Jackson scoffs when he finds out River is in France, believing he’s playing the hero and could get himself into trouble. Jackson tries (and fails) to get any info from David so he decides to leave and dig into exactly when David was in France.

Back at MI5, wet blanket Claude tries to practice his speech in front of Diana but there’s obviously more important things to deal with. While signing documents, he proudly retorts that he wants to change things at the office, admitting this is the pitch that got him his position in the first place.

Diana does some digging into Robert Winters and realizes that he’s one of theirs. Specifically, a “cold body from the tail end of the Cold War”. In MI5 terms, a cold body is someone with a ready-made identity and authentic documents. Giti finds this but Diana lies about its validity and has all records scrubbed from the system. When she tells Claude, he wants to go public but he can’t. In fact, she admits one of the documents he signed earlier in the episode was a C&C document. She tricked him into being part of that cover-up. She doesn’t want someone like him to get in the way of what she deems is “putting out fires every bloody day”.

Jackson shows back up at the office and tells the gang the truth about River. He didn’t want to blow River’s cover and tells Roddy to find out everything he can about Lavande. However, Slough House has a new visitor, a cleaner by the name of Moira.

As they sit together in a restaurant, Jackson lays down the law. He demands she never step foot in his office again. He’s going to find out exactly why she’s been sent down to the office and have her sent back, and in exchange he wants to use her to get onto the database an find out when and why David Cartwright went to France in his career. She agrees.

In France, River shows up at the café. Apparently the worker there knows who River’s imposter is and gives him directions to the mansion he’s staying in. However, River is being tracked. Unfortunately, the men behind the bombings are very clever, and one of them shows up at David’s house, asking about the murder.

When the officer confirms it was River, not David, that died, the man gets in his car and phones his superior. He’s planted a camera at the house in case David returns, but in the meantime, they need to move onto their second target.

River is not aware of any of this of course, and he shows up at a mansion. He breaks in and starts looking around for clues. He does find a painting upstairs in what appears to be a child’s bedroom, and after snapping a photo of it, heads up to the attic. Inside one of the books is a photograph, with Robert Winters, that man from the car earlier on (presumably his brother) and the older man he was on the phone to.

When he head downstairs, the place is ablaze and he walks right into a trap. River is knocked down and almost choked until the old man from the car – the guy tracking River – shows with his shotgun, fires a warning shot and takes off with River to parts unknown.

Episode Review

Alas, the plot thickens. With River off in France and the rest of the gang scrambling to work out exactly what David’s connection to this country is, it’s clear now that all of this is going to come back to whatever David did in the past. It could well be an operation gone wrong or one of the agents killed in the line of fire, and they want revenge for this. But who is the second target?

Jackson doesn’t feature in this episode as much though, which is a shame, as he’s easily the best part of this entire show. However, the scenes he does have show why he’s such a competent agent. He sees right through Moira’s façade and it seems like she’s on his side for now. 

Next week’s episode should be quite the intriguing prospect though as we wait to find out who the old man is and why he’s been tracking River.