Why the frick did they call them that? What does Slow Horses mean? Just because they're all frick-ups? This really bugged me
Slow Horses
Why the frick did they call them that? What does Slow Horses mean? Just because they're all frick-ups? This really bugged me
Slough House = slow houser's - slow horses
That doesn't make any sense
Are you a fricking moron? Of course it makes sense
The name of the building is Slough House.
That sounds/is spelled sort of like "Slow Horse" so they're called "Slow Horses".
It's perfectly fricking simple for anyone with a reasonable grasp of the English language.
Thanks that makes sense
Have you never heard of wienerney slang before?
You frickin idiot
the british are moronic
Americans get filtered by words with -ough in them
What was the purpose of these characters?
They’re frick ups.
>lines you didn't understand
How many more times will Jackson Lamb solve the thing while leaving his subordinates in the dark to figure it out
Jackson is the only one in Slough House who is actually highly competent as a spook. Everyone working under him, one way or another, are either losers or frickups. Or both. So naturally Lamb is the one who usually figures what’s going on or most of it, knows what to do and ultimately has the connections and favours necessary to get shit done and then bail out everyone from getting fricked over entirely when they get involved in something they shouldn’t even touch. He doesn’t share information unless necessary because that’s how the game is played and because he thinks everyone else is incompetent, which is 99% accurate.
People in Slough House only got to keep their job as a spy after they fricked up because they either had connections that allowed them to be bailed out (River due to his grandfather being a retired spook with still influence in the service), sacking them would potentially cause more problems than it’s worth it (Lech whathisname who was caught having kiddie porn on his laptop later in the book series and the service didn’t want that to go public so they just shuffled him off to Slough House) or their skillset is too valuable to just be let go (Roddy Ho, who iirc got reassigned simply because literally nobody can stand being around him because he’s such an obnoxious narcissistic butthole).
Admittedly the early stories don’t quite manage to explain and balance it well, so at times it’s kinda hard to buy how these supposed failures manage to one up the actual professional MI5 people. It starts to get better when a) people in Slough House actually keep regularly getting hurt or outright killed during the story, b) the plots start to be a bit more low level and usually involve the cast themselves fricking up or accidentally getting involved in something or they’re specifically targeted and c) there’s so much crooked dealings taking place that Lamb is able to leverage/blackmail to keep them all away from the firing squad.
Are the books good then
Yeah, they are. The books also are more funny, because a lot of the descriptive narration has good jokes and gives you more in depth information about stuff which can’t be really done that well in TV series.
Roddy for example is fricking hilarious whenever the story is told from his perspective, because he’s so up his own ass with a gigantic ego and delusions of grandeur that when its met with actual reality and how oblivious Ho is about anything that is outside of his tiny area of expertise it’s automatically super funny. London Rules especially, as the plot heavily involves Ho having a girlfriend actually being a honeypot scheme that involves Ho giving her access to some confidential files while she’s selling him out to foreign agents, which ultimately leads to multiple attempts to assassinate him that he by sheer luck avoids. Despite all this he’s so stupid he doesn’t figure out what’s happened until the very end and instead is wienery and delusional about what a super spy he is even when he’a dragged off by the dogs to be interrogated.
River IS by default the most competent member after Lamb (this is entirely for plot purposes so that the Slow Horses are able to get shit done, especially in the field portions, rather than being entirely clueless bumbling idiots and dying immediately) but he does still do his share of fricking up, by ignoring protocol and getting into trouble by being too pigheaded, like when Standish is kidnapped and he doesn’t report it and instead tries to be James Bond only
Ro fail miserably at it, which would have then automatically made Slough House get shut down for good were it not for the subsequent twist that ends up sparing their neck.
The shorter novellas (The list, the Drop, etc.) that are set in the same Slow Horses universe and primarily feature more in depth spook incompetence by telling a longer interconnected story from the point of view of an agency milkman, who briefly shows up in some of Slow Horse books as a minor character, who’s job is to check up and look after old retired assets and spies that are now elderly.
The story start with one of the old spooks in the milkman’s care dying and the milkman getting into trouble when it turns out the dead spy had a secret bank account nobody knew about, which means he was likely a double agent. This then leads to lots of bumbling adventures when he tries to cover his ass but of course the guy is always entirely out of his depth when bigger spy shit is taking place around him.
There’s some great bits like how there’s an entire double/triple agent shitshow taking place where everyone involved basically gets played while smugly thinking they’re being clever, or how at one point austerity has cut the milkman’s job to essentially being just part-time now, so he only gets paid for couple of days worth of work per week and he’s essentially become homeless, so when another one of his other clients dies he just starts living at the dead guy’s flat without making the necessary arrangements to stop the automatic government payments for the apartment and electric bills, etc. Or how the milkman is such a wimp and bad at his job that he actually allows one of his clients that he’s meant to regularly keep tabs on to trick him into taking bribes and then he is blackmailed and has to start filing fake reports about the client’s whereabouts and activities, which of course leads to the milkman getting into deep shit when the dogs find out he’s been lying for years and now when they need to find the client nobody knows where he is.
Yes 100%.
I flew threw all of them last year after watching the show.
They're funnier than the show I think and particularly Lamb comes across better and more whole.
I remember in one of the earlier books Lamb is introduced as loud, smelly & obnoxious but later in the book he sneaks up on the slow horses in perfect silence and you realize his persona is social camouflage.
The show does a reasonable job of this but of course books can take their sweet time in getting the setup just right.
Biggest crime the TV show commits is that Lamb not fatter and isn’t farting more.
Never read the books but we know River was framed as incompetent in s1 so he should actually be competent.
To be fair his whole "buh it was a training exercise" attitude made him come off as an idiot.
It was HQ's nickname for any of the agents from Slough House. Slough House >>>> Slow Horse. God damn you dumb, homie.
I've got a free 3 month apple TV trial to watch masters of the air, is this worth watching? Is there anything else on here to watch?
Silo
Thanks anons
Yeah. Entertaining in both it's stories and humour, decent set of characters. Each season doesn't overstay its welcome.
Has a few twists and turns that did subvert my expectations. Which is something I can't say for the other spy thriller shows that come out on Netflix.
yes and seconding silo, rebecca ferguson is mommy kino
Silo sucks dick. You can watch Severance and, uhm, yeah, Slow Horses and Severance.
Servant is good.
Oh wow Jamie from the thick of it is here
Who is even left in the "real" MI5 besides Diana?
Let me guess, they're going to have Louisa be a "real" spy again because she's totally the best of the bunch by virtue of everyone just saying so instead of any actual visual evidence.
Gary should have the golden globe over that guy from the bear.
He has an oscar and is still the most underrated actor alive.
The show bothers me about actual spookery. I get they want a lighter comedy angle to it, but it's severly missing the operational seriousness of something like Bodyguard
What was his problem?
Arrogance.
He remains one of the most perfect portrayals of arrogance in any show I've ever seen.
Humility is more than just a virtue, it's a social skill in the workplace.
this guy did such a good job his face should be put under c**t in the dictionary
i wanna fuc you
FRICK HORSES
You would rather ride a fast horse or have it tow your carriage. Slow horses get the job done, too but you'd rather not use them. They are basically on their way to the glue factory should they do as much as sneeze.
It means they used to be or are supposed to be race horses, but they can't race so they're called slow. I mean, horses in general were a fast form of transportation. If it's slow, it's only at best good for hauling burden (speaking as someone who never dealt with horses EVER).
Am I reading into this correctly? Every season sort of starts with some bad guys trying to do something bad, and the mi5/government are shown to be the "good guys" trying to stop them, without whom the bad guys would certainly win, yet the deeper you get into each season, the government is slowly revealed to be at best, completely incompetent, and at worst - evil, and the source of the main conflict.
I'm just curious, if that's what the creators and writers were going for deliberately, because I honestly never expected a mainstream tv show these days to actually have the balls to criticize government and its institutions, and instead opt for the low hanging fruit of
>Anti government guys are bad
>Russians are bad
>Government good
>CIA/MI5 good
>because I honestly never expected a mainstream tv show these days to actually have the balls to criticize government
Ie you don’t really watch anything.
its a surprise because referring to people as 'slow' is verboten