Slow Horses (TV Series) Failure's Contagious (2022) User Reviews

Great Start, I'm hooked!

[waddelltony · 9/10 · 3 April 2022]

Great spy story and opening episode. Well paced. Great acting. Oldman delivers sardonic wit. Baffled why anyone in their right mind would give this a 1 star review. Excited to see where this story goes. I'm in.

Loving it all

[twentynine_cims · 9/10 · 1 May 2022]

But it only gets a 9 because there is no way an exercise as complex as this wouldn't have recordings of all communications no confusion would excist around who said what etc.

Good show, except for one small detail

[simonquattrocchi · 8/10 · 17 April 2022]

Blue Shirt , White tee. This is what was said. So why did MI5 not go back and review the recordings. You cannot tell me, even for a training exercise, everything was not recorded. Except for this glaring detail should never have been over looked. I'm enjoying the show.

I wanted to binge watch, but it is worth the wait every week

[barbara_b123 · 10/10 · 16 April 2022]

So this is what I imagine it could be like to be a secret agent: running through airports, knocking guys down, a handler yelling orders into an earpiece, and then when it all goes wrong . . . Reassignment to a dreary office with other people who somehow failed, as well. Gary Oldman plays the disheveled boss, a man who maybe should have retired, we're not sure if he bunks down on his office sofa because he's too drunk to go home, or he doesn't have a home anymore. He's introduced to the viewers in a scene where he rouses himself from sleep with his own blast zone worthy flatulence. Why is he still working for MI5? And why are his younger cohorts still employed? The art direction has left me gasping for air in the dreary scenes of the dimly lit Slough House (the office for the rejects or Slow Horses, perhaps a bit of cockney slang there). We get some glimpses into the past of the characters and how they end up in this purgatory, and see how clever some of them still are in following episodes, and we find ourselves rooting for them, the good guys, and seeing how the politics at the shiny head office play into their fates. There are surprises in every episode, and I find myself comforted every time Oldman is on screen, as his character seems to still care about doing the right thing and taking care of "his people". Entertaining and fast moving, worth waiting for every week.

Great start

[grantss · 9/10 · 9 January 2024]

MI5 agent River Cartwright messes up a major anti-terrorism training exercise to the extent that if it had been an actual attack several hundred people would be dead or injured. He is banished to Slough House, the department where all disgraced MI5 officers are sent. Running the department is Jackson Lamb who, while hardly the epitome of an MI5 officer himself, runs a tight ship and has his staff doing all manner of meaningless tasks. He is trying to get them to quit.

A great start to the series. The opening scenes are fantastic and show us what we all expect MI5 and other intelligence agencies to operate. After that we have the purgatory of Slough House - far less glamourous, making for a great contrast.

While the main aim of this episode is to meet all the main characters, it is very interesting and engaging. There is some humour to lighten the mood.

There is also some cloak-and-dagger stuff and an actual threat, so not all scene-setting but also some intrigue and action.

What?

[iounu2 · 6/10 · 29 September 2022]

Forget the rest of the episode. This is supposed to be realistic and they do an exercise in a real airport scaring the hell out of real people and causing chaos in the scariest place to have chaos? How is this supposed to be plausible? Knocking the wrong guy down on the tarmac? Some things are just hard to get over and this is one. 100 people involved in the most public place during an exercise. Just ridiculous. And it appears they now need 600 characters to write a review even though I'm only reviewing 1 episode so now I have to just make stuff up to finally get there until the character count finally reach..

wow, Never seen a spy show this well acted and directed

[moviesfilmsreviewsinc · 10/10 · 1 May 2022]

Episode 1 of Slow Horses starts in an airport, as a flight is bound to depart for Marrakesh. An agent called Cartwright is in the middle of this and believes he's spotted a terrorist. Diana Taverner, the woman overseeing this operation, gives the greenlight to apprehend their suspect. Tackling him to the ground, it turns out he's the wrong guy. The real culprit is on the other side of the airport, currently waiting to go through the biometric passport control. Given how fast he gets through those gates, it's incredibly unrealistic (as anyone who has used these will tell you!) Anyway, our suspect heads into the toilet near arrivals and seemingly swaps bags. With alarms wailing, Cartwright charges after him as he heads down to Stanstead International train station. He makes it in time and confronts the man....only for him to pull the string and blow the place sky high. Slow Horses gets things off to a pretty promising start, despite the completely on-the-nose political messaging in here. Look, we all know the Conservative Party is evil incarnate but the way this show batters you over the head with that message distracts from more important elements, like building the various characters. It's still early days though so we'll have to wait and see where this one goes next. There's definitely an air of Suspicion here (AppleTV's bunged espionage thriller) right down to the kidnapping, musical score and conflicted police forces. However, this show definitely has an edge over that one, with solid acting, some good characters and a far more engaging premise. MI5 believe that Simmonds has been funding hate groups and that's why Cartwright has been so dead-set on finding him. However, Lamb soon puts him in his place, pointing out that after 5pm he has no business in the office. If he continues though, Lamb promises to make his life hell. River Cartwright heads back home and speaks to his dad, David. Their conversation mainly revolves around Hobden and his past. Here, we learn he used to be a communist in his youth until he switched sides. According to David, a list was leaked about him donating to the British Patriotic Party - something Hobden believes the MI5 had uncovered.

Entertaining

[tyggfqxcm · 7/10 · 11 December 2022]

The issue of the opening scene and its scope is quite immersion breaking, and it seems the show may have blown its budget this episode as much as MI5 would to rent out spaces of this magnitude. The sequence was uninspired, though tried and true entertaining in the way it's put together. The rest of the show trudges along, I imagine purposefully, to match the pace of the protagonist's new reality. The dialogue is sometimes outright awful, but the performances are decent enough to save it. Overall, the premise doesn't have me quite hooked, but it is entertaining enough to continue forward and see what the next episode will reveal.

MI oh MI

[xmasdaybaby1966 · 7/10 · 5 August 2023]

New Tricks meets The Last Detective.

As someone else reviewed, it had a great slick opening but it did sort of go downhill from there.

There was little in the way of laughs but good on the detail of a mundane office.

Hopefully, this episode is just introducing us to characters and things will become more open and relaxed.

At this stage, I don't care for any of the characters with a holey pair of socks being the highlight.

Hopefully the name calling of spider won't be a relentless non-joke and the crew will actually get results even if it is only by chance.

Hopefully, Samuel West will be something more than a TV interviewee and the unfunny comedian will actually give the show a few laughs.

Ep.1 Is Codswallop

[jeffrey-76695 · 3/10 · 28 January 2024]

First of all, Oldman is one of my favorites. The cast is phenomenal. It's competent and well done as a production.

However, the writing and outrageous premise of this show, at least in this episode, is beyond caricature and borders on parody. It's sophomoric, blinkered, and, well, insane. It is the kind of wearisome fare the modern entertainment industry specializes in.

It reveals how out of touch the writers and creators are.

It is embarrassingly threadbare at this point. I'm now just waiting for all of the other "boxes" to be ticked as this series progresses.

The rating for this series is very high and the cast is too good for me to give up after one episode. I'm just surprised and disappointed to see how quickly this jumped the shark into a farce in episode one.

Implausible plot flaw killed it for me

[robhdean · 5/10 · 27 May 2022]

This opens with a dramatic airport action scene which is later purported to have been a 'training event'. This was so implausible as a training event, and so fundamental to the setup, that I don't trust this series with any more of my time. The characters tended towards one-dimensional caricatures, the boss of the dingy office absurdly and overstatedly so to the point of parody.

Not to our taste

[patsette · 1/10 · 15 May 2022]

My husband and I had great hopes for this. We liked the opening, even though it seemed very dated, the way spy movies used to be in the 70's. Then for us it plunged downill. Part of that is personal taste - even though the plot called for a dingy setting, we simply don't enjoy spending a long time looking at filthy, gloomy surroundings and greasy-haired bosses. After the high-energy beginnning, the pace was glacial, the jokes anemic. And the "conservative" villain was so cartoonishly portrayed I almost felt embarrassed for the writers.

The first minutes was good, but then it goes down fast

[dax-87-757053 · 1/10 · 2 April 2022]

Not my taste of humour. Lame jokes and lame story. The first minutes had so much action and it and that was probably all of it for the whole show. After the action is it so boring.

The actors must come from amateur actor class. Probably because Gary Oldman is too expensive.