Before this fifth season put him closer to the center of the action, Roddy had undoubtedly been a misfit among misfits at Slough House, a desk jockey who would hold court at his computer, issuing snide japes at anyone within earshot. He seemed like a one-man Statler and Waldorf, tolerated mainly for his ability to access CCTV footage and occasionally hack into sensitive databases. He was antisocial and notably useless in the field, but the depth of his narcissism and stupidity was kept under wraps, likely because he was far down the roster of important characters. He was a whoopee cushion for the writers to sit in when they needed the comic relief.
As the fulcrum to the entire terrorist plot this season, however, the Roddy character has done much to establish the tone, which is much sillier than usual, despite kicking off with a massacre that’s surely the most harrowing sequence the show has done so far. And while this week’s episode moves the action forward with satisfying pop, especially the “lockdown” scenes at Slough House, Roddy has become such a cartoon of dim-witted vanity that he’s starting to feel a little out of step with the rest of the cast. Granted, he is not an agent at Slough House and isn’t held to the same standard of competence (or semi-competence) in the field, since he’s really just useful as the office’s annoying tech savant. But his behavior during his interrogation with Taverner edges too far into the absurdly inept.
At the end of the last episode, Roddy was scooped up by Regent’s Park for his connection to the spate of terrorist activities around the city, while Flyte and a team of other agents are keeping the rest of the Slough House gang under lockdown. Roddy gets thrown into interrogation room 8, artfully dubbed “The Fright Cube,” but if he’s at all phased by his steel confinement, he’s determined not to give his captors the pleasure of seeing it. On the contrary, he bounces around the cage like an agitated zoo animal, putting on a performance of macho resistance for his unseen audience of snickering agents. He acts like he’s the main character of one of his favorite action movies. “Ain’t no prison built that can hold me,” he says. “The only prison I fear is the prison of the mind, and I busted out of that years ago.” And when Taverner finally enters the room, he mimics Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs: “Welcome, Clarice.”
The substance of Taverner’s questions is compelling because she links him to The Unseen, the incel community that produced the Abbotsfield shooter and presumably other angry, lonely, violent young men. She brushes off his insistence that his relationship with Tara is authentic, because it so obviously doesn’t fit the pattern: “You’re not a lothario,” Taverner tells him bluntly. “You’re not James Bond. Your relationship history consists of a series of deeply awkward, prematurely terminated encounters followed by periods of intense neediness and borderline harassment until you are blocked.” Kristen Scott Thomas, an actress who drips contempt with the acidity of a xenomorph’s blood, doesn’t want to waste time on Roddy’s romantic delusion. The situation is too urgent.
Yet the revelation she ultimately gets out of him is so startling that it strains credulity. Roddy can’t seem to think of anything relevant or related to Tara until he remembers the time he showed off by hacking into the MI5 database and then left her alone in the room for 20 seconds to pick up a pizza. That’s a pretty relevant detail, Roddy! People often lie to themselves to obscure painful truths, like, say, believing the woman everyone thinks duped you is actually smitten with you. But to treat sensitive information this cavalierly, in front of someone now suspected of aiding a terrorist group, is a little silly.
It’s also a massive security breach that widens the competence gap between Roddy and his cohorts at Slough House, who are usually flawed to the point of being underestimated. With Flyte and her team, led chiefly by the stern Devon Welles (Cherrelle Skeete), tasked with keeping Slough House under wraps, it’s then up to Lamb and company to figure out how to wriggle themselves free from Park confinement. There’s one comically failed effort by River to use his soon-to-be-confiscated phone to keep Shirley out in the field. But as he is penned in place at his desk, Lamb turns to his one reliable weapon, his unholy flatulence, to hatch an escape plan.
After Lamb returns from gassing his way to an escorted trip to the downstairs bathroom, two important developments happen in short succession. Still listening to podcasts under his hoodie, Coe offers the sound working theory that sinister forces are enacting a step-by-step “destabilization strategy” that started with the Abbotsfield incident and has continued with other disruptive acts, like multiple car engines exploding from tampered fuel on the streets of London or a bombing attack on zoo penguins. The next step, Coe suggests, is a political assassination, which now puts both mayoral candidates at risk. With that threat in the air, Lamb holds court with a story about a friend’s tragic interrogation session under the Stasi, a tale so riveting that he’s able to mesmerize his captors and tip his people off to a coordinated revolt on Welles and the other agents in the room. It works to such perfection that even Lamb offers them a rare, backhanded compliment: “You lot were really paying attention for once.”
With the Slough House team now liberated to confront the next step in the terrorist’s scheme, Slow Horses is headed into the back half with a lot of strong momentum. Quibbles with Roddy aside, the plotting itself has been as confident and crisp as ever, and the rivalry between Slough House and the Park looks to spill out into the open once more. And with Roddy under wraps, the Park has their own resident idiot, Claude Whelan, ready to step into the spotlight.
Shots
“I don’t understand. Why are all these burning cars still on the road?” It’s funny that Whelan, First Desk at the Park, has to have everything explained to him like he’s a six-year-old.
• Shirley to Lamb after he lets a particularly malevolent fart fill the room: “It’s like you’ve got a pauper’s grave in your asshole.”
• Roddy trying to impress Taverner during interrogation: “I have many nom de guerre: Clint Wolf, dragon slayer, the human tripod, the true king of Gondor. Occasionally, Ice Monroe.”
• Though the show villainizes Gimball and his wife as right-wing agitators, there’s plenty of equal opportunity mockery of Mayor Jaffrey, who turns up at every event with canned political language and tacky feel-good catchphrases like “Make London Londerful Again.” That the fuel-tamperer turns out to be Jaffrey’s son is quite a twist, not least because it’s an example of a spiteful child taking climate action his father lacks the will to address. “A plastic politician,” the kid calls him.
Is it possible that Roddy is this stupid?
