Slow Horses (Season 3) Episode 5: Recap & Ending Explained - How Will Slough House Save themselves from MI5?

For a team so derided and expected to be the last resort in any sort of situation, the Slow Horses are found to be infinitely more capable than the actual MI5 soldiers. Perhaps that is the comedy of the show, though Slow Horses (Season 3) Episode 5 is easily the most action-packed the series has been since the prior season, with its espionage roots flaring up.

Slow Horses (Season 3) Episode 5 “Cleaning Up” Recap:

A meeting between Ingrid Tearney and Diana Taverner, where Tearney is going to share a drink at Taverner’s office, that too the 18-year-old Macallan gifted to her by Taverner, which she hadn’t opened from the time it was gifted. In any other scenario, this would have been a cause for celebration. For Tearney, though, this was a way of making Diana pliable enough so that the show could reveal her involvement in the debacle. As it turned out, she needn’t have bothered because Tearney’s hunch was absolute, but perhaps Taverner’s reasoning wasn’t.

She was interested in getting the post of Director-General, and the Istanbul episode, as handled by Tearney, was enough of a controversial look for Taverner to simply take action. Operation Footprint, as it turns out, was code for Tearney signing off on a hacking device that could hack closed and encrypted systems. Dunn got killed because she wanted to reveal it all. But it was Taverner who had been behind it all. Tvaerner had liaised with Peter Judd to hatch this security testing scheme to neuter Tearney, knowing full well that once Sean goes rogue with his tiger team, Judd will have to deal with the fallout along with Chieftain.

It was a pretty good plan, but with enormous amounts of luck involved. Sure, Taverner had recommended Spider to the Chieftain squad, such that River would inadvertently be involved, but Diana also had to distract him from Duffy so that he could make a run for it and try to escape, putting MI5 in a tizzy. So a bit of luck has been involved, and right now, Taverner is expecting the Slow Horses to rescue her and come out of this debacle intact.

At the facility, Duffy is putting his chess pieces together, ordering the chieftain soldiers to get into formation and ensure that no one gets out of the facility alive. They even block off all the exits of the facility, bar one, and station the majority of their forces there. Douglas, sitting inside, phones River and the others in the bowels of the facility and informs them of the soldiers standing outside. River goes to check, and his face becomes crestfallen as he realizes that Chieftain and the dogs are all planning to enter forcefully. Subsequently, River calls in Lamb from the internal landline and asks for backup, and Lamb, in his typical pattern, tells him to contact the two members who fired Marcus and Shirley and ask them for backup.

River, realizing that this is the amount of help he would get, calls the Slough House official. Coincidentally, at that time, Shirley and Marcus, after drinking their sorrows and wondering what they would do now, had gone to Slough House to return their IDs when River’s message in the phone’s answering machine went through. Before they could pick up the phone, the chieftains cut the phone lines. Realizing that they are in a world of trouble, both Shriley and Marcus drive in Marcus’ sedan towards the facility.

Back at the facility, Louisa is brought up to speed by Ben while Ben searches for the document furiously and then is conscripted into searching for the documents. River and Douglas enter the room to inform them of the soldiers when Douglas is again questioned about the room number, to which he clarifies that Room 12 has three subsections, and they are in subsection A, while B and C are down the hall. As Louisa and River debate about whether River should have a gun, River finally convinces her and takes the gun, walking with Douglas to the entrance door.

River tries to convince them to go away, revealing that they are here for an important mission on Tearney’s orders. It doesn’t matter because the chieftain leader had already called upstairs and gotten the code to bypass the entrance door. Unable to remember the override code in time, Douglas panics, and River shoots the electronic door, rendering it useless. River’s actions are moot, however, as Chieftain soldiers breach the door. River manages to shoot one of the soldiers entering but is unable to convince Douglas to accompany him inside.

He takes the gun of the fallen chieftain soldiers and goes deeper into the vault as the chieftain soldiers capture Douglas. Because Douglas is unarmed, the chieftain soldiers refrain from killing him, but not Duffy. Duffy meets him outside the facility and tries to ask him whether Douglas knows anything. Douglas would have saved himself if he had kept his mouth shut, but he had heard of Tearney’s involvement while listening to everyone else, and he mistakenly reveals that and finds a bullet lodged in his skull.

Slow Horses (Season 3) Episode 5 — Christopher Chung and Gary Oldman in “Slow Horses,” now streaming on Apple TV+.

River and Louisa prepare themselves for a siege, blocking the doors while trying to dodge the bullets. They garage themselves in Room 12, with the Chieftain soldiers moving in closer. All the while, Marcus and Shirley park their cars in the back lane of the facility, where Marcus reveals almost an arsenal of weaponry at the dickey of the car beneath a hidden flap. As the two of them enter the facility through the back door, Chieftain soldiers ambush them, and the two of them are almost trapped. Meanwhile, Lamb and Roddy have finally reached the location of the Dunn house where Standish is kept.

Lamb nonchalantly takes Roddy’s 180 quid coffee cup with a couple of changes and distracts the Dunn sister by pretending to be a beggar, asking for Christmas change, and knocking her out when she tries to open the door. Lamb opens to find Standish had been playing Scrabble with her. But Standish, meanwhile, is very much in a crisis of faith, making Lamb visibly irritated. If MI5 is not above killing one of their own, which side are they working for? But Lamb is unable to answer that question. Unbeknownst to him, Roddy had seen a car entering the lane of the Dunn house, and he, with his misguided heroism, had plans to “do something.” Meanwhile, Lamb, Standish, and the girl, now armed with a gun, start planning to protect themselves from the inevitable attack.

Slow Horses (Season 3) Episode 5 “Cleaning Up” Ending Explained:

Back at the facility, the shootout already having begun as Chieftain soldiers enter and River and Louisa trade shots, Sean and Ben furiously go through the documents. Sean finally locates the document, and Ben barely manages to dodge the bullets to reach him. They both share a moment of elation before the two of them inform them that they have found the file and now they need to get out of there.

The problem is that the only way out is through the door through which the soldiers are crawling. Ben, convinced they can hold them off, asks River for a gun, which he refuses. Undeterred, Ben moves closer to the corpse of one of the fallen soldiers and manages to take the gun out of its holster, but before he can shoot back, one of the soldiers shoots him in the neck. Sean is in shock while River and Guy prepare themselves for a certain death. And that’s when the grenade is thrown.

The episode ends with arguably one of the best cliffhangers of the show’s history: the grenade exploding in close quarters to River and River being thrown backward as the shelves break and push him back. It’s a terrifying visual, and while plot armor is a thing, this cliffhanger is good enough even for a show’s plot to resume immediately as the next episode opens.