Slow Horses (Season 3 Finale), Episode 6: Recap & Ending Explained - Does Donovan’s Sacrifice Go Up In Flames?

Slow Horses (Season 3 Finale), Episode 6: As much as I have been a fan of Slow Horses’ sarcastic commentary on the administration and the follies of the spy game, this season still manages to entertain and surprise me. It’s not enough that “Footprints” is one of the more action-packed entries of this show, with concerted efforts being made to redeem poor Shirley and Marcus, but it is also one of the bleakest endings of the whole show. The cynicism in those final moments easily captures one of the greatest moments this show ever reaches throughout its three seasons, and it easily makes you ask for more with a similar form of consistent tonality.

Slow Horses (Season 3 Finale), Episode 6 Recap:

Episode 6 – Footprints

Opening immediately after the cliffhanger ending of last week’s episode, Louisa sees River being thrown backward due to the explosion of the grenade and goes to check on her fallen comrade, finding him unresponsive. Realizing that she needs backup, she finally takes the help of Sean Donovan, who has managed to get hold of a rifle and can hold off the throngs of chieftain soldiers. Meanwhile, River comes to, dizzy after the after-effects of the blast, and Louisa manages to carry River out of the room they had been trapped in, with Sean holding the Chieftain soldiers off.

Donovan had managed to secure the footprint file with himself to reveal Tearney’s complicity in the coverup of Allison’s death. However, he won’t be able to see his dream come to fruition as he is hit by a stray bullet fired from the guards while the trio is making their way towards the only escape hatch. While Donovan being shot doesn’t immediately kill him, it slows him down, making him realize that if he wants to leak Tearney’s secrets and the secrets of Operation Footprint to the press, he will have to ensure that Louisa and River manage to deliver it to the correct recipients. He thus gives them the file and convinces them to leave him at the tunnel near the hatch with a rifle so that he can hold the soldiers off.

Shirley and Marcus are currently trapped by Chieftain soldiers and are being pinned down. Realizing that following Marcus’ lead isn’t going to help, they split up to tackle the soldiers separately. Shirley had a chance to sneak up on the soldiers and shoot them from behind, only to find her rifle jammed. Barely managing to escape from being shot, Shirley couldn’t help but be cornered downstairs by another soldier, who managed to kill him.

She then climbs up to the second floor and helps draw cover fire for Marcus while asking for Marcus’ car keys. However, their conversation is interrupted because Duffy, now irritated by the Chieftain mercenaries’ incompetence, has decided to take matters into his own hands, coming with a rifle to the shootout and attacking Marcus.

Sean Donovan plans to hold off the soldiers, which works for a while until he is shot through the head by Fenwick, the leader of the chieftains. Meanwhile, Louisa and River manage to reach the hatch and try to climb up, only to realize that the hatch is surrounded by soldiers while they are being chased below as well. They are thus trapped in the tunnel. Meanwhile, Marcus and Duffy trade bullets until their frustrations get the better of each other, and they enter into fisticuffs.

At the Dunn farmhouse, the car that had arrived in the last episode houses Sturges, the Chieftain operative, and Hobbs, Duffy’s assistant. Forewarned, Lamb had managed to set booby traps throughout the Dunn house while ensuring that Sara Dunn and Catherine remained hidden. The booby traps work for the most part, especially injuring Hobbs in his hand due to the open glass at the stairs and the traps set by Lamb. Meanwhile, Sturges manages to locate Sara, who shoots him but misses.

Sara manages to fight back with her injured shoulder and chokes Sturges to death. Hobbs manages to locate Standish and raises his gun to shoot her before he is shot to death by Lamb, who had managed to climb up to the roof and distract Hobbs towards the traps by breaking the window panes until he manages to climb in and shoot him in the head.

A still from Slow Horses Season 3 Finale.

But as for Roddy, he needed to be “Alexander the Great,” and so, like Alexander, he enters with a bang, driving the Dunn marriage bus tour through the house, all to kill the already dead intruders. Lamb is flabbergasted at Roddy’s stupidity, and he, for once, is at a loss for words. Lamb, Catherine, Sara, and Roddy drive away from the almost destroyed house, and they drop Sara off at a hospital to check on her wounds.

Back at the bunker, Shirley again comes to the rescue. She takes Marcus’ car for a spin and uses that to plow through the Chieftain soldiers, killing them and leaving the hatch unprotected for Louisa and River to climb up. Once that’s done, she drops a grenade through the hatch, killing the rest of the Chieftain soldiers. River thanks Shirley for rescuing them and drives off with the document in tow, hoping to leak the contents to the press. Meanwhile, Louisa manages to interrupt the bloody fistfight between Marcus and Duffy, with Duffy almost going to stab Marcus to death until Louisa hits him with a concrete slab, killing him.

As River drives away, he sees a helicopter circling the compound. The helicopter, as it turns out, is the press, and they are reporting the incident, a fallout that isn’t being reported to Tearney by Duffy on account of Duffy currently sleeping with the fish. As Tearney had feared, Taverner had been rescued by Slough House once again, perhaps even without an inkling of their own.

While Jackson drives Catherine and Roddy home, Roddy checks the news, which reports the deaths of 18 people, including Sean Donovan and Ben Dunn. Lamb then confronts Catherine, asking why she had helped her captors, to which she states that the current Tearney-led MI5 doesn’t follow the morals and principles that MI5 under her old boss Charles Partner had.

Clearly, that bothers Lamb, who had been silent over Partner’s crimes throughout these three seasons until now, when he finally had enough. He revealed to her that Partner only kept her around because she was drunk, and that made it easier for him to not only send state secrets to the Russians but also to create a trail of breadcrumbs that would frame Catherine for the crime.

The show strongly implies that while Lamb might be a softie at heart, his anger stems from the fact that Catherine is validating him by referring to Partner’s old observations, which genuinely makes him mad. It also makes Catherine angry and heartbroken, at which point she announces that she is quitting Slough House and starts walking. They had stopped at the petrol pump to fill up the car, and Roddy wondered why she would walk the whole way. Lamb is unperturbed, the mark of a person who has seen too many dejections and betrayals in his life to be completely affected by them one way or another, and just asks Roddy to drive away.

Slow Horses (Season 3) Finale, Episode 6 Ending Explained:

River, to no one’s surprise, takes the document to the one person he trusts implicitly – his grandfather David Cartwright. But Cartwright is an old-school spy, very much dedicated to maintaining the sanctity of the Secret Service and the profession itself. He realizes fully that leaking this document would destroy the legitimacy of the Secret Service and throws it into his fireplace, much to River’s shock. Thankfully it seems River won’t make a catastrophic mistake like last season’s, and as he climbs back into his car, we see that he had made copies of the document.

A couple of days later, we finally get to the meeting between Taverner and Lamb we had missed at the beginning of the season. As she looks on in disgust at Lamb devouring ice cream, she thanks him for leaking the document, to which Lamb corrects her by stating that it was all River’s doing. Either way, Taverner is thankful and very much open to forgiving his transgressions as she has taken over the post of Director-General. Lamb is still in disbelief that she would allow over 18 people to be killed in what is essentially an office-political issue and reminds her that she is the only one responsible for any fuck-ups from MI5. He remarks that he is far happier than Taverner in Slough House, which is ironic considering he is miserable.

Slow Horses (Season 3) stands out as one of those seasons whose change in director feels a deliberate choice in elevation of the production design and action set-pieces far more than the last two seasons. The story itself is very much repeating and doubling down on the commentary of the corporatization of espionage, but, remarkably, the bleakest resolution comes from one of the basic tenets of espionage – lies and secrets, which forces the relationships to be tested and presumably destroyed.