Slow Horses Season 2: Jack Lowden Says Lamb Wants River to Screw Up

Despite the heroism and quick thinking shown by disgraced MI5 agent River Cartwright (Jack Lowden) in Season 1 of “Slow Horses,” he’s back at Slough House under the disapproving eye of boss Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman). And, Lowden told TheWrap, Lamb still doesn’t have that much faith in River as “Slow Horses” returns for Season 2 to Apple TV+.

“It doesn’t matter what they do. They’ve got to do something really special to get back to where they want to be, I think,” said Lowden of his fellow “horses,” who include Catherine Standish (Saskia Reeves), Louisa Guy (Rosalind Eleazar), Min Harper (Dustin Demri-Burns), and tech whiz Roddy Ho (Christopher Chung).

As it turns out, saving a high-profile kidnap victim from decapitation wasn’t quite enough to get them reinstated with MI5.

“And also, do we [the audience] want them to [leave Slough House]? I mean, I do, I want River to be back exactly where he should be,” said Lowden. “But I think it’s gonna take a while.”

Would Lamb miss River if he left? Replies Lowden, “I don’t think he would miss him at all. But, I think over time, he would miss having someone that’s actually very, very competent, that he can completely grind down again and again and again. I think if his workplace is filled with people that are completely useless, he’d find that quite boring. So I think he would eventually miss him. But Lamb would never admit that.”

Meanwhile, after former agent Richard ‘Dickie’ Bough is found dead on a bus, River’s investigation has him on the trail of “cicadas,” supposedly fictitious Russian sleeper agents who now seem very plausible.

Lowden teases that in the second season, which sees new Slow Horses, including Aimee-Ffion Edwards’ Shirley, join the team, “the stakes are a lot higher. And we get to see some of them out in the field a bit more.”

The first two episodes of “Slow Horses” Season 2 are now streaming on Apple TV+. New episodes drop each Friday.