Noe: This story contains spoilers from “Slow Horses” Season 5, Episode 6.
Will Smith did not write the “Slow Horses” Season 5 finale thinking it would be his goodbye to the fan-favorite Apple TV drama. The Emmy-winning screenwriter, whose departure from the acclaimed espionage thriller was announced in July, says his exit was not something he ever consciously planned.
“It wasn’t a decision. It was a practical acceptance of reality,” Smith told TheWrap. As fans of “Slow Horses” are aware, the Apple original, which is based on author Mick Herron’s Slough House book series, produces new seasons at a rate that is practically unheard of in the current prestige TV streaming era. In just a little over three years, five seasons of “Slow Horses” have run their course.
Sure enough, despite Smith’s departure between seasons, the “Slow Horses” Season 5 finale even ends — in typical fashion for the award-winning spy series — with a trailer for its upcoming sixth season. This pace has resulted in an extremely rewarding, yearly viewing experience for fans. While Smith has overseen “Slow Horses” since the very beginning, though he discovered that he could no longer keep up with its breakneck production schedule.
“As the deadlines for Season 6 approached, it was clear I was never going to be able to get the scripts done, because it’s kind of a juggling act working on this show,” the creator, whose past TV credits include episodes of “Veep” and “The Thick Of It,” recalled. “When we were doing the writers’ room for Season 5, it was at the same time we were editing Season 3 and [shooting] Season 4.”
“As a writer, I’m not in the edit all the time. The director runs the edit, but I do watch cuts. I come in and I’m present for a fair bit of it, and similarly, I try to be on set as much as I can, partly because I love watching it,” Smith elaborated. “Watching those actors work, you get ideas and it all just feeds into itself. It’s absolutely brilliant, but it just hit a point where it was like, ‘I’m not going to be able to do [Season 6]’ and they couldn’t move the schedule around.”
“It was with great sadness on both sides, but I sadly couldn’t keep going,” Smith said. Although he is disappointed he could not stay at the helm of “Slow Horses” for its entire run, the creator is optimistic about the show’s future without him. The series tapped Gabby Chiappe and Ben Vanstone to run Seasons 6 and 7, respectively. “It’s an amazing team. It’s an amazing cast. It’s an amazing production,” he remarked. “It will [keep going], and Mick is still writing amazing books, so it will continue to fly and keep getting better and better.”
Below, Smith breaks down some specific moments from the “Slow Horses” Season 5 finale and explains why it felt “best” to make a clean behind-the-scenes break from the Apple TV series — for both himself and his successors. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
TheWrap: The finale ends with River (Jack Lowden) saving Claude’s (James Callis) life, only for Claude to be humiliated shortly thereafter by Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman). How did that sequence of events narratively come together?
Smith: We were originally going to do a final set piece that didn’t work out and Saul Metzstein, the fabulous director who directed Season 3 and came back for Season 5, was like, “Well, if we can’t do that, what about rather than trying to go bigger than Seasons 4 and 3 with big shootouts, why don’t we just bring it all the way down? What if we just made it three people?” We’d already had scenes of Whelan jogging, so that made him jogging seem natural, and then I decided that I would link Claude to the Libyans.
But this is one of those things that I really like and learned from Armando Iannucci, who I worked with on “The Thick of It” and “Veep,” which is that if you’ve done enough work on the ground level of the story, then things tend to just come up later on that work better. We’ve got these amazing characters. We have this great plot. So once it’s up and running, you just have these moments where you go, “Oh, and then this could happen.” Once it’s on its feet, it all just starts to weave and interlock, and it just felt so great at the end.
It is surprising how central Claude turns out to be to both the Libyan plotline and the Gimball/Slough House plot. It’s an unexpected twist, especially coming off how incompetent he seems in Season 4.
Smith: It’s so satisfying because [Peter] Judd (Samuel West) mentions the Libyans when he’s speaking to [Diana] Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas) [earlier in the season], but it’s like the third thing on the list in that scene, so it’s thrown away. It’s there. You might clock it, but then when it comes back around, you remember it. But you’re probably not carrying it with you, like, “Oh, it’s going to be Libya.” Similarly, with the dictaphone, we set it up that Gimball has a dictaphone. But we kind of play it for laughs at first, and then when he dies, you’re like, “If anyone got this, [the Horses] could be done in for Gimball’s death.” But actually, it’s Whelan’s undoing.
I hope you don’t see that coming, and I’m happy to hear that you like that scene because it was great to end a season in a way that isn’t all shootouts and action. There is the shootout between Whelan, Sami (Ahmed Elmusrati) and River, but then it’s just scenes between Lamb and River, Lamb and Whelan and then Lamb and Taverner. They’re just dialogue scenes, but they’re full of drama, tension and twists, and I’m so happy that it works.
The episode also, of course, ends on that shot of Lamb’s scarred foot, which hits hard once you realize what it means.
Smith: Thank you. That’s the thing you want, to land a moment that big and that final shot is … I just feel so, so lucky and proud that we were able to do that.
When you stood back and actually looked at where this finale leaves things, did it feel in retrospect like a good place for you to have stepped away?
Smith: When we start the series, Taverner is desperate to be First Desk and it’s all about her machinations to try to undermine her boss, and River just wants to get back to the Park. At the end of Season 5, Taverner is First Desk. I’ve gotten her where she wants to be, and River thinks he’s going back to the Park, and I love the fact that the one person he thinks he could call to share the good news with is the one person [Rosalind Eleazar’s Louisa Guy] who’s told him, “I don’t want to hear from you for a while.” So all of that is there at the end, and then there’s that final shot of Lamb’s foot, too. It wasn’t like I put all of that together and thought, “Right, I’m off now.” It was just coincidence, really.
Are you still involved at all in the show?
Smith: No, I thought it was best to just [step completely away]. From my point of view, that’s partly because I’m not very good at bringing a light touch to things. Something like this is all-consuming for me, and I think that you can’t really go from being in something like that in such a deep way, to then just, “I’ll do one day a week now.” It’s like when people try to go part-time three days a week and then they just end up working the whole time.
It doesn’t work, and it’s also not fair to the new people who are taking over to be kind of the ghost in the room sitting over their shoulder. I just feel like, if I was still involved in it, the cast’s instinct would be to come to me and that’s not fair. It was just better to be a clean break and it’s someone else’s now. I can just sit back and watch it as a fan.
Lastly, River talks a lot in the finale about wanting to leave Slough House to go back to the Park. But do you think, deep down, River actually wants to leave Slough House?
Smith: That’s a great question. I’ve spoken to Jack about it, and we’ve sort of wondered, “Would he be there in his 40s? At what point would he realize, ‘This is it. I’m turning into Lamb’?” I think he has more fun at Slough House. I don’t just mean that because of the way that the stories, obviously, have to feature the Slow Horses in whatever incident is occurring in each book and season. What I mean is Lamb’s a more interesting person to work for than the kind of people at the Park, than Whelan certainly, and Taverner is not ever going to take River under her wing and let him in. And he’s never going to trust her! I just think with Lamb, it’s the stuff River actually loves. He loves the Cold War and those old spy stories.
He knows Lamb has a connection to his grandfather and wants to know more because that’s the era of espionage River idealizes and fixates on so much. He hates it and he loves it, and he’s drawn to Lamb. He’s fascinated by him. Remember, in Season 1 he says to his grandfather, “Was he ever really good? I can’t imagine it,” and now I think he can. He says in Season 4, “He can be pretty annoying, but he can be hard to beat,” and when Lamb is trying to persuade Devon (Cherrelle Skeete) to call the Park in this season, River tells her, “Just let him make the call! He wouldn’t get up from behind the desk if it wasn’t important.” He knows now that, if Lamb ever stands up, something bad’s happening, because usually he just wants to stay with his feet up, drinking, smoking and farting. [Laughs]
“Slow Horses” Seasons 1-5 are now streaming on Apple TV.
