‘Slow Horses’ Showrunner Breaks Down Season 3 Finale

Slow horsesApple TV+’s tongue-in-cheek, flatulent anti-Bond spy series is exactly the show its relatively cult following has grown to love since the day the cast and crew began filming the first episode, says showrunner Will Smith. The British series, which debuted in 2022, follows the crass and disheveled character Jackson Lamb, played by Oscar winner Gary Oldman, as the leader of a team of disgraced and disowned MI5 agents who go about their jobs with slickness and thoroughness. In the season three finale, in what has become a recurring scene on the show, Oldman plays Diana Taverner, the deputy director general of MI5, played by Oscar nominee Kristin Scott Thomas. They dance around each other, revealing the characters’ motivations and ideas as they revisit the actions that brought them to where they’re headed in the upcoming season.

Lamb and Taverner have a relationship of respect and hate based on a long history of working together in the military. Each season ends with a similar scene of their exchange, but Smith wanted to avoid the scene becoming stale. “In seasons one and two, they always met on the bench by the Regent’s Canal. But in the finale, they both meet and the bench is gone. Part of it is because that’s what television is all about, it’s supposed to be the same but different,” he says. “We’re just trying to freshen things up, and I just found it funny.”

After a dramatic season finale filled with shootouts, confrontations and explosions, it was crucial for the show to step back and examine how the characters are affected by everything that happened. “I love the aftermath as much as the action because I want to see how it changed the characters, where they’re going, where it all ended up,” Smith says. “I love every aspect of the show, but what underpins it is the characters. And because we have one of the most phenomenal casts you can put together, I believe everything. I believe every moment of the show.”

Lamb, though a brilliant spy, can be verbally abusive and extremely unpleasant, but Gary Oldman plays him with a heart that grates. This scene comes after an altercation with Catherine Standish (Saskia Reeves), a character he has known for years who has been kidnapped. “We know how important Catherine is to Lamb, and I have my own theories about that, but he just shrugs and hides his pain behind a joke,” Smith says.

“Eating has become part of Lamb’s character. One of the things I remember about that scene is that Gary eats 12…