Season 3 of Slow Horses Premieres on Apple TV+

Season 3 of Slow Horses premieres Wednesday, November 29 on Apple TV+.

AppleTV+’s faithful adaptation of Mick Herron’s acclaimed Slough House thriller series continues to deliver some of the best espionage stories on television by focusing on terrible spies. Based on Herron’s third novel, Real Tigers, season 3 of Slow Horses offers the same mix of wry humor, intrigue, action, and tight ensemble storytelling as its predecessors.

Spy media often focuses on gorgeous heroes spending their time in some of the most striking locations around the world. Slow Horses stands out by wallowing in shabbiness. Its king of despair is Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman), a flabby, unwashed, alcoholic spymaster seemingly able to fart on command. The clean modernity of MI5’s Regent’s Park headquarters is sharply contrasted by the decrepit Slough House offices, which are made to feel even more claustrophobic this season by their use as storage space for useless old files. It’s a neat bit of symbolism that sets up the main plot, as Slough House serves as a repository for all the things MI5 would like to bury but can’t quite officially get rid of.

So many shows or miniseries with six-episode seasons fail at pacing, holding back too much mystery in the early episodes and then leaving the back half feeling rushed and underdeveloped. Slow Horses uses all of its time to the fullest, whether seeding clues about the mystery the denizens of Slough House will have to ineptly solve or spending time establishing the excellent supporting cast of endearing and infuriating losers.

For instance, the premiere, “Strange Games,” continues to add depth to Catherine Standish (Saskia Reeves), the Slough House office manager perpetually trying to get the rest of her team to take their intentionally mind-numbing jobs seriously. Standish is introduced this season chiding River Cartwright (Jack Lowden) – a seemingly promising agent who landed in Slough House through treachery – right before his negligence leads to him spilling a box of files all over the stairs. It’s a quick scene that perfectly encapsulates both River’s hubris and Standish’s role as the most responsible member of the group.

It’s a dynamic that also neatly sets up the stakes when Standish is kidnapped, leaving Lamb and his agents to try to figure out why. Reeves delivers an excellent, reserved performance as a woman who’s spent a long career operating in the background of the intelligence game – and picked up a few tricks of the trade along the way. She uses this knowledge to gain advantages over her captors, though she’s also forced to confront the ways her idealized vision of British espionage squares with the dark secrets those above her have killed to cover up.

Despite being constantly berated by Lamb, everyone in Slough House dreams of redemption. An attack on one of their own inspires the dysfunctional team to do their best to put aside their individual vices and come to Standish’s aid. Lamb’s a burnout, not a failure, and he continues to morph into an incredibly formidable force when pushed to care about something. Oldman unsurprisingly owns every scene he’s in, with most of Lamb’s clever moves ending with him mocking his employees – and through them, the audience – for not being able to put the pieces together sooner.

The show also does great work as a sort of dark workplace comedy. Still reeling from the death of her partner Min Harper (Dustin Demri-Burns) in season 2, Louisa Guy (Rosalind Eleazar) has been numbing herself with drinking and casual sex. River’s attempts to offer some sympathy and acknowledge her trauma is both sweet and beautifully awkward.

Another scene in the premiere devoted to developing characters without wasting a minute comes in the form of a night out that gambling addict Marcus Longridge (Kadiff Kirwan) is forced to attend because he’s being blackmailed by narcissist hacker Roddy Ho (Christopher Chung). Chung does such a phenomenal job with Ho’s smug smirks that it’s immensely satisfying to watch his hot-headed colleague Shirley Dander (Aimee-Ffion Edwards) punch him for getting out of line.

The underdogs get embroiled in a series of misadventures with increasingly dire consequences as they’re entangled in the internal competition between regal MI5 leaders Diana Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas) and Ingrid Tearney (Sophie Okonedo) and the political ambitions of Home Secretary Peter Judd (Samuel West). Season 3 improves on Real Tigers by further integrating River’s sleazy frenemy James “Spider” Webb (Freddie Fox) and adding extra layers to Standish’s kidnappers.

Dialogue is the core of Slow Horses, which can get a bit over-the-top in moments where master spies share glasses of Scotch and lay out their schemes as they wait to see how they will turn out. But the action is also high quality, with chase scenes, shootouts, and a siege reminiscent of Skyfall all blending emotional stakes and comedy to deliver tense drama punctuated with laughs. Slow Horses breaks down the hypercompetent spy archetype, but it’s a satire that comes from an affection for the genre and its tropes. It’s a fair-play mystery that delivers plenty of surprises, with characters that become even more endearing under Lamb’s withering contempt.