Slow Horses

Cicada Season 2 Episode 4 Editor’s Rating 4 stars ****

Slow Horses

Cicada Season 2 Episode 4 Editor’s Rating 4 stars ****

So … about that meeting with Ilya Nevsky. The good news is, the building seems like a secure — and, with the view, quite lovely — place for a clandestine meeting between the deeply connected Russian oligarch and James “Spider” Webb, despite every second of the preparations throwing up more red flags than date night with Martin Shkreli. The bad news? Nevsky has been found murdered in the most gruesome way imaginable, to the point where getting his thumb severed off seems like a mere throat-clearing for his assassins. (Though it does give Lamb the chance to do his best David Caruso in CSI: Miami: “Maybe they made their getaway by hitching.”)

The cicada metaphor seems apt for this Soviet program, because ever since Dickie Bough made the mistake of recognizing the man who tortured him during the Cold War, the cicadas have been active and numerous and chirping like hell. And with the “Dead Lions” season pushing relentlessly forward toward its final two episodes, the separate plot threads from the beginning are all tangled together now. All that side business about Louisa and Min helping Webb work with Arkady Pashkin’s security goons to set up the meeting is side business no longer, now that it’s been revealed that Min is not only dead, but Andrei Chernitsky, Bough’s killer, delivered the fatal blow. It wasn’t the drunk bike accident it appeared to be, but a murder that had been swiftly and craftily staged to seem otherwise.

In the terrific cold open, Lamb continues to interrogate Rebecca, the driver who reportedly hit Min with her car but was actually on assignment. It doesn’t take much for Lamb to get the fuller picture of what happened to Min at the car park where he’d been keeping his bike. Rebecca’s description of the incident is a credit to Min’s resilience, as he was choked, hit by a car, and finally poisoned as he attempted to crawl away. (A medical examiner would have quite a puzzle to determine the cause of death here.) In the end, Rebecca has a closest view of Chernitsky, who poked Min with presumably the same needle that felled Bough so quietly at the back of the bus. When Rebecca asks Lamb if the agency will keep her safe and give her a new identity, he gives her a phone number and a reference to the number “seven.” It turns out to be the code number for Lamb’s favorite Asian noodle dish.

Roll credits.

“Cicada” is a particularly excellent showcase for Gary Oldman’s sardonic performance as Lamb, which doesn’t shift much as the danger increases around him. He’s a little like Robert Duvall’s surfing Lt. Col. Kilgore in Apocalypse Now!, so thoroughly calloused by the death around him that he believes himself to be invincible. There are times when that hard shell is penetrated, but only when he feels a sense of true disillusionment or an instinct to protect the misfits and outcasts under his watch. Min’s murder doesn’t make him cry — he’s seen too much on the job for that — but he’s intensely bothered by it. And he will stroll calmly into any space to get to the bottom of it. (Don’t ask him to run, though. His heart can’t take it.)

The last episode ended on a cliffhanger. River was posing unconvincingly as a journalist in rural Upshott, taking the pretty bartender Kelly up on her family dinner offer before coming face-to-face with a friend named “Leo,” whom he immediately recognizes as Chernitsky. The question ends up being this: Who knows who about what here? As they chat politely over dinner — Chernitsky seems to relish the thinness of River’s cover story — River seems secure in the thought that Chernitsky and Kelly’s father are co-conspirators and the women are in the dark. But at the family airplane hangar, where River catches Chernitsky with a cache of bomb-making materials, Mom zaps him in the neck with a Taser. The family that flies together spies together, apparently.

Meanwhile, Louisa follows up on her meeting with Pashkin, which was sufficiently pleasant enough not to draw suspicion from him. Louisa surely isn’t buying the official story of Min’s death, so she wants to probe further into Pashkin’s motives, and she uses a bit of sex appeal to do it. Their flirty meeting at the bar finds both of them testing waters a little, but the true effectiveness of the scene is how it’s juxtaposed with Lamb and Shirley’s stakeout on Nevsky’s house, and the developing likelihood that Pashkin, who’d been serving as Nevsky’s ostensible handler, was responsible for his death. Who is Pashkin, really? And what is his connection to the cicadas?

The one perspective we don’t get in this episode is the Park’s, which at this point has more than just egg on its face, but an entire omelet. Slough House is supposed to be the B-team at best, exiled from the mothership where the important spy work is done. But the Nevsky debacle is wholly on them, shepherded by Spider and approved by Taverner, who has continued to bless the project even as it has shown signs of careening off the rails. Keep in mind that Spider’s treachery is the reason he has a spot at Park over River, who was embarrassed by an important training test that Spider deliberately sabotaged. Treachery can be useful in spy craft, but ineptitude isn’t, and Taverner is about to have an awfully big mess at her doorstep.

Which might end up being Lamb’s problem anyway. That’s the Slow Horses formula: If Taverner and the Park really screw something up, they have a natural scapegoat in Slough House, who are eternally the more plausible screwups. Lamb seems to expect it at this point. He still has a job to do.

Shots

• On the plus side, River has a great scoop in the making about what quaint little towns in the English countryside are really like. It’s like Hot Fuzz.

• Roddy remembering poor Min: “He was the only person in the world who had all six Spin Doctors albums”

• More colorful language from Lamb as he notices the six surveillance cameras pointed to the road outside Nevsky’s place and wonders why he and Shirley haven’t been exposed: “We should be having our prostates exfoliated by a couple of callous Russian fingers by now.”

• Yet another quality one-liner from Lamb in an episode loaded with them: “I wouldn’t trust him to tell me the time if we were standing in front of Big Ben.”

Slow Horses Recap: Thumbs-Down