Before we get started, let me just say that I love Slow Horses to pieces and have loved every season so far, even though I found Season 5 a bit weaker and goofier than the rest. So far, Season 6 has been quite good also but last week’s episode has me a bit concerned.

As you may or may not know, showrunner Will Smith exited the series after Season 5 and was replaced by Gaby Chiappe. Smith was one of the main writers on the show as well. His tenure on the series was almost spotless and it remains one of the best-written, best-plotted spy shows ever made (with only the minor hiccup from time to time).

But Season 6, Episode 3 had one sequence that I’ve been thinking about ever since it aired that has me, quite frankly, a little bit concerned . Could Slow Horses , that most reliable of TV shows, be losing the plot? Or, rather, could the remarkable attention to detail and realism that defined the first few seasons be slipping?

I’m speaking of the segment in which River (Jack Lowden) and Sid (Olivia Cooke) escape the two Russian assassins, Jim (Kyle Soller) and Jane (MyAnna Buring). They hide out in a barn filled with cattle before running off into the night.

At this point, they walk down the middle of the road and the bad guys easily find them simply by also driving down the road. It seems like a rookie mistake to not stick to the countryside or find some other, less obvious route.

After another narrow escape, they make their way to an old woman’s house, where the bad guys track them down again. They escape again, thanks to River’s quick thinking, and are once again headed down the middle of the road when, as luck would have it, Coe (Tom Brooke) shows up and gives them a lift, gallantly offering Sid the front seat.

The bad guys then track them down once more, quite a bit later, as they look for a phone to use.

This could mean one of two things. In the best possible scenario, Jim and Jane have some kind of tracking device planted on Sid, allowing them to track them down in seemingly magical ways. Even in that scenario, we have to deal with the fact that our heroes, veterans of however many clandestine ops, walked casually down the road on more than one occasion while fleeing deadly killers.

In the worst possible scenario, Jim and Jane just managed to track them down over and over again by sheer coincidence and luck, which feels somewhat lazy to me. I suppose we’ll find out more in the second half of the season.

The only other thing that worries me about Season 6 is the fact that it’s based on two novels rather than one. Combining two full novels into six episodes might mean that certain elements are rushed and that attention to detail and realism – like trained spies not walking down the middle of the road when evading the enemy – are not as prioritized.

Of course, the writing and characters are still loads of fun, and I’m pretty forgiving of a few minor snafus. Hopefully that’s all they are.

You can watch my video discussion of last week’s episode below:

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