Checkmate to Claude Whelan, ‘Slow Horses’s Finest Failure

Spoilers ahead for “Scars,” the season-five finale of Slow Horses.

Claude Whelan never stood a chance. I think he knows that now. I think he always knew it a little, probably, even as the rest of his brain tried to convince him he could manage a group of spies and analysts the same way one would manage a summer-internship program. He got the job as MI5’s director-general only because the people who put him there wanted a stuffed-shirt bureaucrat to color inside the lines a little more or at least not get caught scribbling off the side of the page. He wasn’t sneaky and thought he was clever, and in the world of spycraft, those two things leave you as vulnerable as a poodle in a shark tank. And now he’s gone, probably, pressured into a resignation after overplaying his hand one too many times. I’ll miss him if we never see him again. He was an ineffective leader who got in the way of important intelligence work and almost got thousands of people killed because he thinks of himself as one of King Arthur’s greatest knights, but man, it sure is fun to watch him squirm.

Slow Horses is great at giving us guys like this, higher-ups whose eventual doom is obvious from the moment they appear on the screen. Detestable weasels, focused on their career and personal advancement above all else, usually in a way that makes them feel like more of a villain than the terrorists and traitors they are supposed to be hunting. The best example of this, of course, was James “Spider” Webb, a weasel so detestable that he got punched to death in a parking garage and large swaths of the audience — including many good, kind people who donate to charity and are nice to dogs — reacted by whispering “yessssss.”

Spider’s death in season three did create a vacuum, though. An audience used to having a cretin to groan at would need a new target. It wasn’t going to be one of the Slow Horses, not even River Cartwright, who somehow continues to be enough of a sweetheart to offset his mixture of incompetence and bravado. It wasn’t going to be Diana Taverner, either, mostly because she needs to be the one in the Park to sigh and roll her eyes at whoever it is that’s getting in her way before helping dispose of them. No, the show needed a new target for everyone’s frustration.

Enter Claude Whelan, played by James Callis, a fine actor with a face that can contort itself into about a dozen different versions of misery and pathetic dismay. That’s what made Claude so fun to root against, really. Where Spider masked his incompetence with bravado and abrasiveness, Claude put up a thin layer of smugness that collapsed when faced with even a tiny amount of resistance. Sometimes he would sit there watching one of his brilliant plans fall apart and get this expression on his face that … okay, you know how some people get that face where it looks like they just threw up a little or are about to? Claude’s face in these scenarios was kind of like someone who hadn’t even started making that face yet but knew it was coming and was already dreading it. Someone who had made it a lot in his life.

Photo: Apple TV+

You can see how it happened, too. This man just could not stop getting extorted, which is not ideal for anyone but is especially unpleasant for the head of MI5. Everyone got in on it, too. It started in season four with the office administrator named Moira, whom he had banished to Slough House and who managed to finagle her old job back after uncovering his affinity for escorts. (Code name “Galahad,” obviously.) It continued this season with outdoor ambushes by private investigators who, well, also knew about the affinity for escorts, and who were working for a nationalist mayoral candidate and his even more nationalist newspaper-columnist wife. The following things then happened:

(1) Claude, in an attempt to save his job and/or behind, dug up embarrassing information about the mayoral candidate and presented it to the couple in a kind of reverse-double extortion, which represented the first and only savvy thing he did in his capacity as the head of a spy agency.

(2) The candidate ended up dead in an alley after getting bonked on the head by a falling paint can while the Slow Horses were attempting to prevent an assassination attempt that was not going to happen.

Also, in the middle of all of this, he released a female suspect whom he had assumed was pressured into working with a Libyan terrorist group, at which point he learned, after she had played him and strutted away like Keyser Soze, that she had seen his file and knew he was a sucker for a vulnerable woman. Classic Claude.

This all led to the confrontation at the end of the season, where a once-again smug Claude assumed he had outmaneuvered everyone and was free to throw around a little power … only to discover he had been outflanked by Jackson Lamb, who was — you guessed it — extorting him again, this time with audio of Claude confronting the candidate who later ended up mysteriously dead and covered in paint. It is very Jackson Lamb to acquire devastating information about an enemy, the kind of thing you could hold over someone’s head for years of collecting favors, and instead use it to be left alone.

The thing that makes Slow Horses work so well — in addition to the action and pacing and farting — is that everyone on this show is incompetent in their own special little way. But Claude’s personal brand of incompetence in season five has resulted in what might be my favorite character arc of the whole thing so far. It might be my favorite performance, too. I found myself getting a little sad after the finale, actually, knowing Claude wouldn’t be there for everyone to push him around anymore. But then I realized something …

Guys like Claude never really fail. They just move on to other things, usually in the private sector, usually making many multiples of their previous salary. That’s what happened to Spider, too, before the punching. And it means we could be headed toward a scenario in which a newly enriched Claude is throwing his weight around in the private-security business. Really feeling himself: big office, nice suits, showing up every now and then to try to taunt his old co-workers. My hope is that this happens on-camera next season, just so I can see Diana and Jackson continue to poke at him like cats with a pompous ball of yarn. But even if we never see him again, it’s nice to imagine he’ll still be out there, bumbling his way into sticky situations, looking like he’s familiar with the taste of his own vomit, and getting extorted by every single person he meets. Maybe River Cartwright will try to extort him someday. That would be fun. I suspect it would end up with both characters somehow extorting themselves.