Note: This story contains spoilers from “Slow Horses” Season 5, Episode 6.
“Slow Horses” creator Will Smith says Slough House head Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman) is a “walking backstory.” In the “Slow Horses” Season 5 finale, aptly titled “Scars,” viewers learn exactly what he means by that.
The episode’s climactic scene sees Lamb go head-to-head with MI5 head Claude Whelan (James Callis) at his Slough House office. There, Whelan informs Lamb he intends to shut Slough House down and pin all of the season’s terrorist attacks on the organization. The only one who will get to remain in the service will be River (Jack Lowden), as a reward for saving Whelan’s life. “Checkmate, mate,” Claude tells Jackson, before informing him that an MI5 team will arrive later in the day to “clean” Slough House up (and out).
It looks, for a moment, like Lamb has been cornered. That is, at least, until he pulls from his coat pocket the dictaphone that formerly belonged to the late Dennis Gimball (Christopher Villiers), which was given to Lamb by River and JK Coe (Tom Brooke) in the wake of their role in Gimball’s death. Lamb plays the recording Gimball captured with his dictaphone of Whelan’s meeting with the far-right politician and his wife Dodie (Victoria Hamilton) just hours before his untimely death. “That was you threatening a political figure hours before he was killed,” Lamb explains to the confused, panicking Whelan.
As Claude asks him what he wants in return for keeping the recording secret, Lamb replies, “I want what I always want: to be left in utter f—king peace.” He demands that Slough House be left alone, Roddy Ho (Christopher Chung) be reinstated and that Claude himself take the fall for the Libyans’ attacks. “If you’re not out of your office within the hour, I’m going to send this to every grubby little hack I know from my drinking days,” Lamb warns. When Claude argues that the tape’s release would do “untold damage” to the service’s reputation, Lamb responds, “Like I give a f—k. Look what the service has done to me.”
In the next scene, Lamb is shown taping up a hole in one of his socks. While he has a banter-filled phone call with Diana Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas), who is in the midst of moving into Claude’s now-vacant office, director Saul Metzstein slowly pans out to show viewers the horrendously scarred, calloused bottom of Lamb’s bare foot. It is a shocking image for “Slow Horses” Season 5 to end on, and one that forces viewers to reconsider a key scene from earlier in the season.
Look what the service has done to me
In “Slow Horses” Season 5, Episode 3, Oldman’s Lamb tells a detailed, horrifying story about one of “his joes,” who was allegedly captured by the Stasi in Berlin in the 1980s and was tortured for days on end by captors who were in search of a name he did not even have. The Stasi used makeshift blowtorches to burn off the soles of the man’s feet and beat a local German woman he loved, who was pregnant with their unborn child, to death with a fire extinguisher in front of him. It’s a tragic story, but the details throughout it give the Slow Horses enough inspiration to stage a daring breakout from their MI5-imposed lockdown.
Afterward, Catherine Standish (Saskia Reeves) asks Lamb if the “joe” he mentioned in his story was actually him. Lamb tells her he made the whole thing up, but one look at his scarred foot in the “Slow Horses” Season 5 finale proves otherwise. Whether everything he said in that story actually happened to him or not is unclear, but we know that at least some of it was true — and that it did happen to Lamb.
According to Smith, that last shot of Lamb’s foot — and the confirmation it provides about his tortured past — was not part of his original plan for the “Slow Horses” Season 5 finale. The idea to “open the door” to this other side of Lamb’s life did not actually come from him or any of the other “Slow Horses” writers, but Oldman’s wife, Gisele Schmidt.
“I’m pretty sure it was Gary’s wife, Giselle, who was later like, ‘Hey, what if we saw his foot at the end and he was scarred?’” Smith recalled. “Me and Gary were immediately like, ‘Oh my God, that’s amazing.’” The show’s creative team then spent a while thinking about how they wanted to pull off the final reveal. Among the options they considered was a scene of Standish seeing Lamb’s scars through a hole in his sock, accompanied by a final shot of Lamb opening his eyes as Standish walked away in a twist that was meant to let the audience know that “Lamb knows she knows.”
“Ultimately, we came down to the decision that just the audience knows and that it would be the last moment, so you’re left thinking, ‘Oh my God, did that—? Did I just see that? What does that mean!?!’” Smith explained. “We shot it one way where Gary’s foot was kind of across his leg, but it just didn’t quite hit the way we wanted. [Director] Saul [Metzstein] then had this great idea of that slow drifting shot down to his foot.”
“He’s on the phone with Taverner, so you’re sort of not sure at first why the camera is moving to his foot. You’re thinking about how Taverner is First Desk again and she looks happier than we’ve ever seen her. River thinks he’s going back to the Park, even though we know that Lamb has just nixed that,” Smith said. “All that is going on, and you’re just thinking the whole time, ‘Ok, so they’re wrapping it up, just wrapping it up,’ and then it’s [smacks hands], ‘Oh, my God,’ again.”
“We open the door to this other side of Lamb and then we immediately shut it,” Smith observed, noting that the reveal still leaves some ambiguity for viewers to parse through themselves. “You might think all of that story [Lamb told] could actually be true or none of it could be true, but what is true is that something very bad happened to him. The rest is to be unpacked at [our] leisure.”
A walking backstory
For Smith, who passed the lead reigns for “Slow Horses” over to Gabby Chiappe and Ben Vanstone for Seasons 6 and 7, respectively, writing Lamb has been a tricky balancing act between hinting at the character’s traumatic past and letting his present day actions speak for themselves. “The amazing thing about the character is that you’re meeting him at the end of his arc,” Smith said. He remembered a conversation he had early on with Oldman, in which he asked the actor, “You realize that there is no arc here, right? The arc’s all behind you. Are you OK with that?” Oldman said he was, and Smith explained why.
“The character reveals his arc in little, micro-expressions, partly, of course, in the whole way he carries himself. You look at the character and you go, ‘What happened to you?’” the “Slow Horses” creator remarked. He likened the effect of the character’s physical presentation to the structure of “True Detective” Season 1, which left viewers to wonder what happened to Matthew McConaughey’s Rust Cohle between its past and present timelines.
“It’s a similar thing with Lamb, where you look at him and go, ‘People don’t normally look and act like this unless they’re very unhappy. So what made you unhappy?’ On a basic level, he’s a walking backstory that you want to unpack,” Smith elaborated. The final scene of “Slow Horses” Season 5, in which viewers get their clearest idea yet of the exact traumas Lamb is carrying with him, gave Smith the rare chance to offer viewers a peek behind the character’s self-drawn curtain.
“I’m so proud of that moment and the way it came about, so organically and with such an open collaboration,” Smith confessed. “Hopefully, fingers crossed, it feels like a really explosive moment for the audience, too.”
“Slow Horses” Seasons 1-5 are streaming now on Apple TV.
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