SPOILER ALERT: The following article contains plot details from “Judgement Day,” the Season 6 finale of “Slow Horses,” now streaming on Apple TV. Those two fateful words announced Olivia Cooke’s return to “Slow Horses” after a four-season absence from the Apple TV spy drama. Cooke’s MI5 agent Sidonie Baker made a brief but memorable appearance in Season 1, forging a flirty chemistry with inept spy River Cartwright (Jack Lowden) before dying from a gunshot wound to the head — or so River thinks.
Sid’s resurrection wasn’t a total surprise to “Slow Horses” fans: the character comes back in author Mick Herron’s namesake novels, and Apple made little secret of her storyline in the advance promotion for Season 6, which concluded this week. But enough has changed since Cooke’s first stint on the show to make her re-joining the ensemble an event in itself. First, “Slow Horses” itself grew into a hit, with a raft of Emmy nominations (plus a few wins) and an avid audience to show for it; meanwhile, Cooke’s own career has taken off thanks to a leading role in the fantasy epic “House of the Dragon.” That star power is on full display throughout Season 6, which sees Sid and River on the run from Russian sleeper agents over one incredibly stressful night.
Icy MI5 head Diana Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas) — who once planted her favored mentee Sid in Slough House, a kind of purgatory for screwup agents, as her eyes and ears — used Sid’s identity as a cover for an off-the-books assassination on Russian soil, and now the Kremlin is out for revenge. All of the Slow Horses (a not-so-affectionate nickname for Slough House employees), past and present, are targeted, and Sid goes to River for help. The pair’s winding route from River’s late grandfather’s country house to Diana’s beach retreat, which Slough House head Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman) cheekily appropriates as a safe house, is a winding one.
Sid and River barrel through a barn, an arcade, and finally an airstrip where Sid is nearly shipped off to Russia as an unwilling sacrifice on their way to a long-awaited first kiss. This being “Slow Horses,” though, their triumph is short-lived: River helps Sid escape and nearly reunites with her at his grandfather’s house, but collapses from an apparent poisoning in the kitchen while she showers upstairs in the season’s final moments. Speaking with Variety from the U.K., the actor shared what it’s been like to dive back into the deep end with over a month of night shoots, from an unlikely injury to her collaboration with Lowden.
We shot [Season 1] towards the end of 2020. It was one of the first projects back after lockdown. I don’t know if the book had come out yet where I make my return, but there were whispers of it.
It was such an uncertain time, and it was the first series as well. It just felt, like, an eon away. Who would have thought it would have gone on for so long?
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