The Greek philosopher Heraclitus said that “no man ever steps in the same river twice.” He clearly never met MI5’s most durable disappointment, Slow Horses’ River Cartwright, who—it appears—is dead in the season 6 finale. But not for the first time. You’ll remember season 4 of the Apple TV series, when his dementia-ravaged grandfather mistook an intruder for River and blew his face off with a shotgun.
River planted his wallet on the body and spent the rest of the episode playing dead. So forgive me if I hold off on the black tie. Then again, killing River off now would be a tidy bit of housekeeping for an actor whose calendar has a famously 00-shaped hole in it.
And, as Heraclitus also held, everything flows towards something else; rivers, as a rule, are always heading somewhere bigger. So River Cartwright’s timely death could open the door for Jack Lowden to, so to speak, die another day in another, not-so-different role. The episode is split into two converging strands: Lamb’s attempt to cut off the head of the snake and the Suffolk holiday-home siege.
To Lamb first: he has Taverner banged to rights, leaving her in a tight corner. To this, he delivers a line that sums up the whole series: “Oh, come off it. The money you took from [Cantor] – it came from the top and it came in rubles.
Now, he’s trying to kill anyone who can prove his connection to this Natasha. The Russians are trying to kill the people they think are responsible for Kazan. And you know who’s in the crosshairs for both?
My fucking joes.” Natasha Carrington, you’ll remember, is the shady Russian go-between who set up the dodgy media meeting between Damian Cantor and some Russian string-pullers. It’s the meeting that would, in her words to Cantor, “land the biggest media deal in Russian history.” It turns out she’s an oligarch’s billionaire daughter with Kremlin ties. Taverner finally admits she’s compromised and that her only option is to come clean and confess to treason.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
