‘Slow Horses’ Team Breaks Down [Spoiler]’s Death & Claude’s ‘Moment’

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Slow Horses Season 5 Episode 4, “Missiles.”]

“We were all rubbing our hands at that,” executive producer Will Smith tells TV Insider of the death from Mick Herron’s book on which Slow Horses Season 5 is based (London Rules) that plays out onscreen in Episode 5.

By this point, they’re all in agreement that the antagonists are using MI5’s own destabilization strategy in their plans, and next: assassinate a populous leader. That brings the action directly to the mayoral campaigns of Jaffrey (Nick Mohammed) and Gimball (Christopher Villiers). While River (Jack Lowden) and Coe (Tom Brooke) head to an event at which Gimball is speaking, Shirley (Aimee-Ffion Edwards) and Standish ( Saskia Reeves) stake out Jaffrey’s. Shirley is the one to find the man about to shoot the candidate on stage, and she and Standish manage to thwart that. But it’s at Gimball’s rally that a murder — completely accidental! — occurs.

After River breaks up a fight between Jaffrey’s manager and Gimball in the alley, Coe, getting a better vantage point from up high on scaffolding, sets off a series of events as he makes his way down. That all leads to a paint bucket falling on Gimball’s head, killing him and splashing pink paint on River. What’s worse: Gimball had his recorder on. And yes, when they play it back, they hear River’s “He really is dead, isn’t he?”

Smith and director Saul Metzstein loved bringing that moment to the screen.

“To me, that’s like the bus moment in Series 3 where you think that could only happen in his books and in our show, and it’s so out of nowhere — I hope you didn’t see it coming,” Smith tells TV Insider.  “The person they think is the target is not the target, but they kill him and the person they don’t think is the target is where the assassin turns up. It is just a wonderful kind of espionage farce almost. I love Tom Brooke and Jack Lowden together. They were just so funny and their energies are so great and just the way they play that afterwards, just as they slowly realize, I mean, it’s obvious that it’s bad, but you can see them sort of processing, ‘Oh no, it’s really bad.’”

For Metzstein, it was about finding the right locations for each rally. “Jaffrey’s rally is the city hall in London, and [Gimball’s] is a place where you always have sort of marches and where communist parties meet and things like that in a sort of way that you think, does that still exist? And it sort of does. So it’s a much more down-to-earth version of London, but these two Londons exist at the same time,” he explains.

When it came to Gimball’s death, “In retrospect, it should be unbelievably obvious what’s going to happen,” says Metzstein. “It’s such a great bit of script, the Slow Horses cause the thing they’re there to prevent. You couldn’t be more Slow Horses than that.”

That recorder of Gimball’s is certainly a problem for multiple characters now. Yes, it has the moments of and after his death on it, but it also has First Desk Claude Whelan (James Callis) going to the mayoral candidate and his wife, columnist Dodie (Victoria Hamilton) who was planning to write a scandalous story about him, and detailing what he knows about each they wouldn’t want getting out. He leaves their house thinking he has the upper hand, that he’s squashed the article, not realizing his blackmail has been recorded.

Apple TV

“That’s the problem when one goes rogue,” says Callis. “He is not James Bond, evidently, and I remember reading the scripts with Will Smith and I’m like, ‘Surely as a spy, the first thing you’d think about is, am I being recorded?’ Will was like, ‘Yeah, but you are not, so there it is.’ I was like, ‘Is there a way that actually…’” At that stage, he explains, he hadn’t realized the recorder would come into play again, as it does just at the end of the episode.

“The dressing down of the Gimballs is what Claude believes is kind of life-altering. It’s not really about the Gimballs, it’s about all the other people as well who’ve ever [pushed him aside],” Callis explains. “It’s like, ‘Oh, Diana Taverner [Kristin Scott Thomas], you think you are a great strategist, you think you’re so… Well, look what I just flipped and nobody will know, that’s even more brilliant. I’ve done this whole thing and I’ve sewn it all up perfectly and that’s what a real spy is about. You don’t know.’ And so he has his moment, and I think we know surely as an audience as well, if it looks like he’s on the up, something is bound to be afoot.”

Slow Horses, Wednesdays, Apple TV