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So, We're Supposed to Worry About Gary Oldman Now?Let me get this straight. The big narra... So, We're Supposed to Worry About Gary Oldman Now?
Let me get this straight. The big narrative hook for the new season of Slow Horses is that Catherine Standish is… worried about Jackson Lamb? That’s it? That’s the dramatic tension we’re supposed to buy into?
We’re talking about the character played by Gary Oldman.
I had to read that twice to make sure I wasn’t having a stroke. We’re supposed to spend Season 5 wringing our hands over the well-being of a character inhabited by the guy who has made a six-decade career out of being the most terrifying, resilient, or just plain unkillable person in any given room. Give me a break.
This is the man who was Dracula. Not one of the sparkly, sad-boy vampires, but the Dracula, the ancient evil. He was the corrupt, screaming DEA agent in The Professional who slaughtered a family over a drug deal and famously declared his love for "EVERYONE!" before getting blown to bits. He was the galactic-level industrialist-slash-maniac Zorg in The Fifth Element, a character who didn't even flinch when his own alien mercenaries were vaporized in front of him.
And now, I'm supposed to believe his biggest threat is a bad cough and someone else’s concern.
Look, I get it. Slow Horses is good. It’s a great show. The headlines tell me so. "Continues to wow critics," they say. An "impressive Rotten Tomatoes streak." Fantastic. I’m happy for them, I really am. But this just feels… lazy. It’s the kind of plot point a writer’s room comes up with when the coffee runs out and the deadline is looming. "What do we do this season?" "I dunno, maybe everyone worries about the main guy?"
This is Jackson Lamb we're talking about. A man who functions on a diet of whiskey, cigarettes, and pure spite. A man whose personal hygiene is a biological weapon. He’s a Cold War ghost who has outlived and outsmarted enemies from Moscow to Whitehall. His superpower isn't spycraft; it’s that he simply refuses to die, mostly to annoy everyone around him. And now the central drama is that his colleague is fretting over him? It’s like making a Jaws sequel where the shark gets a head cold and the whole town of Amity has to make it chicken soup. It completely misunderstands the entire point of the character.
The man has been everyone. He was a wizard, for god's sake. As `Sirius Black` in the `Harry Potter` movies, he survived twelve years in Azkaban, a place that literally sucks the soul out of you. He was Jim Gordon in `The Dark Knight`, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Batman against the Joker. He was Winston Churchill, for crying out loud, facing down the entire Nazi war machine. He's been Lee Harvey Oswald. He's been Sid Vicious. The `gary oldman movies and tv shows` list isn't a filmography; it's a catalog of survivors, monsters, and historical titans.
And the show wants me to be on the edge of my seat because Catherine Standish thinks he looks a bit peaky? This is a bad creative choice. No, 'bad' doesn't cover it—this is a five-alarm dumpster fire of an idea that fundamentally misunderstands its own appeal. The whole joy of Jackson Lamb is that he is an unstoppable force of nature, a greasy, flatulent, brilliant wrecking ball. He doesn’t need your sympathy. He would be disgusted by it.
Offcourse, the critics will love it. They’ll write ten-thousand-word essays on the "vulnerability" and "subtle pathos" of it all. They'll praise the "daring deconstruction" of the anti-hero archetype. It’s so predictable. It's the same praise cycle we see for every prestige show that runs long enough to start navel-gazing. It's like they have a template. It's probably why I cancelled half my streaming subscriptions last year; I'm just tired of paying to be served the same warmed-over "prestige" tropes again and again.
The problem is that the entire media landscape is desperate for consensus. A high Rotten Tomatoes score becomes the news itself. The quality of the show is secondary to the fact that everyone agrees on the quality of the show. So a plot point this weak gets a pass, because the brand is too strong to question. Slow Horses is "good," therefore everything it does must also be "good." And if you disagree, well, you just don't get it.
Then again, maybe I’m the crazy one here. Maybe there’s a huge audience of people who have been desperate to see the human equivalent of a cornered badger finally get taken to the vet. Maybe people look at `Gary Oldman`—the man who has chewed scenery, spit fire, and defined cinematic intensity for a generation—and think, "You know what he needs? A nice cup of tea and a blanket."
But I doubt it. The appeal of `Slow Horses` and Jackson Lamb is the grit, the cynicism, the sheer, unadulterated mess of it all. It’s a story about broken people in a broken system doing a dirty job. Trying to sand down the sharpest edge of that premise by making its central monster an object of pity just feels... dishonest. It feels like a show losing its nerve, and honestly...
I just don't buy it.
It's a Betrayal of the Character
Look, let’s be real. This isn't "character development." It's a failure of imagination. Turning Jackson Lamb into someone to be worried over is the least interesting thing you could possibly do with him. He’s a shark. You don’t worry about the shark. You worry about the people in the water. The second you forget that, the whole story falls apart.
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