Slow Horses season 4 steadily approaches a blockbuster ending, now that personal secrets and desperate acts from the past have been revealed in this week’s episode 5. The penultimate episode deals with the main antagonist, Frank Harkness, moving forward with a horrific plan of his, which puts a lot of lives at risk, despite not being another terrorist attack. On the other side, Jackson Lamb and Catherine Standish learn of the real truth behind the existence of MI5 cold bodies as a scared and nervous David Cartwright finally opens up about the matter.
Spoiler Alert
What Does Frank Harkness Want from Molly Doran?
Slow Horses season 4 episode 5 begins with focus on Molly Doran, as the records keeper from the MI5 headquarters at the Park takes a bus home from her job. Despite having lost one leg and being restricted to the use of a wheelchair for the rest of her life, Molly’s personality is strongly marked by self-reliance and a characteristic hatred against most MI5 agents and officers. Therefore, she is all by herself on her regular route, but as she returns to her apartment, Molly is seemingly cautious about something, as she keeps looking up to the ceilings in the different rooms. Perhaps being an employee of the MI5 with access to every important document of the agency has taught Molly to always check for anything suspicious in her apartment at all times, and this is probably just a routine check. But at this very time, the ringing of her bell stops Molly’s activity, and she comes to the door to see who is visiting her.
As soon as Molly opens the door a bit, it is clear that she is in trouble, as a figure of a man is seen, and he tells her that he is here to check some supposed leak. Molly states that there is no such problem in her apartment, and it is evident that she knows that the man has some very different intentions. After all, the man is Frank Harkness himself, and with no actual effort put in to pretend like the plumber, he is simply just toying around with her. Frank asks to check on the matter nonetheless, and when he is asked for any sort of identification, he just flashes the gun tucked on his waist. Therefore, Molly cannot prevent him from forcefully entering her apartment, and she now becomes a hostage in the situation, for Frank is here specifically for her. The scenes that followed Molly getting down from the bus and traveling the distance from the bus stop to her apartment were actually ones seen by Frank himself as he waited for her return.
Frank Harkness introduces himself by his original name before claiming to be a certain Mitch Philpott as well, saying that Molly might recognize him by this name. Philpott, an ex-agent who worked in the MI5, had actually died a couple of years earlier, but Molly did not know of it. Therefore, when Frank messaged her over the internet a few weeks ago and pretended to be Mitch Philpott, she did not realize that she was speaking to an imposter. The very topic of discussion during these online conversations were about the good old days and the common contacts that they had, all of which made Molly rather happy as she reminisced about the past. However, Frank had the intention of getting the private addresses of David Cartwright and Sam Chapman, because of which he pretended to be Philpott and stated that he wanted to get in touch with his old friends. Without really thinking much about it, Molly gave him the addresses of the two ex-agents, meaning it was technically she who helped Frank track down his targets.
At this point, Molly tries to scare Frank by saying that agents from the Park office will soon rush to her apartment after they realize that she has been missing for an hour, but her bluff falls flat in front of the man. Frank states that the very reason behind him choosing Molly for his plan was the fact that she had pushed away every colleague of hers and literally isolated herself in the archives. Therefore, nobody would even notice if the archives keeper was missing for hours, and hence, there was literally no danger in holding her hostage. Frank had already used Molly to track down the residential addresses of David Cartwright and Sam Chapman, and now he makes one more demand of her. He wants her fingerprint and the security codes to log into the MI5 surveillance system, for his plan at the moment is to track down a convoy of cars carrying River inside. Using the footage from the camera that was planted near David’s house, Frank is able to see River getting caught by the Dogs’ Emma Flyte and being dragged into a car.
Although Molly tries to prevent Frank from using her to do any more harm to people, he now takes over the situation in a very violent way. Frank pulls out a knife and threatens to cut off her fingers and even her remaining healthy leg, ensuring that she quietly gives up the codes and her fingerprint for him to start tracking the convoy. Some time later, the assassin he had recruited to find and kill Sam Chapman, named Patrice, also comes to Molly’s apartment and starts to apologize for his earlier failures. Nonetheless, Patrice then goes about to execute the next step of the plan, for which he steals a garbage truck by knocking down two workers. It becomes increasingly clear that Frank wants Patrice to attack the MI5 convoy, and it is specifically for this that he has used Molly so that he can track down the cars.
In the end, it seems like Frank Harkness will surely kill Molly Dorian, now that she is of no further use to him. He even pulls out a gun and points it at her, making it seem like he will shoot her, along with saying that he intends to send a message. However, Frank then leaves the apartment without doing any harm to Molly, and it becomes clear that he literally wants to send messages to certain people. This is because Frank has left five envelopes on Molly’s table with the names of five important officials written on them. One among the five is addressed to Claude Whelan as well, and these letters most probably have details about the deal he had made with David Cartwright so many years ago. It might also be that Frank leaves messages of blackmail against the authorities to ensure that he and his team will not be held responsible for the Westacres shopping center attack.
What does David reveal about Frank?
When River had returned to his grandfather’s house at the end of episode 4 and then found drawings very similar to the ones on the walls of the Les Arbes mansion, it seemed like he had a secret connection with the place. The fact that one of the terrorists who had arrived from France, Adam Lockhead, or Bertrand, looked very similar to him made it seem very possible that Frank was River’s biological father. This fact is actually confirmed in Slow Horses episode 5, as David Cartwright finally opens up about the secrets from his past. After being picked up from the luxurious hotel, where the MI5 headquarters was once located, David was taken back to Slough House, and at present, he is seen being driven around by Jackson Lamb and Catherine Standish.
David still keeps making demands to meet with the First Desk, although he has no idea about Claude Whelan or even Diana Taverner, having lost most of his memories. Lamb finally seems to acknowledge the fact that the man has indeed lost his memory and is not just pretending to be in dismay, and so he drives him to a place that is sure to jog up some memories. Lamb takes David and Catherine to an old cemetery ground, where David’s beloved wife, Rose, had been buried. The head of Slough House is cunning enough to know that the elderly ex-director might surely remember more because of his overwhelming sense of nostalgia associated with his wife, and even reveal more out of overwhelming emotions at this spot, and the plan actually works brilliantly. David now reveals that he had indeed sent his erstwhile bodyguard, Sam Chapman, to drive to the Les Arbes mansion near Lavande in France, so that he could rescue someone from there.
While we were already shown a flashback of this time in the previous episode, David now reveals who the woman being rescued actually was. In reality, Frank Harkness was once a CIA and Special Forces agent who had been fired for various charges such as embezzlement, torture, theft, and disobedience. Despite him getting forcibly distanced from the world of crime and violence, Frank kept a very strong interest in it, and he wanted to create an assassination squad by himself. His main idea regarding this squad was to raise children by teaching them to be cruel killers from their very young days. It is for this reason that he brought one woman after another to his mansion, impregnated them, and then abandoned them after they gave birth. Frank was basically raising his own assassination squad with his sons, and at one point, he had even taken David and Rose’s own daughter, meaning River’s mother, with him to the Les Arbes mansion.
David mentions that Frank had not really kidnapped his daughter but had taken her there by claiming to love her, which the young woman believed as well. Therefore, the erstwhile director of MI5 was ready to do just about anything to have Frank Harkness release his daughter and let her return to England. Frank took advantage of his desperation and ordered David to give him access to a number of MI5 cold bodies, along with cash and weapons, so that his assassination squad could start taking on contracts from terrorists. Thus, River is indeed the son of Frank, and his familial secret also seems to be the reason behind the Cartwrights being very distant from one another. In this episode, Louisa tries to contact River’s mother to ask whether her son has gone to visit her, but it becomes clear from this conversation that the woman keeps no touch with her father, David, and has not met her son, River, in a long time. It is extremely possible that the woman never wanted to get distanced from her beloved Frank, especially since she was pregnant with River at the time, and the matter created a terrible distance between her and her parents.
Catherine still expresses her confusion regarding why Frank wants to attack David after all these years, and Lamb explains that it is actually linked to the Westacres bombing. While the terrorist attack itself had gone differently than planned (as revealed in Slow Horses episode 4), the video released by Robert Winters made Frank panic since the world had not gotten to know the name of the young man. Although nobody would find anything out of the ordinary in the name “Robert Winters,” David Cartwright and his bodyguard, Sam Chapman, would surely recognize the name as one of the fake identities created by the MI5. Thus, he wants David to be killed, after having possibly done the same to Chapman, and hide the trail leading to himself and his assassin, Patrice, who is surely a son of his. But the MI5 head, Claude Whelan, also figures out that Frank had been leading an entire assassination squad to carry out various terrorist attacks over the years and that they had been using MI5 cold bodies to hide their real identities.
How does River land himself in even more trouble?
River Cartwright had been finally caught by the MI5 Dogs head Emma Flyte at the end of the previous episode, and now he is being taken to the Park headquarters to be interrogated. Although Flyte already starts asking questions about his trip to France and his reasons for returning to his grandfather’s house, River refuses to say anything at all, stating that he will only talk after meeting with David. Flyte has to currently accommodate, and she doesn’t even tell Diana Taverner about the photograph she had just taken from River, which showed the perpetrators of the attacks in London with Frank Harkness and a couple of other men. River notices this and tries to take a superior hand over her, but ultimately Flyte does share the photo with Giti Rahmani and with Claude Whelan. It is after this that the MI5 top heads realize exactly who they are dealing with.
Midway through the episode, River is able to convince the Tactical Unit head to take him to meet his grandfather, but he is shocked to learn that David is no longer at Catherine’s house. By this time, David had been once again taken back to Slough House by Catherine, on the orders of Lamb, but nobody in the MI5, and therefore, River, does not know about it. However, there is a new twist at the very end of Slow Horses episode 5, as the convoy carrying River towards the Park is attacked by Patrice and Frank, who block the path using the garbage trucks they had earlier stolen. Although Flyte tries to help herself and her hostage, she is knocked out by Patrice before he frees River, only to take him hostage again and put him into the trunk of a car.
River will now be surely taken to have a confrontation with his biological father, and it is possible that Frank will try to convince him to join his gang. That said, the Slough House agents, led by Louisa Guy, have already started to track down Patrice, and they will follow him to get to River and rescue him. How exactly these events play out and how the story is rounded up ultimately will be interesting to watch next week in the season finale of Slow Horses season 4.
