This column contains spoilers. Boring, isn’t it? But necessary. They’re for the finale of the sixth season of Slow Horses, which landed on Apple TV on Wednesday. That’s aeons ago in media time, and the season was based on novels published in 2019 and 2021, but it seems sensible to start with a warning in case the statute of limitations on spoiler crimes hasn’t expired as quickly as I thought.
I would like to talk about the death of Emma Flyte. She was the ex-copper turned “head Dog”, or MI5 head of security, and she had a good shot. Jackson Lamb, leader of the MI5 fringe office known as Slough House, described her as a “cracker” in Mick Herron’s books, but her boss, Diana Taverner (played by Kristin Scott Thomas), was less enamoured, pushing her into the chaotic orbit of Lamb (Gary Oldman) and his crew, where this week she came a cropper on a sandy Suffolk beach.
Shortly after being hailed a legend by another admirer, the openly salivating Roddy Ho (Christopher Chung), Flyte went for her tea, heroically taking out one redshirt mercenary but running out of bullets before she could dispatch Frank Harkness (Hugo Weaving), a recurring baddy, who fired a second, fatal gunshot.
I bring this up because when I interviewed Ruth Bradley, the Irish actor who played Flyte for three seasons, soon after watching a preview of the upcoming episodes in August, I asked if there was a day when she knew it would be her last day on the show. She gave a lovely answer.
“I had three, maybe four, days of lying on the beach when she’s already dead,” she said. Around her, the crew and her castmates were still filming. “Adam [Randall], the director, would come back and I’d be bawling, just, like, in tears. I was, like, ‘It feels like such a strange thing. I’m in this kind of suspended world where this character has died, but you’re all still doing your stuff.’ It was like limbo.”
When they finally wrapped, she went straight to the make-up bus, got the nod from producers and cut off her – or, rather, Flyte’s – long hair. “Usually when you finish a job, you go home and you kind of grieve the character in privacy, but having those days of just lying there was really cathartic,” she said.
It’s a strange game, acting, to borrow the lyric from Mick Jagger’s Slow Horses theme tune. I thought Bradley’s answer beautifully encapsulated the way in which actors maintain a parallel existence to the people they play until the day they don’t. I also knew it was unusable in the piece I was writing, as it was a spoiler. Even readers of the books, if they were expecting Flyte to die a quieter death in snowy Welsh woodland, as she does in Herron’s 2019 novel Joe Country, might have been miffed by the reveal.
As a viewer, avoiding spoilers can be hard work. Right now it’s a full-time job trying to swerve smugly enigmatic hints about You Can See Everything, the “mind-bending” documentary about Elizabeth Holmes, the Theranos fraudster, which has sold out some Dublin cinema screenings a whole month before it‘s released in Ireland.
As a journalist, meanwhile, the business of avoiding responsibility for spoilers has been complicated by two things: on-demand viewing, which muddies how long certain twists and plot points should ideally be kept on the down low, and the popularity of reality TV, which has done its bit to dismantle the old reporting principle of scooping your rivals at any cost.
There’s a reason, for example, that British media outlets don’t race to report the outcome of the BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing on Saturday nights, when the weekly eliminations are filmed and the results are discoverable, but wait instead for the Sunday show to air. Nobody wants to be hated for ruining everybody’s fun.
Darren Smith, managing director of Kite Entertainment, spoke about this on a set visit to Slane Castle last year while Kite was filming the first series of The Traitors Ireland months before its broadcast date. “In the early days of reality shows, people were happy to run spoilers. Now you guys don’t, because your readers don’t want them.”
It really is that simple. Indeed, the media has grown steadily coyer about the outcomes of television programmes even after they have aired, with the lucky coincidence being that nameless headlines encourage clicks anyway.
As for the high-jeopardy world of Slow Horses, the much-battered River Cartwright (Jack Lowden) seems to be having a spot of Russian nerve-agent trouble at the end of this season and makes no appearance in the trailer for the next one. Is he dead or is that classic misdirection? At the risk of contradicting myself, I think the answer is obvious, but I also wouldn’t dare state it here.
Source: The Irish Times · Laura Slattery
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