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A review of this week's Slow Horses, "Daddy Issues" — with spoilers — coming up just as soon as I get you a gerbil to replace that fake girlfriend you had...
Alan Sepinwall
When I read Mick Herron's first Slough House novel many years ago, my immediate response to Sid Baker getting shot in the head and then seemingly vanishing was to assume she would be back. Herron had spent too much time building her up as an interesting foil for River that her disappearance felt like it had to be a mystery that would have to be resolved at some point. I felt even more strongly about this when I watched the first season of the show, where Olivia Cooke was — as she usually is — so good, in not a ton of screen time, that I couldn't imagine the show bothering to cast her if there wasn't a plan to bring her back down the road.
Since then, of course, Cooke has become much more famous and in-demand thanks to House of the Dragon — in this cast, probably only Gary Oldman and Kristin Scott-Thomas are better-known for work beyond this show — and as the show moved past the two or three Herron books I read, I began to wonder if we might ever get back to poor Sid.
Then a funny thing happened: Apple put Cooke into the trailers for Season Six. They put her in all of the "first look" photography for the season. (For a while, hers was the first face any press member saw when they loaded up the Slow Horses page on Apple's press site.) This is a show that has never really depended on huge shocking plot twists; the biggest surprises are often jokes, like Coe accidentally killing a politician with a falling paint can. And, again, Cooke's a bigger name now, and her face in the marketing might have been considered enough of a draw to keep anyone from wanting to hide it.