‘Slow Horses’ Stars Go Inside Major Book Change in Finale

Meredith Jacobs Wed, October 21, 2026 at 10:29 AM UTC

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- TV Insider; Apple TV

For the second time this season, Slow Horses deviates from the source material for a major death in the Season 6 finale. The episode also ends with the fate of another character unknown after exposure to a toxin. TV Insider spoke with Gary Oldman, Christopher Chung, and Ruth Bradley about those moments and more in the video interview above. (Plus, read what co-executive producer Gaby Chiappe had to say about the finale here.) Warning: Spoilers for the Slow Horses Season 6 finale ahead!

Slow Horses is heading into Season 7 down two members (well, one and a possible future one) and with another’s life hanging in the balance. River (Jack Lowden) goes to meet Sid (Olivia Cooke) at his grandfather’s house but is poisoned while opening a bottle of wine. He’s unconscious at the end of the finale.

“Not alluding to what happens in Season 7, but I think Roddy’s understanding of that happening to River would be, of course that would happen to River. Who else would that happen to?” Chung says in the video above.

Gary Oldman acknowledges that Jackson Lamb’s relationship with River remains “a mixed bag.” He explains, “He’s got so much baggage from the father, from the grandfather who Lamb despises, despises him, and yet he sees the potential of River. So it’s sort of at times, isn’t it, it’s a bit like a father-son kind of. It’s that kind of relationship.”

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But the character who is dead in the finale is Flyte (Ruth Bradley), who was fired by First Desk Diana (Kristin Scott Thomas) earlier in the season and scoffed at joining Slough House, where the other woman wanted her to go. Flyte dies in Joe Country, one of the two Mick Herron books on which Season 6 is based (Slough House is the other), though slightly differently. She’s still protecting a kid (Min’s son, with Louisa in the book, versus Lenny Rush’s Reece with the rest of the slow horses) and the others, but it’s also not Frank Harkness (Hugo Weaving), mercenary and River’s father, who kills her on the novel’s pages. Here, it is, and that’s something that Bradley reveals was an idea that came up seasons ago.

“I read the book long ago. I think we were shooting Season 4. I knew she was going to go before I shot anything of Flyte. I knew before I was cast. But I hadn’t read it in the book. So I think I was halfway through [Season] 4 when I read it. And yeah, they definitely kept the sense of how she goes,” she says. “They had floated the idea while we were shooting 4, they were like, ‘What if it was Hugo instead of the mercenaries in the book?’ And then I was like, ‘They’ll never make that happen,’ but then it did.”

Her death is very Slow Horses — she manages to hit him, but then runs out of bullets and throws her gun at him before he fires the final shot.

“It just felt so natural to me, I guess, because I’ve been in the show for such a while. I can’t remember if Adam [Randall, director] came up with that on the day, like she throws her gun at him, or if that was in the script,” Bradley admits. “It’s all such a blur. What I remember in the script — because it was a tiny scene, there wasn’t much written, we just kind of talked about it — it was the line that said she realizes this is her last moment, a stage direction. But apart from that, we kind of just blocked it out. Adam’s like, ‘Get shot in the shoulder, maybe go down, maybe crawl back in your elbows.’ It was very loose.”

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She continues, “And then I’m not sure if the throwing the gun was scripted, but everything feels like it’s Adam’s idea because he’s just so kind of calm and relaxed. And I was in such safe hands because he did Season 4 and trusted him implicitly. So yeah, it all feels very Slow Horses. It all feels very Adam because he knows the world so well. I couldn’t have picked a better way to go for Flyte.”

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Her death resonates with Roddy Ho (Christopher Chung) in a way others haven’t, including Coe’s (Tom Brooke) earlier this season. It’s after seeing her body on the beach that he, after running off and leaving Reece and Shirley (Aimee-Ffion Edwards) to fend for themselves, that he returns and tries to help them against their own adversary, albeit missing with every shot he fires.

“The moment I think that I really wanted to explore Ho’s relationship with death and the understanding of that was actually when he sees Flyte, when she dies. And there’s so many instances and references throughout the previous five series of Ho asking for pictures of dead bodies and kind of grotesque things that have to do with death, but he’s actually never seen a real dead body in front of him, let alone someone that he knows or has just spent a lot of time with. So I think that moment, for me, was really important to land, where he comes across Flyte’s body on the beach, because it is his first experience of death,” Chung explains.

“Actually, that’s the moment that really humanizes him because you see in that moment he’s like, ‘Oh my God, this isn’t just a video game, it’s real life,'” he says.

Watch the full video interview above for more from Gary Oldman, Christopher Chung, and Ruth Bradley on Slow Horses Season 6.

Slow Horses, Season 7, TBA, Apple TV

Watch the full video on TV Insider.

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Source: “AOL Entertainment”