Full spoilers for “Daddy Issues” below.
River Cartwright spends this whole episode chasing a ghost, and the show gives him one. Just not the one he was expecting.
He thinks every silent phone call is his father needling him from somewhere out there. He’s wrong about the who, right about the where, and by the time the door creaks open in that last scene, I actually said “no way” out loud. Here’s everything that happened in Episode 2, and what I think it means for the rest of the season.
Quick Facts
- Show: Slow Horses, Season 6, Episode 2, titled “Daddy Issues”
- Platform: Apple TV+
- Based on: Mick Herron’s novels Joe Country and Slough House
- Cast: Gary Oldman (Jackson Lamb), Jack Lowden (River Cartwright), Kristin Scott Thomas (Diana Taverner), Hugo Weaving (Frank Harkness), Saskia Reeves (Catherine Standish), Rosalind Eleazar (Louisa Guy), Christopher Chung (Roddy Ho), Aimee-Ffion Edwards (Shirley Dander), Tom Brooke (J.K. Coe), Samuel West (Peter Judd), Joanna Scanlan (Moira Tregorian), Jonathan Pryce (David Cartwright), and Olivia Cooke as Sid Baker
Quick Recap: What Happened
- Andrew Nesmith, a disgraced former MI5 “Dog,” stole a paper file from Regent Park for a wealthy man named Damien. He tries to blackmail his employers for more money and gets silenced for it.
- Frank Harkness stages Andrew’s death to look like a suicide. River and Lamb find the body.
- A boy named Reece, Andrew’s son, was seen near the house on CCTV. Frank now sees him as a loose end.
- Two hitmen, working through a list of former Slough House agents, kill Moira Tregorian by staging a gas leak in her home.
- Diana Taverner is pushed into a TV interview by Peter Judd and Damien, and she nearly gives away too much.
- Lamb discovers every physical Slough House personnel file has vanished from the Park, which explains how the killers keep finding targets.
- Catherine Standish buys a bottle of wine and comes close to relapsing.
- Lamb orders everyone to go dark. River ignores him, traces a strange call to his dead grandfather’s house, and finds Sid Baker waiting for him there. Not Frank.
The Full Recap
Andrew Nesmith’s Blackmail Backfires
The episode opens on Andrew Nesmith, a man who has just lost his job at MI5. He’s a former “Dog,” the internal security officers who patrol the Park, and he admits he stole a sensitive paper file for whoever is paying him. The twist is that MI5 caught him trespassing in the archives, but never realized what he actually took. They fired him for being somewhere he shouldn’t have been, not for theft, which means the Park still has no idea the file is gone.
Andrew decides that’s worth more money than he was promised, and he threatens to expose the people who hired him if they don’t pay up. The woman he’s talking to makes it very clear that isn’t how this works. By the time River and Lamb get there, Andrew is dead, staged to look like he did it himself.
I like this opening because it tells us exactly who Frank Harkness is working for without a single line of exposition wasted on it. He’s a professional. Loose ends get closed.
Frank’s Real Employer
The episode’s biggest reveal is who’s actually paying Frank. Peter Judd, the slippery political operator who’s been circling Diana Taverner since the premiere, introduces her to a man named Damien, a wealthy television news owner. Judd already gave Diana money on Damien’s behalf earlier, so this isn’t a new relationship, it’s Judd finally showing his hand.
Damien pressures Diana into a live TV interview, and it goes about as well as you’d expect. She gets baited into using the word “retaliation” about a nerve-agent incident, and the host pushes her on rumors that a former First Desk secretly worked for a foreign power. That’s a direct, uncomfortable poke at Charles Partner’s history, and Diana barely dodges it.
Afterward, Frank meets Damien privately, and we learn Damien hired him for a job. Frank confirms it’s done, but mentions a “third-party complication,” which is his cold way of describing a child who might have seen something he shouldn’t have.
That’s the real spine of this episode. Frank isn’t running his own revenge plot against River’s family. He’s a contractor working for a media mogul with an MI5 grudge, and River’s return to his life might genuinely be incidental to Frank, at least for now.
Reece Nesmith, the Witness
River spots a security camera near Andrew’s house and pulls footage showing a young boy in the area. Roddy identifies him as Reece, Andrew’s son, a kid who’s bounced between foster homes because his father wasn’t really in the picture.
Frank’s line about a “minor third-party complication” makes it clear Reece is now a target, or at least someone Frank is watching closely. I found this the most quietly upsetting thread in the episode. Everyone else caught in this mess chose the spy life. Reece didn’t choose anything. He was just standing near the wrong house at the wrong time.
Moira’s Death and the Missing Files
The two hitmen from the premiere, working through a list of former Slough House staff, kill Struan Loy and Kay White before this episode even starts, and Episode 2 confirms Kay’s death wasn’t an accident. A witness near her houseboat saw a man and a woman leaving the night she died, matching the pair’s description.
Then they move on to Moira Tregorian, the department’s former secretary, posing as gas engineers checking a leak. They fill her home with gas and leave her death looking accidental. Moira had just been helping Catherine dig into why Slough House vanished from MI5’s computer systems, which makes her far from a random target.
Lamb eventually figures out the missing piece: it’s not just the digital files that are gone. The physical, paper backups have disappeared too, and Andrew Nesmith was the man who took them. That single theft explains the entire killing spree. Whoever has that file has a name-by-name map of everyone who ever worked at Slough House, active or retired.
Once Lamb understands the scale of the threat, he calls “Blake’s grave,” ordering the whole team to disappear, phones off, no contact, until the danger passes.
Catherine at the Wine Shop
There’s a small, quiet scene tucked into all this chaos that I think matters more than its runtime suggests. Catherine walks into a wine shop, talks through different bottles with the shopkeeper, and picks out a Margaux, the same wine she associates with Charles Partner, her old boss and the source of a lot of her trauma.
She buys it, along with a corkscrew, and gets closer to drinking again than we’ve seen her in a long time. When Lamb finds her later, she insists she hasn’t touched it, and he believes her. His version of support is telling her the choice is hers, then ordering her into the car because everyone’s in danger. It’s not warm, but it’s Lamb, and it works exactly because he doesn’t pretend to be gentle about it.
River’s Trace, and the Ending
Throughout the episode, River keeps getting phone calls that are just silence or static. He’s convinced it’s his father messing with him, so he has Roddy trace the number. The trace leads somewhere far more personal than a random burner phone: David Cartwright’s house. River’s grandfather, who just died.
Furious and grieving, River ignores Lamb’s order to go dark and drives straight there. Lamb finds out and sends Coe after him, but River gets there first. He walks through the empty house calling for his father.
Instead, standing at the top of the stairs, is Sid Baker. The former Slough House agent who took a bullet to the head back in Season 1 and was presumed dead ever since.
The episode ends right there. No explanation, no dialogue beyond River’s shock. Just credits.
Ending Explained: What Does Sid’s Return Mean?
I’ll be honest, I did not see this coming, and I don’t think the show wanted me to. Season 1 spent real emotional weight on Sid’s death. Bringing her back, alive, standing in a dead man’s house, at the exact moment River expected to find his father, is the kind of swerve this show has built its whole identity on.
Here’s what I think is going on, and why.
Why is she at David’s house specifically? I don’t think this is a coincidence, and I don’t think it’s random staging either. David Cartwright was one of MI5’s most legendary figures, a man with decades of secrets and old contacts. If Sid has been hiding, off the grid, for years, a retired spymaster’s empty house is exactly the kind of place someone with her training would know how to disappear into. It’s also possible someone else placed her there, deliberately, to intercept River instead of Frank. That would mean somebody wanted this specific meeting to happen, and knew River would eventually trace the calls there.
Was Sid the one calling River? The show hasn’t confirmed this, but the timing makes it hard to believe otherwise. If it wasn’t Frank on those silent calls, and Sid’s the one who shows up, the simplest read is that she orchestrated getting River there herself. Which raises the bigger question: why now, after all these years of staying dead?
My theory: Sid has been alive and hidden this whole time, likely under some kind of protection or witness-style arrangement that even Slough House didn’t know about. The reason she’s surfacing now isn’t random. It lines up exactly with the moment someone stole the Slough House personnel files. If her old identity is sitting in a stolen file that’s now floating around in the hands of people like Damien and his hired killers, staying hidden stopped being safe. She may have come out of hiding because she is now back on somebody’s target list, and she needed River, someone who still trusts her, before anyone else got to her first.
Is Frank connected to Sid’s return? The episode never puts them in the same scene, which I think is intentional. Frank is calling River, or someone made River believe Frank was calling him, and Frank is also working for Damien on a completely separate thread involving Reece and the stolen files. It’s very possible these two storylines are about to collide hard: Frank’s operation and Sid’s resurfacing both trace back to the same missing file.
What Worked
The structure of the reveal. Spending an entire episode convincing us and River that Frank is behind every phone call, then subverting it in the final ten seconds, is the show doing what it does best: setting up genre expectations and then quietly stepping around them.
Catherine’s wine shop scene. No dialogue does the heavy lifting, just her hands on the bottle and the shopkeeper’s small talk. It says more about her relapse risk than a full monologue would.
Lamb’s genuine urgency. He’s usually the guy insulting everyone in the room. Watching him snap into actual protective-boss mode when he realizes the scale of the threat lands harder because it’s so rare from him.
What Didn’t Work
Reece’s storyline feels thin so far. He’s clearly set up as an important loose end, but this episode treats him more as a plot device than a person. I hope the show gives him actual scenes soon, not just references to him as a “complication.”
Damien is still a cipher. We know he’s rich, owns a news channel, and hired Frank, but I don’t have a read on what he actually wants yet. That’s fine for episode two of eight, but it’s a lot of trust to ask viewers to extend to an unnamed motive.
The pacing in the middle third slows down. The Diana Taverner TV interview subplot is well-acted, but it sits a little separately from the main momentum of the episode, and I found my attention drifting during the political-maneuvering scenes compared to the more propulsive Frank and Andrew material.
Verdict: Hit or Flop?
Hit. This is Slow Horses doing exactly what it’s known for: patient plotting that pays off with one gut-punch of a twist. The Sid Baker reveal alone makes this one of the stronger episode-two setups the show has done.
My rating: ★★★★☆ (4 out of 5)
Your turn: Did you clock that it wasn’t going to be Frank at the top of those stairs? And what’s your theory on why Sid resurfaced now? Tell me in the comments.