Slow Horses Season 5 Episode 5 Circus Raises the Stakes — Spoiler Recap and Verdict

After Slough House accidentally kills a mayoral candidate, the misfit unit hits a new peak of chaos and must regroup fast, as the conspirators press on believing Jeffrey is dead and Missiles lays bare how badly MI5 and the Slow Horses are out of sync.

Slow Horses hits the penultimate hour and, somehow, everyone manages to make things worse. Last week the team literally knocked off a mayoral candidate by accident. This week, MI5 and Slough House one-up themselves with a masterclass in bad judgement, bruised egos, and a plan that only looks clever until it actually works.

Quick heads-up: spoilers ahead for 'Circus' and the rest of the season so far.

Where everyone stands when the hour kicks off

• Farouk and his crew (Sami and Kamal) are melting down over failing to kill Jaffrey. When Sami and Kamal threaten to bail, Farouk waves a gun around. Then they see the news: mayoral candidate Gimball is dead anyway, courtesy of that paint-can fiasco. Their read: the operation can still go forward.
• At MI5, Taverner hands Whelan a paper briefing and heads back to the interrogations. Whelan frets that Gimball’s death looks tailor-made for conspiracy nuts; Taverner confirms the paint hit to the head story. They walk into Flyte grilling Tara, who admits she was coerced into dating Roddy.
• Lamb pings River and Coe to meet. Coe returns to the car with a change of clothes for River and a bag of cherries he won’t stop eating, which is exactly as annoying as it sounds. Back at Slough House, Dander and Standish get barked at by Lamb, but they do confirm the target was Jaffrey and hand over a partial plate from the getaway car.
• River spirals, convinced he and Coe are about to be booted from MI5. Coe points out Tyson isn’t going to the police; he doesn’t trust them, and they’d probably blame him before helping find River and Coe.
• Tara tells Flyte she was given a profile on Roddy and planted a small piece of code during his database break-in. Under pressure, she coughs up the code.
• Lamb meets River and Coe; River tries (badly) to lie about Gimball. Lamb spots it in two seconds. Coe hands over an audio recording. Lamb listens, then ices them: stay away from me.
• Inside Regent’s Park (MI5 HQ), Lamb outlines the playbook everyone should have seen coming. Devon flags a positive ID on a suspect vehicle sitting at an airport car park. Lamb also says to start thinking Libya, given Tara’s flat was a shrine to Libyan history, which earns him eye-rolls and accusations he’s just trying to clear Roddy.
• Taverner slips Flyte a note before the next Tara session. Whelan keeps snarking about Lamb’s competence until Tara basically confirms Lamb’s read: she met Farouk’s people at Libyan cultural events, got recruited, and then threatened. She doesn’t know the exact endgame, but the proverb she cites points them toward the airport.
• Taverner puts MI5 on high alert. Welles matches the van’s shell casings to the Abbotsfield shooter and the hit on Ho’s flat. Tech says Tara’s code is device-specific and meaningless in the abstract; they need Ho on his own machine to see what it actually does.
• River gets a call from his grandfather, who tries to walk him through the destabilization plan and warns about a second honeypot. River hangs up, because of course he does.
• Lamb pays a visit to Molly, who has been shown the door but still knows things. After some dry gallows humor about how she’s going to end it, Lamb nudges her for anything concrete. He clocks that she might be sitting on a file that proves his theory.

The plan, in plain English

Lamb says the quiet part out loud: the classic move in an operation like this is to blind your opposition before the endgame. He literally calls the next beat.

"Blind your enemy."

Meanwhile, Whelan yanks Tara out of her cell for a walk-and-talk. She needles him, then casually reveals she has a way to reach Farouk: a midnight meet at Piccadilly Circus, using the Underground and switchovers to confirm she isn’t being tailed. Flyte brings her clothes. Whelan sends Tara out to play bait.

Taverner pushes back. Whelan, puffed up and sure he’s the smartest man in the room, shrugs her off with a promise that he’ll handle Tara. It’s a choice.

Whelan bets on a honeypot... again

At Piccadilly Circus, Tara balks. Whelan gets on the phone and pleads, and in the process he and Flyte tell her every single way they’re tracking her. She agrees to proceed, then promptly ducks out of sight, dumps the jacket with the tracker, and vanishes while MI5 takes a beat too long to notice.

At the same time, Roddy hacks back into MI5’s mainframe on his own kit to execute Tara’s code on the right device. The only thing that pings back is one file: Whelan’s. Then the code does its real job — it takes MI5 off the board. Systems go dark. Tara resurfaces, hops into Farouk’s car, and delivers the good news: MI5 is blind. Time for the final act.

Loose ends that aren’t actually loose

Back at Slough House, everyone tears through Roddy’s piles of junk. Standish notices how much of his hoarded nonsense ties straight into this destabilization. It’s not clutter; it’s breadcrumbs. Also floating through the hour: Devon’s airport lot vehicle hit, Dander’s partial plate from the assassin pickup, and Coe’s unhinged cherry obsession, which at this point feels like a character beat and a cry for help.

Why this hour hits

The episode is a tidy little indictment of institutional overconfidence. MI5 isn’t just missing contingencies; Whelan has turned himself into the weak point. He picks a fight with a clan of government-conspiracy diehards, then after Gimball’s death, doubles down by sending a suspect back into the field like he’s the only one who can pull off a result. He gets played by the same trick twice.

On the Slough House side, Lamb is furious but still the guy who can make use of broken tools. River and Coe are currently those tools — and they’re lucky Lamb hasn’t thrown them in a skip. Standish and Dander, meanwhile, look sharper than River right now. River’s also disturbingly cold with his grandfather, who, infuriatingly, was right: a second honeypot worked because Whelan is easily gamed.

The runway to the finale

Lamb clearly smells something old and ugly coming back to bite MI5. The question is whether he can put the pieces together before the last move lands, or if the service already tripped over its own shoelaces for good.

Slow Horses drops Wednesdays on Apple TV. 'Circus' lands October 22, 2025.