Apple TV+ Slow horses The Season 4 premiere, “Identity Theft,” wasted no time in raising the stakes. Instead, it threw explosions, murders, and emotionally charged espionage at us while building up a major new threat that will shake the very foundations of Slough House…

“Identity Theft” is a classic Slow horses from the very beginning: Roddy (Waterloo Roads Christopher Chung) shows up at a Christmas party at a chicken joint, but his colleagues aren’t there. His calls to his colleagues at Slough House go unanswered until Louisa (Whores actress Rosalind Eleazar), always eager to make fun of the cocky hacktivist, responds and explains that their boss, the drunk and farting Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman), lied to Roddy to get rid of him.

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As Roddy leaves the restaurant, a car bomb explodes in a nearby shopping mall. MI5 rushes to contain the chaos, but the scale and suddenness of the attack catches everyone by surprise. Was this an isolated incident? The first step in a larger criminal conspiracy? These are the questions that haunt Second Desk’s Diana Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas) as she looks out at the wreckage. Her superior, new First Desk Claude Whelan (Battlestar Galactica’s James Callis), is not much help.

The next day, River (Jack Lowden) tells Louisa about her grandfather, legendary spymaster David Cartwright (CrownJonathan Pryce (born 1962), has memory loss and extreme paranoia. Louisa urges River to visit him, reminding her friend that it’s his turn to prove himself, that his grandfather cared for him when others didn’t, and that he needs to show himself to the only family he knows.

River is right to worry about his grandfather. The elder Cartwright is convinced he’s on someone’s kill list (to be fair, he almost certainly is) and can barely make it back from grocery shopping without looking for his shotgun. With the gun in his hand, the stock firmly planted in the most favorable corner of the living room, he dozes off.

Someone is banging frantically on the front door before a voice claiming to be River convinces David to open it. “River” rushes in and offers him a bath, but something is wrong. The camera is careful not to show us the guest’s face. Suspicious, David follows “River” upstairs and, in a moment of consternation, shoots him.

Lamb, arriving at the Cartwrights’ house shortly after the shooting, meets the new head of MI5’s internal affairs department, Emma Flyte (Ted Lasso(Ruth Bradley). He wants him to determine whether the unnamed body curled up in David’s bathtub is indeed River. He takes one look at the gruesome scene and confirms the body’s identity. For someone so fiercely protective of the spies he commands, Lamb seems unfazed by the younger Cartwright’s death. He leaves the scene and sits alone in his car, momentarily convincing us that he really believes River is dead.

Meanwhile, Taverner sends a task force to investigate the apartment of a bombing suspect. The subject of the search, a man identified as Robert Winters, is nowhere to be found, and his apartment seems strangely devoid of bombs or booby traps. A simple pull on the blinds proves otherwise. Winters has set the blinds to explode when opened, and they do.

The Slough House crew, having learned of their friend’s “death” via Roddy’s callous theft of River’s hard drive, are stunned by the news. Lamb, however, is noticeably absent.

That’s because after leaving the Cartwrights’ house, Lamb goes straight to her former office administrator, Catherine Standish (Saskia Reeves), who resigned last season after new details about her deceased mentor came to light. The exchange is awkward, but Lamb gets to the point: she believes River is alive and knows Standish has seen River and David since the murder. Standish denies any knowledge of the situation, but Lamb all but forces her to prove that River is alive but off the grid, and David is asleep in Standish’s bedroom.

“Identity Theft” ends with River hurtling through the French countryside in the back of a taxi, armed with a fake passport and determined to find out who’s after his family…

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