Not to be an insufferable Shakespeare girl on main but, a lot of Slow Horses reminds me of him, the way it utilizes how tragic yet utterly stupid and comedic violence can be. (BTW, This is very much inspired by @saulbetter 's very cool observation of how the show uses Webb as a living example of escalated violence, the crash test dummy that suffers increasingly real consequences, lol)

One of my favorite plays is Titus Andronicus, especially because of an interpretation by Peter Sacks called “non-mourning”. I’m really condensing it here, but in essence it’s about how Titus is a story so filled with blood, revenge, tragedy, and (at times ridiculous) violence that it makes the characters completely breathless. There is no time to mourn, only to react. The mourning itself is expressed by increasingly horrific murders etc. 

Season 3 of Slow Horses is not only the most violent, but also the most fast paced so far. It all takes place over the course of, like, one day. That is crazy. The deaths we see on screen are also very blunt. They are quick, brutal, final, and both avoidable yet inevitable. That makes the conversation River and Louisa are afforded for ca. five minutes before disaster stand out so much. And after everything in the end, Louisa is just like “Okay, bye”, which is the opposite of a healthy reaction. While River goes to see the person he is already mourning (not lost, losing) who goes on to give him a genuine reason to mourn– not because grandpa is slowly drifting away, but because he is also destroying the image River has of him and MI5 in the process. This is like when everyone mourns Lavinia, even though she is still alive, only that she happens to be a living reminder of loss (!).

Finally, as an aside, I also have to think of how Donovan and Webb are positioned in this story arc. Slow Horses and Titus Andronicus both have a sort of cyclical (or perhaps pyramidical?) nature of violence going. However, back to the beginning of the post now, Webb as a character seems to inspire violence, though never directly carrying out any. The tragic comic aspect is that it circles back around to him no matter what he does or doesn’t do. On the other hand, Donovan wants revenge/retaliation for what happened. His journey starts with violence carried out against his lover, he continues to carry it out as a reaction, then it circles back to him, eventually destroying him (and others), too. Hauntingly, the last part of the chain is presented by the sister who is no longer a sister when Lamb leaves her at that hospital, is she?