Prime Video’s extremely expensive boondoggle of a spy show Citadel bypassed the political issues of having its heroes work for a real-world intelligence agency by making one up. The supergroup Citadel is always doing good, while its rival organization Manticore is responsible for all the worst stuff that’s happened in the modern era. Replacing a real-world organization like the CIA or MI5 with a fictional one that never does wrong is a cartoonish answer to an actual problem: With trust in institutions at an all-time low, it can be hard to root for heroes with government backing.
But HBO Max’s Peacemaker and Apple TV Plus’ Slow Horses offer a better solution: making their heroes losers and failures on the outs with their shady higher-ups.
[Ed. note: This article contains some spoilers for 2021’s The Suicide Squad, Peacemaker season 2, and Slow Horses.]
A very faithful adaptation of Mick Herron’s Slough House novels, Slow Horses has run for four seasons, with a fifth one releasing on Sept. 24. Slough House is a place where MI5 agents who have messed up too much to be trusted with real field work are subjected to mind-numbing tasks and constant beration from their cantankerous, alcoholic boss Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman) in the hopes that they’ll quit. It’s a dumping ground for addicts, incompetents, and the service’s biggest jerks, meaning the motley crew is always sniping at each other, even if they do form a sort of camaraderie in their exile.
Yet during each of the show’s extremely tightly crafted seasons, the misfits manage to uncover some sort of serious plot, usually something that traces back to malfeasance within MI5 itself. It’s an excellent spin on the spy genre, because Herron and British showrunner Will Smith care deeply about their flawed characters, and their work to solve rich, morally complicated mysteries. The show explores the darker corners of the British government’s work both at home and abroad, from cozying up to white supremacists to disastrous interventions in foreign wars.
James Gunn’s 2021 film The Suicide Squad similarly makes it clear that the DC Universe’s powerful intelligence agency A.R.G.U.S. (Advanced Research Group Uniting Super-Humans) is deeply amoral. A.R.G.U.S. doesn’t do anything remotely heroic in this film. It’s made a mess with its secret operations in the fictional island nation of Corto Maltese and conscripted superpowered prisoners with bombs in their heads to do the dirty work of cleaning things up.
In a plot paralleling the U.S. government’s long history of siding with friendly Latin American dictators instead of popularly elected governments, a revolution in Corto Maltese endangers the mind-control projects the U.S. is running on political prisoners using the alien Starro. A.R.G.U.S. head Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) is solely focused on covering up the operations there, ordering Peacemaker (John Cena) to use any means necessary to hide America’s crimes.
The rest of the Suicide Squad is only able to escape and stop Starro’s rampage because Waller’s subordinates Emilia Harcourt (Jennifer Holland) and John Economos (Steve Agee) defy her orders. That earns them their own version of Slough House, as they’re forced to team up with the disgraced Peacemaker and conduct an operation out of a boarded-up video store in Peacemaker season 1. Like the denizens of Slough House, Harcourt and Economos know that their superiors are punishing them with terrible conditions and questionable coworkers, but they don’t quit because they wouldn’t fit in anywhere else. Peacemaker’s dynamic winds up being very similar to that of Slough House, as the squad constantly bickers but learns to trust each other when it comes to doing what’s right and standing up to their bosses.
There’s a saying among the spies in Slow Horses: “Moscow rules meant ‘Watch your back.’ London rules meant ‘Cover your arse.’” Waller always plays by London rules. Even though Peacemaker’s protagonists succeed in their season 1 mission to save the world from an alien invasion, they start season 2 even further on the outs with A.R.G.U.S., after revealing the truth about Waller’s work to the world.
Waller has Harcourt blacklisted so she can’t get work with any security agency. Waller’s daughter Leota Adebayo (A Minecraft Movie’s Danielle Brooks) tries to start her own security company, but her only prospective client thinks she’s advertising as a sex worker. Only Economos still has a job at A.R.G.U.S., which he mostly uses to try to help his friends stay out of trouble. But like Slow Horses’ version of MI5, A.R.G.U.S. is a viper’s nest of personal grudges and big egos that makes working there seem miserable, even for employees still in the organization’s good graces. Both shows make it clear that having friends you can rely on is far more important than being part of an elite, high-status organization.
That’s still a hard lesson for the characters to learn. In Slow Horses, River Cartwright (Jack Lowden) was sent to Slough House after failing a key training exercise, which was actually sabotaged by a coworker. He thinks that means he deserves to be working at MI5’s headquarters, even though he regularly demonstrates that he’s overconfident and doesn’t take responsibility for his mistakes. He keeps thinking he’ll eventually do something heroic enough to earn his way back, and keeps being disappointed.
Likewise, Peacemaker spends the beginning of season 2 ignoring his friends in favor of chasing the fame and power he thinks he deserves by auditioning for the Justice Gang. They reject him while also demonstrating that they’re such colossal jerks that Peacemaker likely wouldn’t have been happy working with them anyways.
Slow Horses and Peacemaker share a powerful message: You don’t become a hero by earning the approval of a powerful group or person, but by taking heroic actions even when no one believes you’re capable of them. It might be nice to imagine a world in which a governmental agency or other powerful organization is always on the side of good. But in the messy reality we live in, it’s better to view those in authority with a high degree of skepticism, and to find some losers you can really root for.
