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PaperclipPerfector  18d ago (text post)   2860 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for September 25, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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How about some television talk.

I was looking for a show to watch on a second screen while I played the new Trails in the Sky 2nd Chapter and came across Slow Horses - BBC spy show about MI5 and a group of remedial agents. My parents have been watching for years and always recommend it. I loathe most modern television but for whatever reason decided to give it a shot.

It’s very much as expected. The first half of season 1 is all about a “loathsome” right wing terrorist cell, the Sons of Albion. Get this - these right wing youths kidnap an innocent British British-Asian boy and plan to behead him live on the internet in an ISIS style video. But wait, it’s actually a rouge opp carried out by the evil girlboss intelligence minister. They then do a double fakeout where the Sons of Albion get wise to the setup and the scary right wing guy goes on a rampage and attempts to carry out the beheading.

This is a completely ludicrous plot line and it appears that Apple’s Slow Horses is going to be every bit as awful as I expected for a show developed after 2016. Does Hollywood imagine there are actually these sort of right wing terror cells just waiting to activate? Despite all evidence to the contrary and dozens if not hundreds of other instances of racial and political violence perpetrated against white people? Or is the goal to get boomers all worked up about dangerous right wing ideologies. Are they stupid or liars?

For anyone here who’s watched it, does Slow Horses get better? Is there anything of value here?

I’m separately on season 4 of Le Bureau des Legendes - a French foreign intelligence tv drama produced by Canal and very highly regarded by anyone in the Anglosphere that’s seen it. It’s the show that Paramount’s The Agency is based on. And I must say the The Bureau is truly excellent. Season 1 aired in 2015 so it’s only mildly annoying with politics. Very mild. It’s really great and worth a watch if you haven’t seen it. I have a lot of thoughts on it that I can share if anyone is interested. But it reminds me a lot of 24, with less action and more drama.

I got through season 1 because I like Oldman and Kristin Scott Thomas, though the same issues bothering you bothered me. It was jarring how blatantly Bizzarro world that was. The setup in general of the Slough House is a little reminiscent of something LeCarré might have written as a novel, without some of the vulgarities. And I liked LeCarré.

To respond, season 2 I remember as better, season 3 has more action but really goes off the rails plotwise (not necessarilyin a culture war way). I had to stop at season 4 because it seemed to me one of the leads (Jack Lowden's character) seemed to have been written by someone who only read the first pages of season 1's script, decided they didn't like River at all or men generally, and dropped any other possible character development. But maybe it got better. I think there are 5 or 6 seasons now.

I often wonder whether these shows are bound by diversity riders but also characterization clauses (e.g. the female black character must be smarter than the white male) or similar. Or maybe the writers are pandering. Or, of course, true believers.

In season 1 episode one I was thinking "Wait she said Asian male, that guy looks Indian." Then I realized.

Every once in a while I check in with myself and try and make sure I'm not becoming overly sensitive on culture war matters. I think you doing that here.

For one thing, the show is just great.

For another, it's designed to make you think it's about certain themes when it isn't (for instance the question of if River is meant to be in Slough House). The villains are often part of that (and the over arching theme is usually more system-failure and banal corruption than any specific political bugbear).*

Lastly, while the UK obviously has some stupid and exaggerated fear of right wing extremism, it's not as stupid as it seems because they actually have had white people committing acts of terror is recent memory (the troubles).

*Many of the villains are women, and ethnic women, and one of those women is also a hero. It does not deal with morality in a childlike and unipolar way.

Lastly, while the UK obviously has some stupid and exaggerated fear of right wing extremism, it's not as stupid as it seems because they actually have had white people committing acts of terror is recent memory (the troubles).

I don't think anyone thinks like that here in the UK. The Troubles were Irish separatists, and were not considered 'white' (or non-white), nor 'right-wing'. Irish violence (both terrorism and Mob-related) has been common enough in the last century to have its own category.

Just going by your message, what Slow Horses is doing is mixing the British fear of skinheads and working-class hooliganism with the fear of Islamist extremism. The IRA never used videoed beheadings as a method of stoking fear, they used shootings, bombings, torture and mutilation. Whereas al-Qaeda and ISIS were famed for it.

Whether reversing the races to present crimes committed by muslims against whites (to instead be crimes by whites against muslims) should be considered Culture War is something I leave to the reader's judgement. I suspect the primary reason for doing it is that it's politically easiest. Right-wing whites (especially working class ones) have no special interest groups worth a damn.

I think you are correct that it's because of easy targets and all the other usual CW stuff and at the same time the UK has had recent severe organized terrorism performed by Whites, unlike the US (which mostly has psychotic actions and a few small isolated political ones).

What I'm trying to say is that there's no semantic box in the British mind which contains both the IRA and the 'Sons of Albion'.

It would be like saying, "To understand the current reaction to Patriot Front, you need to understand America's history of white violence: the Italian Mafia ravaged America for nearly a decade".

No American (IMO) would write that. The Godfather portrays violence by whites, but it's not the same kind of violence and they're not the same whites.

Rightly or wrongly, there's a semantic cluster in the American mind which goes 'KKK -> Jim Crow lynchings -> Patriot Front'. There isn't one that goes 'Mafia -> Patriot Front'.

In the UK there is a semantic cluster containing 'Enoch Powell's rivers of blood speech -> Oswald Moseley -> the BNP and EDF -> Sons of Albion'. There is not IRA -> Sons of Albion.

But if you took a man off the street and gave him "recent severe organized terrorism performed by Whites" I doubt the IRA would leap to his tongue. He might get it eventually.

Perhaps for the British, but they are nearly a minority in their own country at this point, no?

Slow Horses is British, as is most of the BBC. Non-British don't think about the Troubles at all, they weren't there.

The UK is still about 85% British, and would be about 93% if we refused to give Citizenship to people who don't have it yet. It's the demographics of the young, and in the major cities, that is concerning.

for instance the question of if River is meant to be in Slough House

Yes he absolutely deserves to be there.

Putting aside the actual political incident the landed him in Slough House. The major reason he deserves to be there is that he is a bad spy. He's a great law enforcement agent, but a horrible spy. He really leaps before thinking, goes off half cocked, and routinely makes big messes or gets himself into really horrible spots because he doesn't think things through.

The incident with the glasshouse in the 2nd season is a peak "Cartwright" moment. He's just too moral, too much of a goody two shoes, a righteous knight to be an effective spy. He idolizes his grandfather but from all accounts, David was a right bastard. Lamb's a bastard, Lady Di is a bastard, Teerny is a bastard, Every good spy/spymaster we see is, morally, a piece of shit, because thats what it takes to play in that world.

Right, I think more perceptive watchers will pick this up quickly but at first you are supposed to think he isn't at fault. Later on it becomes clear he nearly has everything he needs but is justttttt off, not sure what will happen in future seasons/books, he may eventually put it together.

And at the same time - you also start to realize that with like only 3-4 exceptions, everyone else is the same as him or worse (even at the mothership). Cough cough dogs cough.

I'm not sure Lamb is a bastard, and I think perhaps his off-puttingness is part of his coping mechanism for not being one.

I feel River should have grown a bit. It annoyed me in season 4 (where I stopped) that the writers were keeping him in a kind of development stasis. In particular after some of the wild shit that had gone down in the previous season.

Probably, but I also don't think it is unreasonable for him to be portrayed as an idiot who is skilled, which makes him more dangerous and dysfunctional than most of the idiots who are corrupt or just idiots. Lack of growth goes along with that.

I suppose I resent as a viewer the notion that I should invest time on plots involving someone who is an irredeemable idiot.

I mean isn't the premise of the show using idiots to solve spy problems?

That is one of the premises--but Lamb is not incompetent. He is just a slob and has been eroded into a slob of a man. Even Taverner recognizes his worth. I think I was hoping Cartwright would develop somehow. Otherwise it's just Keystone Cops, the MI:5 version.

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I don't know, I think Slow Horses is pretty good.

I think this is a pretty shallow read. SH is a spy thriller, what is happening on the surface is not really the entire plot. The whole first season is about how the #2 in MI5 essentially created a situation so they can get money/prestige, but that situation goes off the rails. They instigate, fund, and organize a false flag with some local domestic disgruntles. If you are mad about "Right wing terrorists ends up being a false flag op of a bunch of glowies plus an actual nutter organized by girlboss" because it is "unrealistic", I point you to the Whitmer Kidnapping Plot, in which there is good evidence that the entire thing was setup by different alphabet soup agencies. If you are mad because its Hollywood making right-wing terrorists the big-bad, I recommend you chill the f out, and learn how to actually analyze cinema.

The institutional MI5, and the elites are the source of a the majority of the problems/villians throughout the series. They are portrayed as incompetent, Machiavellian, toxic, rife with abuse and mercenary behavior. This is not 24, or james bond where its a classic good-guy spies vs evil villains, its far too modern. The heroes of the entire series are the "Slow Horses", a cast of actual colossal fuck-ups, everyone of them being an actual loser for some reason or another, but who because they don't get with the toxic culture of the institutional MI5 have been exiled to a waste dumping zone. Being a spy thriller deconstruction, River Cartwright is what James Bond acts/looks like, and he a colossal fuck-up. Jackson Lamb is what actual spies operate like. Using actual wits, brains, tradecraft, and covert actions.

In addition this is an actual book series that is being adapted, and to my knowledge a fairly close adaption. So no, this is not Hollywood being Hollywood and taking the "shit on the right wing".

Haven't watched Slow Horses, but if you like this sort of stuff, I'd check out The Sandbaggers.

Does Hollywood imagine there are actually these sort of right wing terror cells just waiting to activate? Despite all evidence to the contrary and dozens if not hundreds of other instances of racial and political violence perpetrated against white people? Or is the goal to get boomers all worked up about dangerous right wing ideologies. Are they stupid or liars?

The number 1 rule of Hollywood is that they will never show an accurate representation of who is actually commiting crime/terrorism and who the victims are. Just look at decades of Law and Order and the defendants they showed.

Related, notice how the news media can carefully manage to never mention who is actually disproportionately committing violence against trans prostitutes, or causing so many Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, or engaging in sex trafficking of minors. Somehow, all those problems are caused by SocietyTM (aka white people) instead of the perpetrators commiting the crimes.

There was a L&O SVU episode a couple of decades back about a couple who were keeping an impoverished third-world woman as a slave.

The show had the couple be white. Every single instance of this scenario I've heard about has the "owners" the same ethnicity as the slave, but wealthy. Can't have Third World immigrants be portrayed as the bad guys, though, not even rich ones!

Or is the goal to get boomers all worked up about dangerous right wing ideologies.

Yes. They still trust whatever the TV tells them. The fact that many have left the reservation because they also trust whatever the TV on their phone tells them means the people still making trad media content feel like they need to triple-down on the propaganda even harder.

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