Slow Horses Season 6, Episode 4: J.K. Coe killed in bathroom fight with assassin Jim

Centre · 2In Season 6, Episode 4 of the Apple TV spy series Slow Horses, titled "Lost and Found", the Slough House agent J.K. Coe (Tom Brooke) is killed after a fight with the Russian assassin known as Jim (Kyle Soller) in a bathroom. 1 2 Centre · 1Earlier in the episode Coe rescues River Cartwright (Jack Lowden) and Sid Baker (Olivia Cooke), who is alive after being thought dead since Season 1, from the assassins Jim and Jane (MyAnna Buring), who have been killing former Slow Horses. 2 Centre · 1The fight itself is mostly not shown: the camera cuts away after Jim produces his own knife, and at the end of the episode River finds Coe slumped against the wall with a stomach wound and his headphones still playing. 1

Centre · 1Before the confrontation, Coe asks Jim whether he is FSB, and Jim says he is GRU, Russia's military intelligence service. Coe then shows the push knife he has carried since earlier seasons. 1 Centre · 1In an interview with Collider, Brooke said he wanted Coe's death to be the end of the character's story and raised it in one of his first conversations with showrunner Will Smith. He said he was offered three seasons at the start and understood why after reading the books. 2 Centre · 1Brooke said the books supply about four of the six episodes, and that author Mick Herron was keen for the show not to repeat the book story, telling the team to "Go for it". Season 6 combines two novels. 2

Centre · 1Brooke said he saw Coe as psychopathic, feeling "more human" the more people he killed, and as being at his peak in the bathroom. He said he and Soller rehearsed the fight and added a few touches, and that he wanted Coe's smile in the toilet to be the first and only time Coe is seen happy. 2 Centre · 1Brooke also described improvising with Cooke and Lowden in the car scene, where Coe offers the front seat to Sid, and said he and Ffion Edwards (Shirley) had noticed a recurring gun-passing moment between their characters that he raised with the writers. 2 Centre · 1Gaby Chiappe, who took over as head writer after Will Smith left, told /Film she finds the bathroom scene "so moving and so beautiful", with "no real animosity" between the two men. She said she had hoped Coe would survive and hopes his death "will count for people". 3

Centre · 1Chiappe described the bowling alley setting as "quite British", with a "Slow Horses-y sense of failure" and places to run, hide and attack from. /Film's interviewer likened the bathroom fight to the one in Mission: Impossible — Fallout. 3 Centre · 1In Mick Herron's novel Joe Country, Coe dies after slashing his attacker's throat, according to /Film. On screen Jim is not in the bathroom when River finds Coe, which /Film takes to mean he escaped. /Film says book readers expected the death but that the lack of a payoff makes it hard to take. 1 Centre · 2Episode 4 also ends with Sid being kidnapped, according to Collider. The final two episodes of the season are still to come. 2 3