Kingdon Isn't Popular Just Because Mel Is A Popular Character, Langdon Is Conventionally Attractive,

Maybe. Or addicts can love their kids and at the same time be a bad parent in some ways because of their addiction. Sometimes people with a substance abuse problem can turn it on and superficially keep it together in some settings but not in all aspects of their life all of the time.

Honestly, I hate this idea that because he visibly loves his kids that means that his addiction can't possibly be negatively affecting his parenting. You can love your kids a lot and also fail them in some ways. You can love your kids a lot and still choose your substance over them sometimes. It's not always black and white. And I think it's extremely unrealistic to think that someone with a drug dependence serious enough to motivate them to commit crime and endanger their job (that is the culmination of years and $100ks of training) is able to just completely separate the effects of that addiction from other significant parts of their life.

There's love in the sense of the emotions you feel for someone and then there's love in the sense of how you actually show up for someone. Those two things don't always align.

frank langdon isn't a bad dad because the whole point is that he's an addict that doesn't "appear" to be an addict. he's functional, he's alert, he is focused and engaged and yes, at times, erratic on account of the drugs in his veins but he is always present and if he's that way in the e.r., it stands to reason that he would be that way at home too. he's probably a bad husband to his wife because they don't want to be with each other. if we're being honest. that tends to make you a bit shit at things, when you have to do them and you don't wanna. but he wants to be a dad. he wears his kid's bracelet on his wrist. he calls them just to hear their little voices. he's locked in on the dad thing and, finally, i think that if you're a person who is analyzing the pitt and the conclusion you come to is that frank is a drug addict ergo frank is a bad dad then i think that speaks more to a subconscious and unjustified association between addiction (an illness) and one's personal value to the tune of addicts have no distinguishable personhood outside of their addiction and non-addicts do which is probably not great but understandable considering how disdainful and hateful the world at large is to addiction as a concept. anyway.

SLOW HORSES (2022 — ) 🐴✨

How do you picture young Jackson Lamb? Gary Oldman in State of Grace for very young, and then him in Romeo Is Bleeding/Leon while in Berlin

There are so many pictures from State of Grace where I see Jackson…

This moment, for example, gives me

This

And this gives me Standing by the Wall (Jackson, Molly, Otis photo)

Romeo Is Bleeding & Leon ? Maybe Jackson undercover if he had to cut his hair…. 🙃

And bonus: when I see Gary as Rosencrantz I think baby Jackson 😁

For my money, the most (only?) interesting thing about Frank Harkness is seeing where River Cartwright gets his crazy streak from.

River spent most of his childhood and youth raised by his grandparents, in what I can only imagine was a mostly pleasant stereotypically repressed British upbringing. His hometown is wealthy and picturesque. He probably went to a nice university and did mostly normal university things there. And yet he is, canonically, a maniac, who is ready to commit violence at any given moment. My two favourite examples:

s1: beats his erstwhile friend unconscious

s2: chokes a random cab driver (and then tells him "I'm one of the good ones". Lol, okay honey bunny)

And he also has the other side of the coin, which is that he's unruffled by the prospect of enduring physical violence himself.

And Frank sees this in him, instinctually.

When Frank tells Taverner that River is a poor fit for MI-5 and that's why he's mouldering in Slough House - ask yourself, where is the lie? River is constitutionally ill-suited for life in a modern bureaucratic institution, even if that institution does spy stuff.

He would never join Frank's operation because unlike Frank, he has good in him, or at least he wants to do good. But ooh, he also wants to be good at what he's doing. He wants to feel good in the way you feel good when you're doing something that comes naturally to you.

The most best thing about the scene between Frank and River at the bar in season 4 is when Frank gives him a few crumbs of praise and River just fucking eats it up, despite himself. Because actually he IS good at the kinetic stuff. But what drives that side of him is also what gets him continually shit on by the Service. And it must feel amazingly good to have someone recognize and validate that potential in him, even if it's coming from his nutcase absent father.

Lamb sees River's potential, of course, but he never shows it or overtly encourages him because Lamb understands him and knows that he's already got a big head and no impulse control and that he needs to learn to get over himself and calm the fuck down. He doesn't need the OB filling his head with Rudyard Kipling nonsense or Frank Harkness selling him American-style on the glamour of being a mercenary. He needs someone who can show him how the world, in all its ugliness, really works. That's what's going to keep him alive and possibly intact in some sense.

I think this is all pretty obvious but I've been trying and failing to plot a River Harkness AU so here are some thoughts that arose on father/son dynamics.

Thoughts inspired by @saulbetter's recent posts.

This show is kind of sold or discussed as "spies! but they suck at being spies!" But the thing that all the slow horses actually have in common isn't that they're bad spies, it's that they're people without social capital. They actually range from competent to excellent at the technical aspects of their work (Ho, Catherine, Marcus, Shirley, Coe, and even River are all good at the hard skills of their jobs. We are told Louisa screwed up but in both show and books she is shown to be one of the most reliable performers on the team). But they don't have friends or patrons to protect them when things go sideways.

The reason they're the rejects is because they're loners who struggle to connect with other people for all their various reasons (childhood trauma, job-related PTSD, addiction, personality disorder, inherent temperament). So they're playing checkers when their internal opponents at Regent's Park are playing chess. To the extent that they even realize that the social/political game exists (Ho and Catherine mostly don’t), they're bad at it (Coe, Lech) and/or think they shouldn't have to play it (Marcus, Shirley). River impressively manages to be deficient in all three aspects: totally naive to the politics of advancement within the Park, bad with people, and so committed to his own view of himself as a Boy Scout that he thinks he shouldn't have to sully his hands with any of it.

This is why the show is such a brilliant office drama. This one is for all the folks who are good on paper but bomb in interviews, for all the people who are promoted based on their technical mastery and then shit the bed as managers because they're illiterate at reading people. This is why it's such a stroke of genius that River's ascendant career is cut off at the knees by tailing Taverner. He's so full of himself and such a try hard that he mistakenly thinks doing an unrequested extra credit assignment about his boss makes him clever instead of creepy, annoying, and red flagged as a potential troublemaker.

Unfortunately, because Mick Herron is unable to let the story or the characters grow, this excellent premise results in some deep weirdness later in the book series. (Weirder than the deadbeat dad child soldier sex cult plotline, you say? Idk, you be the judge.)

Book spoilers under the cut.

First, let’s talk about Lech Wicinski. (I know, no one wants to talk about Lech Wicinski, but he is the curly-haired insomniac introvert of my heart so I’m going to talk about him.) I love Lech but parts of his origin story are so stupid. He’s just a normal guy who is comfortable in his niche and relatively unambitious and gets screwed by ambitious people’s big ego shenanigans, which he falls into by accident when he unthinkingly steps outside his work comfort zone for a minute. So far, so good. But then, while he’s desperately trying to save his job and reputation, he’s also… not? Like, why would this sort of overly serious but otherwise very normal young-ish middle class man immediately and inexplicably decide not to seek medical treatment for a profoundly disfiguring injury? Why does he never even actually try to show to his fiancee that the revelation that causes the breakdown of their relationship was completely fictitious? It makes no sense! Except, the author is lazily destroying Lech’s social capital to make it make sense that he’s now a slow horse for life. 

Similarly, River can’t have Sid in S1 because she is a bright and well-rounded person while he is cute but also an idiot nepo baby manchild. So do the books resolve this imbalance by allowing River to grow - or even just change - in response to various challenges like dashed career aspirations, finally meeting his psychopath biodad, the steep mental decline of his beloved father figure, etc? No. Instead of letting River at least attempt to grow up, the books put River and Sid on a level by cutting Sid down instead - putting her in protection (ie. cutting all her social ties) and giving her a traumatic brain injury that hollows out her previously bright personality. Heaven knows we’re all miserable now. Sure do hope they fix that plotline for the show! I love them as endgame and I honestly think the show could do something so satisfying and poignant with them finally finding their missed connection but the books make the way they finally get together so creepy and sad.

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Slow Horses (TV), Slough House - Mick Herron Rating: Explicit Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: River Cartwright/Diana Taverner Characters: River Cartwright, Diana Taverner, James "Spider" Webb Summary:

Her friends are so jealous / You know how bad girls get / Sometimes it's not so easy / To be the teacher's pet

Cartwright catches Taverner's attention during training. HR violations ensue.

🏛️ THE GREEK PITT-THEON 🏛️

Never in my life have I wanted two people to lose focus and have a consensual workplace relationship than I have with Langdon and Mel. For many reasons, but mostly because so many people, even her fans, seem to see Mel as this Incorruptible Fairy of Pureness and Good who will help fix Langdon as he comes back from rehab. And I think Mel deserves better than that.

Look, I see a lot of myself in Mel. I’m not autistic, but I am very awkward and anxious and tend to cope with that by being cheerful and overly kind. I give a lot to anything I do and everyone around me, frequently to my own detriment. And treating these qualities like they make someone too good for bad decisions isn’t admiring or flattering or positive representation. It’s infantilizing. To imply that Mel being autistic or even just awkward and anxious makes her incapable of questionable moral choices is demeaning. It treats her as someone who is an ideal, not a person, because people make bad choices. That doesn’t make them bad people (see Langdon and his drug use— bad choice, good person), it just makes them human. So acting like Mel is inherently above that just denies her humanity and personhood, or frames her as incapable of understanding bad choices the same way a child is. So, for Mel to be seen as a full adult, she and Langdon need to have an affair. Not an emotional affair that can be swept away as Mel not understanding relationships, but a full-blown, physical, banging-in-the-on-call-room-until-someone-catches-them-and-even-then-they-don’t-stop-just-yell-for-them-to-leave affair.

TL;DR: Mel and Langdon need to have an affair to push back against ableism.

RIVER CARTWRIGHT ● Slow Horses S02E05

Chinese street fashion in Chengdu

Videos compiled by me. Videos were filmed with the subject's knowledge.

song: 好久不见 - Lil Jet