Slow Horses Season 6's First Major Death Brings Back A Forgotten Season 1 Character

Warning: This article contains spoilers for the Season 6 premiere of "Slow Horses," "Circle of Life."

Say what you will about the flatulent-heavy antics of "Slow Horses," but the Apple TV spy series has always carried a certain ruthless streak ever since it first arrived on the scene. To date, every season has featured significant character deaths (or mysterious disappearances, like Olivia Cooke's Sid Baker) that reinforce the threat posed to everyone misguided enough to choose espionage as their line of work. Not even our exiled castaways of Slough Horse are immune to such consequences — in fact, they frequently find themselves in the crosshairs because of their associations with the security services based in the Park.

The Season 6 premiere, titled "Circle of Life," appears to be setting up quite the conspiracy for our Slow Horses. The cold open kicks off in surprising fashion, bringing us back to an old "friend" who's remained comfortably out of sight and out of mind since the very first season of the show. Allow us to (re)introduce you to Struan Loy, the ineffectual agent played by actor Paul Higgins. When we catch up with him, he's been drummed out of the service for his backstabbing actions in Season 1. Now working as a martial arts teacher for a class of disinterested kids, he spends his days hawking a sketchy real-estate scheme on the side to anyone who'll listen. Such a humble existence wouldn't seem to paint him as a target of an assassination, but that's precisely what happens as his grisly death at the hands of two mysterious killers kicks off the events of the new season.

While none of our Slow Horses are all that broken up about it, Struan's death clearly hints at something much deeper and darker at work here.

Even by the typically unsavory standards of Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman), his contemptuous reaction to the news of Struan Loy's death is beyond the pale — although not entirely undeserved. The former Slow Horse spent much of Season 1 annoying colleagues like River Cartwright (Jack Lowden) and Louisa Guy (Rosalind Eleazar) with his incessant pleas to spend social time together off the clock. But his greatest sin was much more unforgivable than that. When Slough House is set up to take the fall for an operation gone horribly awry, involving a domestic terrorist group known as the Sons of Albion, Loy is one of the first Slow Horses picked up by the Park and interrogated sharply by Diana Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas).

When threatened into incriminating his boss and throwing Lamb under the bus, Loy hardly even hesitates to do so ... and earns the eternal disdain of both the Park and Slough House for his efforts.

So how does such a low-level ex-agent end up becoming #1 on the target list? That's one of the many unanswered questions left hanging by the Season 6 premiere, though we certainly have a few clues to go on. For one thing, his complete insignificance to his former team makes it that much more likely that his death would go unnoticed — though this is proven wrong when Lamb takes immediate interest in such suspicious circumstances. For another, the assassins soon move on to another Slow Horse in Kay White, a character from "Slough House" author Mick Herron's novels, whose death suggests a disturbing pattern. Whatever the reason, our heroes better watch their backs.

New episodes of "Slow Horses" streams on Apple TV every Wednesday.