Our four-legged race — Amos chasing Downey; Downey and Sarah chasing Dinah; Zoë chasing Downey and Sarah; the Ministry of Defense chasing … all of them — is headed to Scotland, where Dinah is being kept in a rat-infested room with agent-nurse-lady Steph and two random guys who, if nothing else, at least are kind of funny. Down Cemetery Road has maintained a quippy, cozy tone throughout. From Zoë and C’s memorable turns of phrase to the beautiful landscapes and rainy-weather vibe, it’s a show meant to be enjoyed as the weather cools.
But “Slow Dying” also probes the emotional depths of its characters and their situations. Take the bumbling Malik: Sitting in his office, thinking about what he’ll do with the freelancer he hired to kill Amos who isn’t replying to his texts, he gets a video call on his computer. Dinah’s face fills the screen. She wants to know where her mom is. Though Malik and Steph have the obligatory humorous back-and-forth, the tone shifts when Steph — who doesn’t even know Dinah’s parents are dead — asks Malik how he would feel if his kid were in this situation. He looks at a picture of his son on his desk and a cloud of emotion passes over his eyes. You can see how, to the outside world, Malik would read as a family man. He has memorized the lyrics to the children’s song that both her son and Dinah like; in the corner of his office is a dog bed, and a leash hangs on the coatrack. But the harshness of the job has beaten the wholesome out of him. Maybe that’s what all that bumbling is: the earnestness trying to hang on.
This whole episode is about how the jobs of most of our characters, mired as they are in death and self-preservation, have sucked the light out of them. Zoë loves to pretend she is a curmudgeonly misanthrope, but she clearly loves people. It’s obvious from the way she knows how to talk to them. Wayne, for example: When he shows up at her house early in the morning, after she has cleaned up the mess her intruders left (rude), he is prepared to connect on a deeper level. Though flattered, Zoë doesn’t want romance from him; she wants him to break into Wright’s laptop. Wayne takes his “rejection” in stride, and as he works to figure out Wright’s password, he talks to Zoë about how he has “never been able to progress in the old romance academy.” It makes the heart melt — even Zoë is softened. She tells him love will come when he least expects it. Who knows what other advice she might have given him if the computer hadn’t chimed.
If C could see the state of this computer, he would go ballistic. Not only is it not “firewalled to fuckery,” it has a folder that may as well be named Governmental Crimes right on the desktop. In it are subfolders labeled for the eight soldiers who were court-martialed. When Wayne and Zoë click on Downey’s name, they see a number of medical reports, all written by Wright and signed by C. With them are disturbing close-up photos of chemical burns. Wayne recognizes Downey’s tattoo as matching one that Tommy Singleton had. Zoë puts together that the soldiers were guinea pigs for the government, which Joe was on the verge of uncovering when he was murdered. Only one video file is encrypted. Zoë leaves Wayne with the task of decrypting it while she goes out to get answers from Wright.
Zoë quite literally barges into his office, nearly catching a patient with his pants down. She comes right out with it: She wants to talk about Tommy Singleton. It’s obvious to Wright that she took his laptop and already knows more than she should, so he tells her what he knows. He was tasked with monitoring the soldiers’ reactions to a chemical-weapon antidote called histropine. He doesn’t know which chemical weapon it is or where in Scotland this testing happened since he was taken there blindfolded in a chopper. The only thing Wright won’t tell Zoë is who hired him. By the time she leaves, her old repressed empathy shines through: She can tell the toll this inhuman job has taken on him. “Whistleblowing is all the rage,” she teases. Can we get that show?
A version of Down Cemetery Road that centers Wright’s morality crisis and his decision to tell the British people what they deserve to know about their government’s nefarious wartime tactics could also feature Amos’s random software girlfriend. What is up with this girl? She’s tending to the wound Amos sustained on his shoulder in his extremely brief fight for his life when he texts Malik back through one of the freelancers’ phones. Malik has been trying to get an answer from them for ages, so he’s relieved to get confirmation that the job was done; this relief is expressed through a single thumbs-up emoji, dad style. Then Amos tells Software GF they’ll never see each other again, and she’s like, “Okay.” What?
Amos’s first order of business is to check in with his old bosses. C is coming out of a meeting with his own boss, Secretary of Defense Talia, when Amos surprises him. Talia wanted to quickly touch base on whether there were any “dodgy deals” or “British-made weapons killing innocent people abroad” before asking the chancellor for more money for their department. C assured her there was nothing to worry about after taking a half-minute-long pause that gave Talia “Voldemort vibes.” That’s a total misread of C’s whole thing, no? I was never a big Harry Potter person, but am I right in thinking C’s more like … Snape? An evil proponent of the dark arts motivated by some tortured past?
When he fears for his life, the first thing C thinks about is his family. That’s what he tells Amos when he’s locked inside his chauffeured car: “I have a family.” Malik had just called to say that Zoë won’t bother them anymore and that Amos has been taken care of, when C catches Amos’s eyes in the rearview mirror. The look on C’s face indicates he knows he is about to die, but Amos wants to cut a deal. He wants to kill Downey because Downey killed his brother. In exchange, he will lead Downey to Dinah and “clean up” the whole thing, which is, incidentally, exactly what C wants. They shake on it; it’s the perfect deal for them. They should have thought of it sooner.
This deal has the advantage of sidestepping Malik, who is so out of the loop that he believes the freelancers are tracking Downey and Sarah. With that out of the way, he’s free to pursue his other task — to get Joe’s body out of the morgue and buried. He goes to Janice’s house to have her register the death, pretending to be “Mr. Howard” with the coroner’s office. He tells Janice there won’t be an inquest since the death was ruled as not suspicious. Zoë arrives just in time to stop Janice from signing anything, and she’s not buying the Howard impersonation. She makes sure Malik knows she isn’t scared of him or his messengers by slamming the door in his face.
That’s everything that happened in London and Oxford this week. But the most important development of “Slow Dying” is that we finally find out why the government wants Downey and Singleton dead. The episode opens with a nightmare/memory that comes to Downey as he sleeps in Paula’s Beemer. When he wakes up, he finds Sarah in the woods, practicing shooting. In the first of several aggravating things she will do this week, she almost shoots a gun with plugs in it, which would have blown off her arm. Downey is frustrated with her presence, which he calls a liability, but they agree that turning on Axel’s phone is the only way they’ll get a clue to where Dinah is. The phone has many missed calls from “A,” whom they call back. A is for Amos, who gets the call in the bathtub, the phone propped up on a rack as if he were scrolling TikTok. Amos doesn’t pick up, but he calls them back later, after he has struck his deal with C. Amos tells Downey that Dinah is “at the luxury spa” where Downey and his colleagues “convalesced,” i.e., somewhere in Scotland.
Sarah becomes so agitated that when a police car appears in her rearview mirror, she guns it despite Downey’s pleas for her to stay calm. The police were heading to an accident on a nearby off-ramp, not chasing them. Downey decides they have to ditch the car in light of Sarah’s “Popeye” Doyle impersonation. He suggests they walk to his sister’s house “nearby” — it’s 15 kilometers away, roughly 9.3 miles. That’s a long walk, but at least it’s through some elite-ass woods. Crossing the top of a waterfall, Sarah feels the pull of the drop and stops just short of indulging her intrusive thought to take the plunge. It’s a thought she is all too familiar with, which she explains to Downey when they sit for a break. Sarah’s leg is injured from the accident. Looking out on the village below, Sarah tells Downey about it and how she has always felt “different and weird, not in a good way.” It’s the most meaningfully they have connected so far. Their allegiance is touching not because they are more similar than they seem but because, despite their differences, they are united in their pursuit to find Dinah, each for their own reasons.
It’s a little fraught once they make it to Downey’s sister’s house, mainly because she, uh, thinks he’s dead. Downey asks Sarah to prepare her for the shock, but Sarah simply cannot pull herself out of the uselessness that has clung to her all episode so Downey pops his head in. Ella, his sister, looks like she’s seeing a ghost because she is, sort of. All Downey tells her is that they are trying to find Maddie and Tommy’s daughter, Dinah. He asks Ella not to tell their mom he’s alive, that he’ll do it himself once he’s out of this mess. Finally, he asks Ella if she will take Dinah. Ella doesn’t say “yes” explicitly, but we know she will from the way she says good-bye to her brother: She tells him she wants “to see that little girl.” After giving them food and new clothes — it was about time Sarah changed out of those horrific pale-pink silk pajamas into something cute and functional like track pants and a striped shirt — she sends them on their way to Scotland in her car.
That’s when Downey finally tells Sarah what happened in Afghanistan. Ella had tellingly said to Sarah that Downey “always loved Maddie,” which is how Sarah knows to ask, later, if Dinah is his kid — he thinks she may be, but he doesn’t know. All he knows is they were on patrol when insurgents attacked. As they were exchanging shots, a helicopter showered a substance Downey thought was snow before he remembered they were in the desert. This is the scene that opens the episode. Once it began to fall, Downey realized the insurgents were not enemies but kids. Worse, the “snow” was a chemical weapon that was burning them alive. Next thing he knew, he woke up in the “luxury spa” referred to by Amos, which was anything but a place to rest. The doctors ran experiments with histropine as if the soldiers were lab rats. But nothing was working and they were dying quickly, so they made a plan to escape. Only Downey and Singleton made it out. The night of the blast, the two had gotten into an argument, which is why he wasn’t there when the bomb went off. Sarah cries as she hears all this.
So that’s why the Ministry of Defense wants Downey dead: It would be very bad for the British government if word got out that they had tested chemical weapons against their own troops. And that’s why the soldiers never made it to trial — because they became fugitives of the state. Downey’s explanation is played over the video Wayne has managed to decrypt after an afternoon playing Joe’s records and eating egg rolls. In London, Zoë tails Wright back to his house. Amos is there waiting to push him down the stairs the minute he comes in. Zoë sees him through the window and waits behind a wall long enough to hear Amos tell someone on the phone, “I’ve done your dirty work, now I’m going to Scotland.” That’s how she knows to follow him to a train despite having to knee at least one random guy in the process. But Amos knows he’s being followed. Zoë has just entered the major leagues.
• Why did Wright have to get hurt? Did the Ministry of Defense somehow know he talked to Zoë, or is he being punished for his laissez-faire approach to data security?
• I loved noticing a North by Northwest poster in Zoë’s house. It tracks that Joe would have loved that movie!
• Malik impersonating an official from the coroner’s office with the name Mr. Howard is a nice reference for readers since Howard is the name of his counterpart in the book.
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