Slow Horses Season 6 Just Killed Off One Of The Show's Best Characters

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Spoilers follow.

"Slow Horses" Season 6 has fixed the main problem with Season 5, taming the comedy and focusing more on drama. While many fans will surely have been pleased at this tonal shift, almost nobody will be glad to see the death of Thomas Brooke's J.K. Coe, who in Season 6, Episode 4 goes out a hero in a fight with a Russian hitman.

"Slow Horses" has been killing off main characters since Olivia Cooke's Sidonie Baker (ostensibly) died in Season 1. In Season 6, Episode 4, entitled "Lost and Found," Coe becomes the latest victim when he takes on Kyle Soller's Russian assassin, known only as "Jim," in a rest stop bathroom. Unfortunately, we don't get to see much of the fight — just the aftermath, and it seems Coe didn't make it out of this battle alive.

After Coe, Sidonie (who returns earlier in Season 6), and River Cartwright (Jack Lowden) manage to escape from Jim and his fellow assassin "Jane" (MyAnna Buring), they make a stop at a service station. But the deadly duo catches up to them. Thankfully, the ever-vigilant Coe spots their arrival and calmly confronts Jim in the bathroom. "You FSB?" he asks, before Jim confirms that he's actually a member of the GRU, Russia's military intelligence service. The odds don't look good for Coe at that point but he nonetheless squares up to Jim and produces his trusty push knife. It's a brilliantly understated scene that ultimately ends in tragedy.

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"Slow Horses" Season 6 began with a major death and it looks as though the show is going to keep 'em coming now that J.K. Coe has been dispatched. The character joined "Slow Horses" in Season 4 and was an enigma from the moment he showed up at Slough House. We didn't learn much more about the hoodie-wearing mystery man as things progressed, either, which makes his death feel even more of a waste. 

That said, Coe did reveal a few details about his past during his Slough House tenure. "Before I was assigned here I was handcuffed against my will and tied to a chair for 72 hours," he tells Christopher Chung's Roddy Ho during Season 5, giving us a clue as to where his reserved, withdrawn nature might come from. Coe claims that, during this ordeal, a man threatened to cut open his stomach with an electric carving knife, and that's the end of that charming anecdote.

We do know Coe doesn't like to be touched. We also know he used to work in some sort of behavioral analysis/psychological evaluation role, and when River Cartwright and Coe go to question Roddy's supposed girlfriend in Season 5, he reveals a push knife — the same weapon he uses against Jim in what turns out to be his final battle.

Coe showed us just how deadly he was with his push knife in the "Slow Horses" Season 5 finale when he took out a terrorist threatening to kill Nick Mohammed's London Mayor Zafar Jaffrey. In that instance, however, he got the drop on his target. In "Lost and Found," he finds himself in a fight to the death.

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In "Slow Horses" Season 6, Episode 4, after Jim produces his own knife in the rest stop bathroom the camera cuts away and we're left to wonder what happened in the fight between him and J.K. Coe. At the very end of the episode, River Cartwright enters the bathroom to find a bloodied Coe slumped against the wall, headphones still playing. When he goes to check on his colleague, he finds Coe has been felled by a nasty laceration to his stomach.

While fans of Mick Herron's books, on which "Slow Horses" is based, will have been expecting this death, it's still tough to take. Coe dies in the sixth novel, "Joe Country" — one of the two books on which Season 6 is based (the other being "Slough House"). In that instance, however, he manages to slash his assailant's throat before going down. In "Slow Horses" Episode 4, we don't see what happens to Jim, but he's not present in the bathroom when River discovers Coe's body — suggesting he got away. Meanwhile, Coe dies alone and it's nothing short of a major bummer, not only because him taking out one of the assassins would have been a major crowd-pleasing moment, but because Coe was still a mystery waiting to be revealed, not to mention a fan-favorite character.

A quick look at Reddit should give you some idea of how beloved he is, with almost every user expressing their hope that Coe makes it out of Season 6 alive. Unfortunately, it looks as though he's gone for good — though "Slow Horses" did bring back Sidonie Baker this season. Unfortunately, it seems unlikely Coe will return.