Slow Horses Season 6 Episode 3: Why Was Sid Baker’s Death Faked for Three Years?

Sid Baker has been dead for three years, at least on paper, and Slow Horses Season 6 Episode 3 finally confirms that MI5 helped keep that fiction alive after she survived being shot. Slow Horses Season 6 Episode 2 brings River face-to-face with Sid, whom he had mourned since Season 1. However, their reunion opens another can of worms. Sid has scars, three missing years, and an MI5 story to explain, while two assassins at David’s house prove the past is far from buried.

Why Did MI5 Fake Sid Baker’s Death?

Credit: Apple TV

River’s first response to Sid is relief mixed with anger, and I can’t blame him. He spent three years carrying guilt over her supposed death, while she never contacted him once. Sid explains that the gunshot was real. Her scar remains visible, and she still suffers pain from the injury. After she began recovering in a London hospital, Diana Taverner arranged for her to be moved to an English village, where she spent the next three years recuperating and remaining out of sight.

The reason appears tied to an MI5 mess nobody wanted exposed. Moody, an MI5 operative doing Taverner’s dirty work, had shot Sid, so allowing her survival to become public knowledge could have opened an inconvenient can of worms for the agency. Her death was consequently allowed to become the accepted story while Sid disappeared from her former colleagues’ lives.

River doesn’t get much time to digest that betrayal because “Jim” and “Jane” arrive looking for blood. Sid assumes they have come for her, and she and River spend much of the episode dodging them through fields, cattle sheds, and an elderly woman’s home until JK Coe arrives to help. Yet Sid may have misread the danger. The assassins appear to have gone to David’s house looking for River and are surprised to encounter her there. Forbes similarly notes that Sid’s exact place in their hit list remains uncertain.

Does Sid’s Kazan Story Point Back to Taverner?

Credit: Apple TV

Sid has another reason for believing somebody wants her dead, and this one leads all the way to Russia. Weeks earlier, she received orders telling her to travel to Kazan. Her handler later dismissed them as a system glitch, but assassins began searching her village soon afterward. While fleeing with River, Sid discovers that a woman has been murdered in Kazan in what was reported as a botched robbery, although two gunshots to the head hardly scream petty theft. River develops a disturbing theory: someone may have used Sid Baker’s identity for the Kazan operation and generated travel records to make it appear that the real Sid carried it out.

His suspicion falls on Taverner. There is no confirmation yet that she engineered the travel order or the killing, so I wouldn’t put the handcuffs on Diana quite yet. The Russian connection itself has considerably firmer footing because Jane slips into Russian during the chase before Jim reprimands her for speaking the language. Sid still trusts Taverner enough to call her from a payphone despite River and Coe warning her that Regent’s Park may be compromised. After three years of being hidden by MI5, that faith could prove either remarkably perceptive or spectacularly misplaced.

Moira Lives as Lamb Corners Taverner

Credit: Apple TV

Sid isn’t the episode’s only resurrection. Catherine Standish and Shirley Dander collect Louisa Guy from her new corporate job before checking Moira’s house, where they smell gas and discover her unconscious. Jim and Jane had incapacitated her and staged a leak, but the Slow Horses arrive before it finishes the job. Moira survives, although her rescue rather memorably involves vomiting into Catherine’s handbag while Louisa and Shirley seek a weapon from Marcus’ old illegal gun dealer.

Lamb has a different missing person to retrieve. He and Roddy track down Reece Nesmith, whose father Andrew was murdered by Harkness. Reece tells Lamb that Andrew stole a hard-copy file from Regent’s Park and tried leveraging it for more money before Harkness killed him. That sends Lamb straight to Taverner. Lamb suspects the stolen file exposed former and current Slough House agents, explaining how someone keeps finding them. Taverner denies involvement, while Andrew’s death muddies the waters further. After Oliver Nash grills her over her disastrous TV appearance, she takes it out on Emma Flyte and demotes her to Slough House.

For me, Sid’s return makes the conspiracy more intriguing because MI5 has already demonstrated that it can erase a living agent from everyone’s lives when secrecy demands it. Whether Taverner once protected Sid or merely protected herself is the distinction Season 6 still owes us. Did Taverner hide Sid to protect her, or was Sid another inconvenient secret MI5 needed buried? And who used her identity in Kazan? Bring your best spy theory to the comments, and follow FandomWire for more Slow Horses coverage.

Slow Horses Season 6 is streaming on Apple TV.