Latest Posts by generalpenguinangel - Page 2
Jack Lowden as River Cartwright Slow Horses – S01E03 – Bad Tradecraft
Jack Lowden as River Cartwright Slow Horses – S04E03 – Penny for Your Thoughts
AU where instead of being spies the Slough House gang are in an unsuccessful punk band called Idiot Activity. Lamb is their long-suffering manager. Taverner is head of A&R at the record label who keeps them on the books as a tax write off.
Idiot activity
"[I] might throw a few dance moves here and there."
[BOOK SPOILERS/speculation]
Please tell me this means they filmed the club scene. Please. I need Roddy wearing his sunglasses at night. I need Shirley in her natural element. I need the gang brutally dunking on River for how shit he is at picking up women.
I NEED THIS, GUYS.
Generally, I'm not sure I totally get the whole "whump" thing. But that first gif, where he's being perp walked out of the Park by Hobbs with blood all over his face? Is that what you guys are talking about?
JACK LOWDEN as River Cartwright in SLOW HORSES Season 3 (2023)
Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Slow Horses (TV), Slough House - Mick Herron Rating: Explicit Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Sidonie "Sid" Baker/River Cartwright Characters: River Cartwright, Sidonie "Sid" Baker Additional Tags: Fake/Pretend Relationship, OCs (secondary characters), Co-workers to lovers, One Night Stands Summary:
Sid asks River to be her date to fool her friends into thinking she's moved on from a bad break up. In a surprise to no one who's ever read a romance novel, the only one she's fooling is herself.
(I think maybe you could consider this fluff if you're willing to overlook the teensy tiny ethical violation of banging someone you have under surveillance.)
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 😁
set dec saturday
from these below 100% exposure, shadow removed screen shots of River's bedroom from 4x04
Dr No. Poster- [setdec creation]
I can't find the exact photo they used to make it but it says 'Dr No.' + 'Ian Fleming' on it over a photo of Ursula Andress as Honey Ryder in the 1962 movie-- the closest photos i could find are:
100 years of flight poster- [setdec creation]
Based on this Poster in a 2003 issue of National Geographic which works because he has a few national geographics on his windowsill
Old map of Cornwall- [real!]
Overhead View of London- [Real!]
Six Nations Fixtures | '05 (or 02 or 03)- [idk real or not]
Postcards: Iceland, Whistler, Kenya
River in the first frame all "can't you just abandon me in the garden and leave like an adult with some fucking dignity instead of embarrassing us both in front of my friend"
Revisiting this scene for giffing inspired by @countessrivers posting about it the other day bc it really is just. River's expression in the first one is so just, fascinating. Exhausted and disappointed and realising he's been betrayed again, but still just overwhelming sad about it. The way his eyes track down to look at Spider's hand clutching onto him, his lips, his eyes, the last contact they'll ever have, and then it's just.
So deeply embarrassing and pathetic!! Spider being like. hah! You moron! worried about children dying! Louisa just. Had enough. The 'sniper' going for his 'gun', pulling the most insane faces in the background. Spider gripping River's clothes about as long he can justify it's all so -
why can't you just break up like normal people?
'You... thumped?
Jack Lowden as River Cartwright Slow Horses – S01E04 – Visiting Hours
River Cartwright versus a flashbox Slow Horses
Jack Lowden as River Cartwright Slow Horses – S01E01 – Failure’s Contagious
⚡️10 People I want to know better ⚡️
Thanks @daydreamgoddess14 for tagging me. I'm doing this so I will feel like less of a creep commenting all over your fic. 😄
Last song: Death From Above 1979 - Romantic Rights
Favorite color: green
Last movie: Barbie? I think?
Last TV show: Shafted (aka Super Males)
Sweet/savoury/spicy: Thai food so I can have them all at once
Relationship status: married
Last thing I googled: "requin ou raquin"
Current obsession: Slow Horses/Slough House series, Jack Lowden, Paul Mescal (I've never seen anything this man has been in but I watch his interviews, wtf self). I'm about to finally start Onyx Storm, so good chance I'll get pulled back into those books (they are so bad! but also so addictive).
Looking forward to: The improv class I signed up for starts next week.
No pressure tags: @ghost-woods @jamietarttsnorthernattitude @rivercartwrong @bobfloydpilled @too-many-rooks @cartwrong @ofnightandlight @louisaguy
All of this. I am so obsessed with imagining their relationship before the series starts.
Also, River is all about River in a lot of ways. And he's sad about Spider's death because it's not only the final death of what their *relationship* once was, it's also a symbol of him losing who *he* once was. Or who he thought he was going to be.
I think that the insane yearning and obsession they have for each other is driven a lot by how needy they both are for a certain kind of success and recognition. They recognize each other as fellow travellers. They also have those feelings you have when you have a crush on someone and it's kind of about how you think that person has something amazing about them that makes you want to bask in their aura but also you kind of resent them because you're envious of their sparkle.
The seething disdain they feel for each other after the Falling Out is a reflection of their disappointment in how the other has failed to live up to the (still nascent) image they projected and the grimy mirror that holds up to their own respective reflections.
Instead of Britain's most dangerous field asset, River is a fuck up who can't follow basic instructions (for his surveillance assignment - hence Stanstead/King's Cross). Instead of an astute political operative climbing the ranks and pulling strings behind the scenes, James is babysitting a bunch of filing cabinets and only gets trotted out when some woman with actual power needs a biddable warm body for her own purposes. They both suck and they hate looking at the other man and being reminded of the abjectness of failure, of falling short, of being so desperately close but so far. It's embarrassing watching the other one hanging from the cliff by his fingernails while he puts on a show like he's still climbing the mountain.
I think the saddest thing about their relationship is that these boys never even really knew each other. And they couldn't because they didn't even know themselves. They were too young and trying too desperately to outrun themselves and become perfect, unassailable, lovable.
They're both so deeply lonely. And then Spider dies and River is even more alone. They ended up hating each other but James also understood what it was like to live with that black hole in the centre of himself and there was a type of company in that, even after the love was gone.
river and spider are just such a tragedy to me. the way they both (in the books) are just. constantly wistfully thinking about Back When They Were Friends… and it’s about more than just their friendship in a lot of ways, it’s that Back Then was when they still had bright unbounded futures, back when they thought they’d wander straight into influential spots at the service and be bestest friends forever while they changed the world and got everything they ever wanted.
and like. the thing is, that is already gone. they’re never getting that back. even if they somehow put all their bitterness and history aside and became close again, it wouldn’t be the same as before… they’ll never get that youthful optimism that (in my head at least) defined their pre-series relationship back. that version of their friendship is gone forever already.
but then spider dies and, well. now it’s really really gone. now even the hope of a “different from before but close enough to what they had once” reunion is gone.
just. agh. this idea of like. that, that version of their relationship, the version that they miss, is already dead and buried before the series starts and there’s no getting it back. there’s already no getting it back. but they still keep hoping (or at least, river keeps hoping, though i think spider does too) that it somehow, against all rules of logic, WILL come back anyway. until spider dies and river has to face that that hope, while impossible before anyway, it now for real actually impossible impossible…
heartbreaking, man. they’re such a tragedy.
god there is nothing more embarrassing than feeling like you're going to self-combust with emotion over your special little rpf guy. he is LITERALLY just some dude. just a straight man walking around in the world living his life clocking in at his day job ho-hum. and yet here you are. down so bad it's frankly humiliating to witness. heart fucking racing. face flushed. ribcage about to explode with the unbearable intensity of your eeeeeeeeeeeee feelings. girl get a grip
Jack Lowden perfects the triple take - The Graham Norton Show
Workplace sexual harassment!
Bonus frowny face;
quintessential jack lowden tongue acting
River Cartwright is Harry Potter and James Webb is Draco Malfoy.
Discuss.
Would you believe me if I told you this occurred to me about 5 minutes after my previous post and I was like "Oh. DUH."
The whiplash i get from seeing season one feotus zygote river- bro was a little stream a canal at best- and season two's I'm just a little lad who loves berries and cream river with the nerdy specs and sneakers
AND FRICKIN DAD BOD RIVER IN SEASON THREE? WHOS A LITTLE ROUGH AROUND THE EDGES AND MEAN LOOKING?
like i understand that season one and two were filmed one after the other and in the break before season three jack lowden had to play a- lmao- 'jacked' up mafia gangster in a biopic tv show BUT STILL
In the slow horses universe, what'dya guys think happened to him in the interim? Looking like he drank depresso expresso no milk extra salt every morning ass character development
SLOW HORSES 3.01
I think post s2 is when it really sinks in for him that it's not all just a clerical error and he's never going back to the Park. And he starts to realize that the Park isn't a club he really wants to be part of anyway. So the look fits even though it's really just because Jack Lowden beefed up for his role in The Gold.
Follow up question: what happened between s3 and s4 that prompted him to cut all his hair off like a girl suffering major situational depression after a bad break up?
The whiplash i get from seeing season one feotus zygote river- bro was a little stream a canal at best- and season two's I'm just a little lad who loves berries and cream river with the nerdy specs and sneakers
AND FRICKIN DAD BOD RIVER IN SEASON THREE? WHOS A LITTLE ROUGH AROUND THE EDGES AND MEAN LOOKING?
like i understand that season one and two were filmed one after the other and in the break before season three jack lowden had to play a- lmao- 'jacked' up mafia gangster in a biopic tv show BUT STILL
In the slow horses universe, what'dya guys think happened to him in the interim? Looking like he drank depresso expresso no milk extra salt every morning ass character development
JACK LOWDEN Slow Horses 3.04 "Uninvited Guests"
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.
JACK LOWDEN as River Cartwright in Slow Horses (Season 2)
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.
Not exactly my thing but reblogging because I like the energy. Those two would make River and Spider look like two kittens fighting over a piece of string.
I'm only 2 and a bit seasons in but by some cursory ao3 scrolling it seems no one is matching my freak re: Slow Horses
not one single fic for Jackson Lamb/David Cartwright? Hello??? Don't call yourself a fan of old man yaoi if you don't want Jonathan Pryce and Gary Oldman to fuck nasty. Gary Oldman yaoi, come on, it's IN THE NAME