A mass shooting in an open shopping square. A divisive election that’s roiling London. An attempted hit on a Slough House MI5 agent. And Gary Oldman‘s ever-arch Jackson Lamb telling one of his underlings to give him information about it all quickly, “so I can tell you to f**k off and finish my breakfast in peace.”

Season 5 of the richly layered Slow Horses begins with a bang indeed. “With every season, it’s a level up,” says series costar Christopher Chung. “There’s more suspense, more thrills, and this season there’s a bit more of a comedic tone. But really, what we’ve given the audience is something they’ve been asking for the past four seasons — more Roddy Ho.”

Chung’s laugh line has a ring of truth since his Roddy, the team’s lovelorn and agonizingly naïve computer expert, is at the center of the action. Dating Tara (Hiba Bennani), a woman way out of his league, he refuses to see her possible involvement in a violent plot that could affect the reelection of London’s mayor (Ted Lasso’s Nick Mohammed).

For Roddy, it is at least a step up — last season, he was “dating” someone that turned out to be a bot. Then again, he’s hardly alone among his fellows in dealing this season with dashed hopes and a greater sense of isolation. River (Jack Lowden) suffers from a triple dose of shock and abandonment, first due to his grandfather’s (Jonathan Pryce) increasing dementia, then from his closest crew-mate Louisa’s (Rosalind Eleazar) impending retirement, and third from last season’s revelation that his birth father was psychopathic ex-CIA hired gun Frank Harkness (Hugo Weaving), a man willing to kill him. For Shirley (Aimee-Ffion Edwards), while her instincts for danger remain sound, the trauma comes from memories of watching her work partner Marcus get shot and killed in the office during last season’s final standoff. These frayed spies all pretend to be OK; none are.

“A lot of this show is about connection. And there’s a little bit more heart and soul coming through,” says Chung. “And all of those traumas that we have that color Slough House are immediately elevated in some way through the comedic tone that we have throughout the piece.”

Some of that dark humor comes with the continually mercurial slow horse J.K. Coe (Tom Brooke), ever keeping his earbuds in — until he makes some out-of-left-field pronouncement about the terrorism he sees that just might be true.

Such twists are common for fans used to seeing Lamb’s group of demoted agents step up once MI5’s top spies — including Kristen Scott Thomas’s Deputy Director General Diana Taverner — bungle investigations while the slow horses, led by Lamb’s field smarts, save the day.

The Park, where all the main MI5 action is, has its own dilemmas, all centered around Taverner’s boss, First Desk Claude Whelan (James Callis), who remains lacking in all cogent areas except ego.

It’s a mess, but will it end that way? Not if Lamb can help it, and fans have come to expect the Slow Horses’ savviness the same way they welcome each new Jackson Lamb fart joke (and my goodness, this season has a doozy).

“[Showrunner Will Smith] has such a brilliant way of reinventing the formula, which is so special because he manages to make every season just slightly different enough that keeps the audience engaged, even when they know where the story is going to take them,” says Chung. “And that’s a really difficult thing to do.”

Slow Horses, Season 5 Premiere, Wednesday, September 24, Apple TV+