[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Slow Horses Season 5 Episode 3 “Tall Tales.”]

With Slough House in lockdown, Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman) shockingly opens up about a heartbreaking moment from his past … or lies about the whole thing to send a message to his team so they can stage their escape in the Wednesday, October 8, episode of Slow Horses.

Lamb tells the story of someone who was tortured, the skin on the soles of his feet burned off, then had to watch the woman he’d been involved with — as close to love as he could get — be put through the same agony and killed, all for a name he couldn’t give them because he didn’t know it. Worse: She was pregnant. The team then uses details from that story to escape from their MI5 guards. After, Standish (Saskia Reeves) asks if it was about him, and Lamb says he made it up.

The Slow Horses team isn’t saying if Lamb was revealing a part of his past, but either way, executive producer Will Smith agrees with TV Insider that it says a lot about his state of mind that Lamb told such a dark story.

“Even if none of it happened, the fact that you can think that, can summon that in the moment, says you probably have some issues. I mean, it’s very, very dark. And where we wanted to leave that was just a question mark really: Did it happen or not? Did it happen to this other person?” explains Smith, “Because the way Gary does it, Gary completely draws you in. You believe it, I feel, and certainly the other characters in the room completely believe it. And then when it’s like, oh, it was a thing to tip people off about stuff, you think, well, he must’ve just been making that stuff up to fit the objects that were in the room that would help them break out. But then Catherine’s onto him, and you’re like, is there any element of that that’s true? What has he been through?”

Smith also praises Oldman’s work in that scene, which he brought his son to set for. “I was like, ‘You’ve got to come and watch this, and when you’re older, you’ll really appreciate how lucky you are to come and watch Gary Oldman do take after take of this,’” he says. “And all the other actors, it was like we got a one-man show, one-man play all day of Gary just doing the speech, and it’s the detail, the little flickers and looks that just tell you there’s something more going on. It is just so amazing what he does in that.”

For us, it’s his use of the word love when detailing his torturers burning the skin off the beautiful face of the woman that stands out.

“Yeah, and there’s a look he does, there’s a sort of pause, I think it’s after he says, he got sloppy, it’s a lonely life. And then he does a kind of little look and a breath, and you’re like, oh, you definitely fell in love with someone at some point and got sloppy, and it might not be this person, but he’s drawing on something, I think,” Smith adds. “But it’s totally open. It’s up to the audience to decide.”

Director Saul Metzstein reveals that while they “virtually don’t do any rehearsals with the lead actors,” they did with that scene. “Normally, I don’t quite tell them where to stand. I do devious things to make them do what I want to do, but I need them to find it, if you know what I mean. But in this particular instance, you actually have to make some dialogue coverage work into an action sequence,” he explains.

“It has a very interesting problem, which is how you do a scene which is about a bunch of people talking, which then turns into an action sequence. And all I can say is that it took extra work,” he continues. “It’s something you really have to make them understand it’s not a normal situation that they can [say], my character wants to walk over there. They can’t because this is going to destroy the whole next scene.”

He adds, “Even though it’s tightly plotted and it’s complicated and is quite a lot of structure and underlying plumbing and mechanics going on, you absolutely want it not to feel like that is a show. That’s in a way the sleight of hand. It is actually very structured, but the minute it would feel structured, the minute you feel like you’re forcing the character to do something, I think you’re in trouble with this sort of drama because you have to not see that join. Of course, Gary delivers it so well, and there are all just these little looks. I have to credit Zsófia [Tálas], who edited that one. Just finding all these little moments and tying it all together again, telling you what’s going to happen, but not so much that it’s super set up. And also, you don’t really want to interrupt Gary’s monologue that much because that’s a weird thing, this guy acting his socks of,f and then we cut to somebody holding a lighter. It’s a sort of delicate problem.”

Meanwhile, Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas) has brought Roddy Ho (Christopher Chung) into the Park and interrogates him after an attempt on his life, and his girlfriend is likely involved (she did set him up).

“Roddy Ho and Taverner is a double act that you never knew you needed until it existed,” says Metzstein. “We had so much fun shooting the scenes with Taverner and Ho, partially because of course a character like Taverner has to do a lot of expositional work because she’s, in a way, the straight [person], but then to suddenly put her up against this guy who — my direction to Chris in that was, we must never know whether you’re a genius because you’re putting up this amazing front of being an absolute idiot, or you’re an absolute idiot. And of course, the viewers of Slow Horses know he’s an absolute idiot, but the people trying to interrogate him might just might not know what kind, whether they’re dealing with a super genius or just somebody who’s so lacking in self-awareness that it’s a totally impregnable position he has. You could see the ‘I can’t deal with this’ expressions coming out [of Taverner], which I think are marvelous.”

Chung enjoyed getting to work with Thomas after not getting to do so “properly” in the first four seasons. “Getting to be in a room with her character, Taverner, who is so grounded and so proper and strait-laced, and putting her in a scene with Roddy who is so obnoxious, arrogant, and completely ego-driven, having her really talk to him like a head teacher in many ways and try and lay the land out for him and it’s just not going through his brick wall was such a great dynamic because you only start to see her starting to succeed towards the end of that interaction,” he notes. “And even when this slight glimmer of doubt comes into Roddy’s reality, he manages to spin it away. So, having those moments with her was great fun.”

Part of that is that Roddy thinks he can go toe-to-toe with Taverner. That’s “because there’s really not anyone that he sees as above him. I think that he does see Lamb as his equal in many ways because Lamb does know how to put him in his place, but he sees that as a bit of a, ‘Oh, that’s just my bro,’” Chung explains. “But I think with Taverner, he’s not intimidated and he is not afraid of her, and he is not afraid of this situation because he’s got the skills and the ability to completely annihilate everybody.”

Do you think Lamb just shared a major part of his past? What did you think of the latest episode? Let us know in the comments section below.

Slow Horses, Wednesdays, Apple TV+