Happy holidays, you get a spy show! As we round out the year, an array of espionage is at your fingertips: Eddie Redmayne is having a blast under old-man prosthetics on The Day of the Jackal; Ted Danson is creeping around a retirement home in A Man on the Inside; there’s heady, slick dialogue about spycraft on The Agency and heavy-handed, tiring dialogue about spycraft on Lioness. These series each have their selling points, but only one meets all the genre requirements and also throws in a few delightful extras: spirited characters and lively world-building, frenetic action and fizzy conversation, Ben Whishaw’s luscious hair, Keira Knightley smiling like she wants to rip you apart with her teeth. Black Doves is the platonic ideal of a spy thriller, all of its elements fully in sync for a fun time.
From creator Joe Barton, who previously played in the crime space with the fantastic Giri/Haji, Black Doves is named for the spy organization at the heart of the series. They’re an at-the-highest-bidder’s-whims group that sells secrets and information all around the world, and Black Doves focuses on deep-cover spy Helen (Knightley); her triggerman, driver, and best friend Sam (Whishaw); and their handler Reed (Sarah Lancashire, giving Margo Martindale a run for her money in the unimpressed-older-mentor department). When Helen’s lover Jason (Andrew Koji) is murdered in the premiere, she’s devastated and then desperate for answers and revenge — so much so that she threatens her decade-long cover as happy housewife to the U.K.’s Defense secretary. To keep Helen’s hands somewhat clean, Reed calls in Sam, who seven years ago left the U.K. after a job went wrong.
With the pair reunited and Reed lurking over their shoulders, Black Doves sprints and tumbles through a pleasantly complex series of mysteries, with flashbacks illuminating how the three initially came to work together, action sequences that will make you go, “Damn, Paddington is good at murdering,†and an excellent ending that sets up Netflix’s already-ordered second season. What else could you possibly want from a spy thriller? Black Doves is like if The Gentlemen were good-good instead of trashy-good, or if Alias could have had cursing and way more blood spray, or if Gangs of London had pithier exchanges and more lighthearted relationships, or if The Diplomat … well, it’s actually nothing at all like The Diplomat. (Good!) Here, five reasons to give thanks for Black Doves.
Spoilers follow for Black Doves, including the ending, but we’ll keep them vague.
1.
All that criminal underworld-building
Black Doves doesn’t avoid real-world politics entirely. Helen’s husband Wallace, whom she was ordered to seduce and then marry when she joined the Black Doves a decade ago, has risen in the British Conservative Party to the position of Defense secretary; all that time, Helen has been leaking information to Reed about the country’s relationships and negotiations with the Saudis, the Chinese, and other groups. A major plotline this season involves the murder of the Chinese ambassador to the U.K., the subsequent disappearance of his hard-partying daughter, and the assassinations of Jason and two of his friends, a series of crimes that some of Wallace’s colleagues are revealed to be involved in. But the primary focus is never really the jockeying between the British, Chinese, and Americans over who is at fault. It’s the underworld operators who are spying on those negotiations and figuring out how to use them for their benefit, and Black Doves resembles the composite worlds of John Wick and Guy Ritchie in how well it builds out its network of assassins, moles, and crime lords.
Knightley and Whishaw’s chemistry has a lot to do with this; in both their present-day and flashback scenes, they have a spiky, sarcastic, sweet bond that adds humor both to action sequences, like when Sam saves Helen’s life by shotgun-blasting a foe’s body all over hers, and quieter moments of contemplation. (Sam’s recurring “Darling, I will certainly endeavor to try†vow to Helen is a lovely running beat through the years of their friendship.) Most of the series’ professional relationships have this kind of lived-in texture, from Helen and Reed’s venomous friction to Sam and his assassin rival Williams (Ella Lily Hyland) listing people in their lives that the other has killed. These are killers with moral codes, but they’re also people with favorite holiday movies, business fronts, and inside jokes; Sam buying Helen’s kids toy guns for Christmas is a particularly inspired touch.
2.
Ben Whishaw’s broken heart
Black Doves keeping its international politics surface-level allows it to go deep on its characters instead, and Whishaw grabs that opportunity to make Sam the series’ soul. Helen drives the season’s action by trying to trace down who killed Jason and why, but it’s Sam who personifies the cause and effect of all this. We see how being an assassin’s son inspired him to want to prove his worth to his father, how his first job calcified him, and how his genuine romance with the gentle artist Michael (Omari Douglas) is destroyed when it becomes violently clear that Sam isn’t an insurance agent after all, in a harrowing scene where we see Sam’s dreams of a normal future disintegrate in front of him.
Whishaw has always been quick to skip across the boundary from hangdog to mischievous, and his alternating consternated frowns and winsome half-smiles communicate how dangerous all of this is for Sam, for Helen, and for the people in their orbit, even when a job goes well or a grudge is laid aside. Not every story about spies needs a conscience, but if a character is going to absorb all this emotional toll and convey its accompanying loneliness, it doesn’t get much better than Whishaw’s performance of a man who is thoroughly exhausted by this profession and these people, but who also can’t figure out any other way to live.
3.
Every single thing Sarah Lancashire does
Every spy piece needs a world-weary handler who simply cannot put up with their young charges anymore (think of Martindale in The Americans or Gary Oldman in Slow Horses). Lancashire exudes comfortable authority and increasing impatience in every scene as Reed, whether she’s sighing, “Oh, Christ†at Helen insisting she and Jason were in love or setting up one of her charges for a double-cross. Through it all, Reed is simply unflappable, and Lancashire never raises her voice, never seems to blink, and never has anything but perfectly straight posture. She’s an iron fist in a velvet glove and provides Black Doves with the ideal quiet-but-forceful authority figure for Helen and Sam to bounce off of.
4.
Keira Knightley knife fight!
Some women have a favorite lipstick; Helen Webb has a favorite knife. As a wife and mother, Helen is warm, smiley, and comforting, always ready with a question about her husband Wallace’s day and another craft for her twin children to make. As an experienced Black Dove who’s infiltrated the heart of the government, she’s scathing, quick-witted, and vengeful, and her eagerness to get back into action makes her a great foil to the more wary Sam. It also makes her a great fighter, and Helen’s action scenes are some of the series’ most exciting: when she takes on two assassins in the premiere, slicing and whirling her way through their coordinated attack, or threatens one who breaks into her house with torture using kitchen accessories. (Her “I have a NutriBullet†threat is so matter-of-fact, it’s frightening.)
The best of these scenes is in the penultimate episode, when she takes on her husband’s assistant who has been getting a little too flirty for Helen’s liking, and whom Helen correctly guesses is another Black Dove sent in by Reed. The jewelry-store duel is very Kill Bill, with the two women tossing out insults before attacking brutally and relentlessly: throwing each other around glass cases, using the shop’s offerings as weaponry, and avoiding the incapacitated store owner. But it’s the moment when we see Helen realize this murder ultimately isn’t worth her time that offers a fascinating glimpse into how her mind assesses risk and reward. When she calls Reed to tell her off for sending “a teenager to kill me,†Knightley’s amused irritation lets us know how unserious this fight was to her. You know she’s done a lot more damage with that knife.
5.
There’s more to come!
Black Doves wraps its story up pretty effectively via a solidly twisty series of reveals that is mostly delivered via Reed’s exposition and a flashback montage, but it’s anchored by Knightley’s face, which flickers through shock, despair, fear, and finally wistfulness as she realizes who was responsible for killing Jason and how she got dragged into it. The plotting is neat, and the emotional arc works. But there are two other things that happen at the end of finale “In the Bleak Midwinter†that suggest major changes for the upcoming second season.
The first is that Sam, who had previously been a freelance assassin and then Helen’s partner, takes a job with someone he was supposed to assassinate years ago but couldn’t, a moment of hesitation that led to the end of Michael and Sam’s relationship and to that person becoming a major player in the London underworld. So why would Sam work for him? Is it to escape the Black Doves, or because he was sick of former boss Lenny holding that previous failure over his head? Regardless of motivation, Sam’s new job seemingly means he won’t be able to work for Reed or with Helen, which would be a major change for the second season, given how key their chemistry was to the first.
And then there’s the last shot of Reed, seen entertaining a young woman in her all-glass-windowed home (a spy has to see who is coming from all directions!) The two don’t speak, but the implication is that this is another Black Dove, one whose intrusion in the Webbs’ life Helen might not anticipate as easily as she did Wallace’s new assistant. What other obstacles does Reed have up her sleeve for her onetime protégé? These are questions for Black Doves’s second season, which can’t come soon enough.
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