For “A Little Black Doveâ€, we can have a little backstory as a treat. In case anyone was insufficiently charmed by Helen and Sam’s banter-forward bond and approach to working together in the series premiere, here we get to see that when they first met in 2014, they began as they meant to go on, bickering and jockeying for position, then settling into the early stages of sincere mutual trust and fondness. It’s a big night of firsts for both of them: Helen’s first assignment, when she meets the mark who will eventually become her husband, Wallace, and later, the night Reed tells Sam that she’s releasing him to the tender care of someone named Lenny, who wants to give him his first assignment as a triggerman. They grow up so fast!
These beats weave in and out of the main, present-day action of the episode, as the reunited friends and colleagues try to track down and dispatch Elmore Fitch, the very real-sounding former SAS agent whose fingerprints were on the casing Sam just happened to find in the sniper’s perch. It’s a measure of how rusty Sam is at some of the finer points of being a triggerman, and Helen has to be the one to point out the suspicious ease with which he found the casing. Snipers aren’t usually this sloppy, are they? Leaving a shell casing behind? With fingerprints on it? That then leads to a known address attached to a real name?
It seems a little suspicious and possibly dangerous, but Helen doesn’t leave the house in her serious spy-lady outfit (cozy fuzzy shaker knit sweater replaced by a sleek turtleneck and black leather belted trench) for nothing. Away they go to try to have a quiet word with Mr. Fitch at his flat. Unfortunately, things go from too quiet (nobody home) to extremely loud and incredibly close (the place was rigged with a bomb). It seems as though Helen has gotten Sam onboard with her Always Attract Attention and Arouse Suspicion Methodology (a.k.a. AAAAAS(s)M(an) … is this anything?); Fitch’s apartment exploding in flames is even less subtle than the state in which they left Jason’s place the previous night. It’s great that Sam is still so committed to helping Helen meet her goals of staying alive long enough to track down Jason’s killer and extracting bloody vengeance — he did swear, very convincingly, if conditionally, “Darling, I will certainly endeavor to try†— all for one and one for all and all that, but perhaps he and Helen would have thought twice about acting on his Fitch knowledge if he hadn’t drunk quite so much wine and done that line of cocaine at Arnie and Zack’s place. Actually, he muses aloud, that may have been ketamine; the world may never know.
The contrast between this damp squib of an evening and their respective first jobs back in 2014 couldn’t be more stark. Back then, everything was simplicity itself. Helen’s honey trap ensnared Wallace with minimum effort, and she’s pleasantly surprised to like this handsome, earnest Tory — why, he even has a sense of humor! — who has not the faintest shred of a notion that she’s anything but the insightful, funny, and hot politico about town that she appears to be. Sam’s first murder for hire, a single shot to the head of a guy who Lenny (tiny, ferocious, tracksuit-clad, and played by the extraordinary Kathryn Hunter) says must pay for the unspecific but also unforgivable crime of “breaking the code†of triggermen, leaves him shaken but basically fine.
Now, though, they’re getting caught out by an easy-to-spot trap and then by failing to expect Fitch to call on Helen at home. Once you get past the pure enjoyment of the well-choreographed kitchen fight between them, the scene is an argument for the notion that Helen and Sam, excellent as they were in their prime, may be getting a little long in the tooth to pull off this kind of work. For one thing, is there no loudly blaring security system in place to announce Fitch’s arrival as he creeps through the (apparently unlocked) back door? And yet we still see glimmers of the “coiled spring†Reed originally hired, as when Helen takes down Fitch with impressive ease for someone who probably hasn’t had occasion to bust out her hand-to-hand-combat skills in several years. If I were a betting woman, I’d put money on Helen definitely surviving the season, with Sam being solidly in iffy territory.
Before marching Fitch down to her garden shed (not a euphemism) to die, he becomes at least the third person to inquire after a pinhole camera with valuable footage on it and to be looking for Kai-Ming Chen as well. Given Kai-Ming’s clear connections with Maggie and Philip, and with her late father being the only local person likely to be looking for her in a caring, non-murder-y way, Helen deduces that Kai-Ming is at the center of the whole mess.
No doubt they’d find her quickly if Sam were able to focus exclusively on protecting Helen, but an unwanted reunion at the pub where he’s enjoying an otherwise uneventful lunch has hurled a wrench into the works. Remember Lenny? She, along with Williams and her new literal partner in crime, Eleanor, drop in on Sam to announce that (1) he must pay his debt to Lenny by killing Hector Newman, the mark he bailed on dispatching last time; (2) if he fails or refuses to do so, Williams and Eleanor will kill his lovely-seeming ex-boyfriend Michael; and (3) Williams is definitely going to kill him to avenge Kent’s death, too. Phew! This scene, with its Martin Blank versus Grocer at the diner vibe, is the clearest example so far of Grosse Pointe Blank as an ancestor of Black Doves.
Not unlike Martin Blank, Sam is deeply hung up on his ex, and we get another moment of fizzy banter between him, Williams, and Eleanor, who come across him loitering piningly outside Michael’s flat, watching cute father-daughter moments unfold between Michael and his young daughter. Williams cautions Sam (as he advised Helen when they first met) not to get sentimental about Michael (or, presumably, about anything). It’s good advice that he’s simply not built to take. If nothing else, though, Sam can still set up and pull off a murder for hire, so it’s a bit anticlimactic for him to find that other killers have already hit Hector’s warehouse.
They left behind a video camera that includes footage of Hector questioning a very out-of-it Kai-Ming Chen, and since they’re not among the corpses Sam has to pick his way through, he knows they managed to get out. It’s good news that Kai-Ming is alive, but overall, this development is bad for a host of reasons, including but not limited to: Sam having to prolong getting this job-within-a-job done, which takes time away from his real job of protecting Helen; the realization that whoever is doing these murders, they’re relentless and there’s quite a few of them; the understanding that it’s going to be that much harder to find and extract Kai-Ming Chen from this situation.
Let’s not let Helen rest on her laurels, either. Through flashbacks, we see that very recently, she made the mistake of confiding in Jason that her identity as Helen Webb is fake. She’s not a real person, she says, and he wouldn’t like the woman behind the role she’s been playing for so long. Has he ever heard of a Black Dove? This wasn’t a mistake, and she didn’t let this information slip. She chose to reveal it, and now she’s lying to Reed about it. It’s hard to imagine that Jason kept this information to himself; he was a low-ranking civil servant working in the Department of Justice and would have felt obliged to report his lover as a significant information security risk. That hardly seems like something that would result in his murder by a highly skilled and expensive contract killer, to say nothing of the fates Maggie, Philip, and Ambassador Chen suffered. These four murders required incredibly deep pockets to fund, and this tangled web isn’t getting any easier to unweave.
Adding yet another complicating thread is a conversation that Helen captures between Wallace and his friend, London Metropolitan Police Commissioner Stephen Yarrick. Apparently, the Chinese government and its own investigators not only reject the heroin overdose explanation for Ambassador Chen’s death, but they also believe it was the work of U.S. government operatives. Stephen rejects their rejection quite smoothly based on the evidence his detectives have collected, but has less of an explanation for why Philip Bray contacted Wallace for comment on a story about Chen’s death that he was preparing to run, supported by footage that he claimed included Stephen. We’ve seen some explosions already in these two episodes, but were the Chinese to announce their suspicion of the Americans, that could spell something far worse than your garden-variety international scandal.
Closing Doors, Opening Windows
• If only I could text Sam, I’d send him Séamas O’Reilly’s immortal and always hilarious thread about the time he misremembered his work schedule “and ended up alone in a room with my boss and the President of Ireland while I was on ketamine.â€
• Shout-out to the A+ use of Eartha Kitt’s “Santa Baby†playing under Sam’s grisly discovery at Newman’s warehouse. It starts off incredibly eerie, almost unrecognizable, and comes into sharper focus as he finds the room where it’s still playing on a little tape deck.