Helen Webb (Keira Knightley) opens the second season of “Black Doves” in couples therapy with her husband, Wallace (Andrew Buchan), who is days away from becoming prime minister. A few scenes later she is in a Paris hotel suite with a safe she cannot crack, a stranger shooting guards behind her and her best friend, Sam (Ben Whishaw), talking her through the lock over the phone. Netflix released all six episodes on Thursday, November 5th, nearly two years after the first season. What came back is bigger, funnier and a good deal more crowded, with a missing handler, a rival organization and a mystery that reaches back decades.
The reviews have been warm in a way that sounds almost surprised by itself. The Guardian calls the show “rambunctiously entertaining”, The Independent names it “the show currently most worthy of your Netflix subscription”, and NME settles on “ludicrously enjoyable”, while Digital Spy argues the new run is “stronger than the first” and made for bingeing. There is dissent as well. ScreenRant’s headline says the season “Loses Depth As It Aims For James Bond & John Wick”, and the Irish Independent’s says the second series “takes the silliness way too far.” The fairest verdict may be that the show is exactly as silly as before, and that the silliness is either the point or the problem depending on how much mischief a viewer will forgive in a spy drama about a prime minister’s wife who does her best work between state dinners. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for all six episodes of “Black Doves” Season 2, including the finale.
The fairest verdict may be that the show is exactly as silly as before, and that the silliness is either the point or the problem depending on how much mischief a viewer will forgive in a spy drama about a prime minister’s wife who does her best work between state dinners.”
The first episode, “Black Door”, sets the table. At a diplomatic gala in Paris, Helen lifts the hotel key card of Katia Chernov (Sylvia Hoeks), the wife of the Russian oligarch Alexi Chernov (Goran Kostic), and slips out to meet Laila (Ambika Mod), a brash new Black Dove who is happy to do the shooting while Helen does the safecracking. Sam coaches her through the lock by phone and the pair fight their way out. Helen hands the Wildflower file to her handler, Reed (Sarah Lancashire), who plays a recording from it and looks shaken. Reed describes Wildflower, according to Vulture, as “an echo of something from a long time ago” before she leaves. Reed is ambushed by two cars on her walk home and is gone by morning. Sam, meanwhile, is arrested after a hit and offered his freedom by a man named Patrick (Sam Riley), who wants four people dead. By the end of the hour Helen has a new handler in Mr. Conteh (Babou Ceesay), a family installed at 10 Downing Street and a bad feeling about Sam’s first target, Erik Klein, who turns out to be a Black Dove himself. She learns it a few minutes too late to stop Sam, who has brought in Williams (Ella Lily Hyland) and Eleanor (Gabrielle Creevy) as backup, from pulling the trigger.
In “Put Your Head On My Shoulder”, Helen and Sam follow Erik’s trail to a luggage drop at King’s Cross and to a recording from Ida Povetkin, a Black Dove who worked as the Chernovs’ housekeeper and is now dead. It points them at a failed mission in Berlin with a single survivor. Sam’s second target is an elderly woman code-named Spitfire, who tells him about the “opportunity to become savage” the Berlin team took, reaches for a gun and loses, after which he eats her biscuit. Helen’s day is busier. Laila and she are chased through Somerset House by masked kidnappers, Laila walks off with a “Don’t call me again!”, and on the South Bank Mr. Conteh warns Helen that Black Doves are being killed and that Reed, Sam and Laila are wanted. The Black Doves are holding Reed, alive, and Conteh tells her that everyone else from the Berlin operation is dead. The hour ends badly for Sam, who traces his employer to Patrick, is shown video of Helen shooting an older man and is ordered to kill Jerry (Samuel Barnett), the hotel concierge he has only just started seeing, which he does.
Sam spends “P is for Poison” at the flat of the crime boss Lenny Lines (Kathryn Hunter), who lets him in on condition that she keeps his gun. By morning Patrick has turned up with the next name, Alexi Chernov, a job Helen helps along without knowing it when she mentions that she and Wallace are dining with the Chernovs that night. Helen, for her part, has talked Dani (Agnes O’Casey), a Black Doves colleague who is not happy to help, into searching the archives for Wildflower, and she is cornered by an MI5 officer who wants to know where her parents are buried and whether she remembers a stepsister named Bonnie Weir. At the dinner Helen and Katia hold the real meeting in the ladies’ room while Eleanor, disguised as a waitress, makes sure the poison finds Alexi. Helen recognizes Eleanor across the room, and the look on her face says she has just worked out what her dinner plans were for. Conteh puts contracts on Sam and Laila, a red laser dot settles on Laila’s chest, and the hour closes with Sam learning that his final target is Reed.
The fourth episode, “The Opportunity to Become Savage”, is the season’s hinge. It opens with Williams and Eleanor pinned down in Laila’s flat by the woman they have been paid to kill, which prompts Williams to declare her feelings with “I love ya. Probably. Definitely, actually.” Then it leaves them there for a long flashback to East Berlin in 1988. A younger Reed is undercover inside Kestrel, living with Franz, one of its leaders, and their small daughter, Vita, while sleeping with her Black Doves station chief, Peter Maddison. When Franz proposes moving the family to Amsterdam, Reed invents a car-bomb plot, London authorizes the removal of everyone in Kestrel, and the night ends with Peter dead by her hand, Franz left for dead and Vita gone. The rest of the hour follows the consequences. Reed finds Sam hiding in an Italian village and asks him to trace a man she believed dead, Sam refuses, and she sends Helen instead, a few months after Helen gave birth, to a cottage in Dorset. The family’s nanny, Marie (Molly Chesworth), has come along on the holiday. Helen shoots Franz, whose last message is that he has found Vita, and the killing is the video Patrick has been holding over Sam.
By “Murder Mix”, the team is in a car on its way to rescue Reed from the country house where she is being held, arguing over the soundtrack. Williams and Eleanor push a murder playlist, and Helen can name little beyond Olly Murs. The raid goes loudly wrong, Williams and Eleanor trade a first kiss under fire, and Sam and Helen reach Reed alive. At that point, according to Show Snob’s recap, Reed tells them about Berlin, admits that Wildflower was her code name and that she has a daughter named Vita, and denies killing anyone. The same recap has Sam passing up chances to kill her in the chaos, the MI5 officer telling Wallace back in London that Helen is not who she says she is, and Patrick phoning Sam to tell him to finish the job and to warn him that Williams and Eleanor have taken the contract on his own life.
The finale, “Peace Summit”, opens with Sam delivering Reed alive to Patrick to settle his debt, and Patrick agrees to delete the footage of Helen. Then the summit Wallace has been organizing becomes a trap. Kestrel’s agents take two hostages, Katia and the American defense envoy Cecile Mason (Neve Campbell), while Dani, who has been sidelined, opens the Black Doves headquarters to Patrick’s forces from the inside. Katia, it turns out, is Vita, Reed’s long-lost daughter, raised in a Soviet orphanage and bent on destroying the Black Doves. Her plan is to make Helen kill the prime minister, using the Webb children as pressure. Reached through a hidden earpiece in Wallace’s car, Helen tells him more truth than she ever has, including “I was born with a different name, a different voice”, and fires at the window behind him instead of at him. At headquarters Eleanor, Williams and Laila storm in to free Reed. Vita kills Cecile, and the gunfight takes Dani, who catches a grenade in an elevator, and Vita herself, who dies after Reed tells her she never stopped loving her. Helen confronts Marie, the nanny who has been working with Vita, and kills her.
The last minutes belong to the aftermath. Sam and Helen say goodbye at night outside the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square, and Sam goes back to the Italian village from his flashbacks. Wallace, questioned by MI5, covers for his wife by saying she was frightened and went into hiding. The season then ends on a line from Wallace that the screen cuts off before Helen can answer, “Let’s start with your name and work from there.” Creator Joe Barton joked to Netflix’s Tudum that “We just ran out of film”, then called it a “delicious mid-sentence stopping point”, adding that the fallout from Wallace learning her identity “kind of needs its own series.” Patrick has escaped, and the Black Doves are badly depleted, with Reed and Mr. Conteh left to rebuild. Barton said the aim was to keep Kestrel “as the SPECTRE to their James Bond.”
Where the season loses people is in the machinery. The Hollywood Reporter complains of “the waste of several intriguing guest stars”, singling out Campbell and Hoeks as actors left to “wander aimlessly around the margins” until the finale. It adds that the big reveal comes in “flashbacks that not only feel lifted from another, far less entertaining espionage drama, but lean on emotions the show, to the end, never actually earns.” The Guardian calls the whole thing “so relentlessly preposterous it’s practically nihilistic”, yet adds that “the attraction is the characters and the cast.” The Times grants that the “gears clunk between action, laughs and drama” while still calling the series “a riot” for anyone who does not take it too seriously. IndieWire, by contrast, praises the flashback hour as “superb” and treats Helen’s line “I think friendship is the paddle” as the show’s thesis, which is probably fair.
Netflix has not announced a third season, but the finale leaves the ground prepared, with a Helen who can no longer play the spy wife, a Wallace who wants her real name, a Sam who may not stay in Italy and a rival organization still at large. Knightley told Tudum that Helen is “a worm on a hook this season”, and the ending suggests the hook is not going anywhere. The widening was deliberate. Barton told Tudum he wanted to “show more of how the operation works”, and the season obliges with archives, executives, safe houses and a headquarters that ends the season shot to pieces.
Whishaw’s own description of Sam, “he’s just a bit of a mess, but then aren’t we all?”, is about as close as the show comes to a mission statement. It is arguably why a season built from safe-cracking, poison soup and a laser dot on Laila’s chest still lands as a story about friends who keep coming back for one another. The sequel’s best joke is Williams and Eleanor, whose love story struck Barton as “quite romantic and sweet”, which, he told Tudum, “is funny because they’re both psychopaths.” Its cruelest idea is giving Reed a daughter and letting the daughter win a few rounds, and it is the one that stays after the credits.
What Do You Think? Does a spy show this ridiculous earn a heartbreak like Vita’s, or does the heartbreak only work because the jokes come first? Should Helen tell Wallace everything, or should a third season keep her lying a little longer? And would you follow Sam back to Italy, or does he belong in London with the people who keep nearly getting him killed?
See you on the next binge!
