Spy thrillers tend to be less about the conspiracy or secrets the spies at its center are working to reveal or keep. It often comes down to the spies’ relationship with each other, given that the only other people who know the life of a spy are other spies. That is evident in a new Netflix thriller that stars Keira Knightley and Ben Whishaw.
BLACK DOVES: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: Revelry at a London pub, with Christmas lights in the background.
The Gist: As a man dressed as Father Christmas exits the pub, he’s passed by a man (Andrew Koji) who looks like he’s being followed. He calls two other people and tells them to be careful, but they are both pretty quickly killed. As soon as the man, Jason Davies, realizes what might be happening, he calls someone on his phone and leaves a message to express his love — but he gets shot through the chest before he is able to do so.
Helen Webb (Keira Knightley) is shown getting her twins ready to go to a Christmas party she has organized. She’s been married to her husband Wallace (Andrew Buchan) for a decade, and has been with him as he’s ascended the governmental ranks; he’s currently defense secretary, and one of the big issues he’s dealing with is the overdose death of the Chinese ambassador to the UK.
At the party, Helen is greeted by a white-haired woman that her husband doesn’t recognize. She excuses herself and tells the woman, Mrs. Reed (Sarah Lancashire), that she shouldn’t be there. Helen actually works for Reed, feeding her government secrets as an agent of a secretive organization called Black Doves. Reed tells Helen about Jason’s death, knowing that the two of them were engaged in an affair in the prior months. Helen’s reaction tells Reed what she already knows, and when she presses Helen for why she’d risk having her cover blown, Helen says it was purely for love.
As a precaution, Reed has called in Sam Young (Ben Whishaw) from Rome; Sam and Helen worked closely over the years but Sam has been away for a number of years. But he’s here to look into Jason’s death and take out the people who are after him. One of the reasons why he’s there becomes apparent when Helen goes to Jason’s flat, and is confronted by two assassins. She texts that she’s compromised, and Ben arrives with a shotgun to bail her out. This is when the two of them see each other for the first time in seven years.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Black Doves, created by Joe Barton, has a bit of a feel of The Americans.
Our Take: In many ways, Black Doves doesn’t do anything special. It’s a spy thriller, where people gather secrets while keeping lots of secrets of their own. Helen has been spending the past decade feeding secrets from her relationship with her husband to this mysterious organization. We have no idea who the Black Doves work for or what they do with the information, but we do know that Helen’s cover is so deep that even engaging in an affair doesn’t mean she gets “retired” (i.e. killed).
So what’s going to keep us watching is the relationship between Helen and Sam, one that’s got a history. Barton takes pains to show that Sam is gay, just to point out that the relationship between Helen and Sam isn’t romantic in any way, shape or form. But it is a close one, which is why the two of them are going to work together to see who went after Jason and the two other people who are killed. By the end of the first episode, we see that Jason’s death is connected to the death of the Chinese ambassador, which leads to the inevitable notion that “this is bigger than we thought.”
Knightley and Whishaw have the proper chemistry with each other, but we actually like them better separately. Knightley expertly shifts Helen from accommodating government wife to flinty assassin without much difficulty, and Whishaw plays Sam’s quirks, like his penchant for Champagne being his drink of choice, and makes them seem natural. Those characterizations will serve the show well as the two of them get deeper into this conspiracy while trying to keep their covers intact.
Sex and Skin: We Helen and Sam in different sex scenes, but we see more skin from Sam than from Helen.
Parting Shot: After Ben calls her to join him to investigate the connection between Jason and the ambassador’s death, Helen grabs a gun from her secret dresser compartment and looks at herself in the mirror.
Sleeper Star: Sarah Lancashire is just menacing enough as Reed to make her believable as a spy organization handler, in the tradition of Margo Martindale’s character Claudia in The Americans.
Most Pilot-y Line: As Helen is being attacked by the two assassins, her daughter calls asking where she is. Helen keeps saying, “I’ll be there in a minute,” when she knows it’s going to be more than that.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Black Doves isn’t going to blow you away with some revolutionary spy story. But the story is intriguing enough, and is improved by the chemistry between Knightley and Whishaw, with a big assist from Lancashire.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
