Black Doves Season-Premiere Recap: Who Are You Calling a Spy Wife?

Black Doves
Black Door
Season 2 Episode 1
Editor’s Rating ★★★★
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Welcome back to Black Doves, dear readers! We’ve got another season of quips, murders, and espionage for hire; rapidly shifting alliances; and getting by with a little help from one’s friends. When last we left Helen and Sam, they were enjoying a cozy Christmas together at Helen and Wallace’s home after taking down the London representatives of an increasingly international crime syndicate. They’d solved the mystery of Helen’s lover Jason’s murder, too (not a conspiracy, just the sad result of a crime lord’s nepo baby having accidentally killed the Chinese ambassador, could happen to anyone), and managed not to get themselves or any more of their colleagues murdered. Oh, and Reed told Helen that Wallace was likely to be rewarded for being untainted by scandal — next stop, ascending from secretary of state for Defence to prime minister. Everything was coming up roses, or pretty close to it.

These people are not made for long-term contentment, though. Black Doves has always wondered aloud about what it means to be a middle-aged spy-assassin. In any other field, Helen and Sam would be successful mid-career professionals, but in their line of work, happy retirements are basically unheard of. Last season, Dani (Agnes O’Casey) thought herself ready to step into Helen’s shoes should Wallace unexpectedly find himself widowed. Sam still mourns the end of his relationship with the very lovely Michael, who has gone on to embrace a very normal life, adopting a little girl. In this season, series creator-showrunner-writer Joe Barton (Giri/Haji, the Amadeus TV series) continues to excavate the theme while raising the stakes from the micro or personal to the geopolitically consequential (and still personal).

It makes sense to widen the scope and ratchet up the stakes at this point. When the second-season premiere opens, Wallace is about to become prime minister, so he and Helen are attending a gala dinner at a peace conference in Paris (Helen later refers to it brattily as a networking mixer). All looks exactly right with the power couple in their formalwear, and Helen should be positively giddy at the scope and significance of what she can pass along to Reed, but instead they’re both miserable. Wallace can feel that something isn’t right with Helen, but because he’s a normal person, his mind goes to infidelity, not the selling of state secrets and unrelenting, casual violence. (Okay, he can’t be fully normal — he is a Tory, after all. Nobody’s perfect.) There’s no way Helen can possibly engage in couples therapy honestly, and she also seems kind of bored, sitting at their table alone and fidgeting with her rings while Wallace works the room.

She may well be bored, but because Helen is always working, she uses it to segue smoothly into a conversation with Katya, the wife of Russian oligarch Alexi Chernov (who is chatting with Wallace). The two hit it off at once, and Helen offers to encourage Wallace to give Alexi a speaking slot at the defense conference he’s hosting in London next week. She also finds a moment to steal Katya’s hotel key card, duck out of the venue through a utility hallway (where she has already stashed a pair of sneakers), and zip over to the hotel where she links up with another Black Dove, Laila (played by the always welcome Ambika Mod, yay!). Like her spiritual kin Williams and Eleanor, Laila is somewhere in her mid-20s, a cheerful and judgmental motormouth, and a dab hand at merciless, quick-draw gunfights. I can’t wait to see the three of them together this season. 

As if Helen were not already obviously out of sorts, her knowing less about the mission than Laila does and being wholly unprepared to crack a high-end safe makes the whole evening a bit much. Thank goodness for Sam calling her out of the blue! Her body language shifts instantly — can-do Helen is back! — and he walks her through the tricky bits to retrieve a laptop with files about Wildflower. There’s no further time for the lengthy catch-up session Helen would love to have with Sam, though, because she has to put in an appearance at the party the security goons are dying to throw for her and Laila is about to kick off. The fights on Black Doves are always a lot of fun to watch — the choreography is energetic and freewheeling, and at their best, the physicality is witty in a way that matches the dialogue. Helen and Laila have known each other for about five minutes, but they sync immediately, dispatching (by my count) ten security guys total, and by the end, neither has so much as a droplet of blood on her.

The job was a success, but Helen can’t shake how crummy it felt to be called a spy wife. Laila’s throwaway comment has touched a very sensitive nerve; Helen knows she was hired as much for her multilingual intelligence as for her moral flexibility regarding murder, so why does Reed keep her in the dark about so much of the purpose and consequence of her work? She wants to feel like “a real fucking spy, not a honey-trap idiot who can’t be trusted,” but Reed is too unsettled by the Wildflower files to grasp how deep this runs for her agent. Helen already knows plenty by Reed’s lights, and it’s possible that even her present level of knowledge is a danger to her. Better to “stay good at lying,” get her marriage back on track, and make the most of however long she winds up having to live behind the titular glossy black door at No. 10 Downing Street. Leave the messiest stuff to Reed. We know the mess must be horrific because Reed is visibly unsettled by a Russian-accented recording in the files. She describes Wildflower as “an echo of something from a long time ago,” but that echo seems deafeningly loud, especially once Reed is cornered by two cars as she walks back to wherever she’s staying. What a bravura little moment for Sarah Lancashire in this scene, as surprise, irritation, and resignation flicker across her face. She doesn’t say a word, but I heard loud and clear “Well, this was bound to happen eventually.” 

Things that were bound to happen eventually also include Sam hitting the sauce before a dreary, low-end hit on an older fellow triggerman, then getting cornered by about ten armed Metropolitan Police officers the second he walks out of his victim’s tower block. That call Helen took from him earlier was Sam’s one postarrest call, which did not go the way he’d hoped. But not to worry: A man claiming to be his solicitor arrives, introducing himself as Patrick (Sam Riley), who represents an as yet unnamed “private entity” (surely nothing to worry about! Plenty of legit, completely untroubling organizations refer to themselves that way!) that wants to offer Sam his freedom in exchange for four murders at 20 percent above his usual rate. No hesitations, no refusals, tight timelines — sure, why not? 

Sam returns to his quiet life as a long-term resident of a swanky hotel whose adorable concierge, Jerry, is also Sam’s fuckbuddy and deliverer of the dossier on his first target, Zeus. Zeus (a.k.a. Erik Klein) is living in a safe house with enough armed guards surrounding it that Sam needs to bring in some muscle of his own. Yes, it’s time to get the band back together: Williams and Eleanor are reporting for duty! They’re every bit the exuberant, sarcastic bowl of puppies you remember from last season, making a nuisance of themselves with the waitress at the tapas restaurant Sam has selected for them and lamenting the near unkillability of bodyguards these days. As if a wee wisp of a girl assassin doesn’t have enough to contend with in her line of work, now she has to shoot a target a dozen times and run over him with her car because he’s turning himself into Rasputin with all the steroids and cocaine at his disposal? 

Their stakeout and invasion of Zeus’s safe house goes pretty smoothly (I didn’t keep a running tally of dead guys, so let’s ballpark it at eight) with Sam getting his polka-dot-undies–clad man in the upstairs bathroom. It takes a bit of grappling and scuffling to get himself into position to pull the trigger on Zeus, but the real drama comes from Helen leaving Sam a frantic voice-mail begging him to abort the mission. During her deeply unsettling command performance at the Black Doves’ swanky London office, she was assigned a new handler (the officious Mr. Robert Conteh) and used her little file-copying device to download Mrs. Reed’s details. Scrolling through the “known associates” section, she comes across Ida Povetkin, the Chernov family’s housekeeper found murdered in Moscow a few weeks ago, and … Erik Klein! Zeus himself is an active-duty Black Dove! Helen needs to talk to that guy, but that’s never going to happen because Sam is just too good at his job. 

Strange Times to Be Nefarious

• Helen seems not to have a security detail? I recall the Webbs beefing up their security at home last season, and of course No. 10 is well guarded, but what about personal protection? How does this aspect of Black Doves’s fictional world compare with our reality? My limited understanding is that the prime minister has close protection from Royalty and Specialist Protection officers, but I am wholly unclear on what protection is provided for the PM’s family.

• During Helen’s visit to the Black Doves’ offices in some nondescript high-rise that looks like it could be next door to the old Pierpoint & Co. offices in Industry (now there’s a crossover I’d love to see), there’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment where we see Dani is now a desk jockey. Well, well.

• Jerry, the adorable concierge who could maybe possibly also become Sam’s boyfriend, is played by Samuel Barnett. To me, he’ll always be Dirk Gently from Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. If you’re in the market for something quirky, exuberant, and not infrequently sinister, it’s well worth a watch (bonus: Fiona Dourif, a.k.a. Dr. MacKay from The Pitt, is outstanding as a holistic assassin named Bart).