Black Doves Recap: Deafeningly Loud Echoes of the Past

Black Doves
The Opportunity to Be Savage
Season 2 Episode 4
Editor’s Rating ★★★★
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Usually, the various narrative threads of Black Doves alternate with each other scene-by-scene throughout an episode. I think “The Opportunity to Be Savage” is the first episode so far told in straightforward chapters, with a single, significant 15-minute scene cut in half to bookend it all. When last we saw Eleanor, she’d played her part in helping Sam poison Alexi Chernov, but her night is far from over, because Williams needs her help. She’s been waxing philosophical, in the classic style of the inebriated, in a ladies’ room stall at some club, where all of the other spaces are drenched in the bisexual lighting this show loves so much, monologing her way through the existential questions every one of our characters is grappling with this season. The big conversations always happen in a women’s restroom: When we get down to it, who are we? What mark do we leave on the world? Williams really starts to cook, wondering aloud about how “we’re all just animals, aren’t we? Living with the things that we’ve done, living with the consequences of our actions, looking for purpose, for connection, for love. Maybe we’ll never find it. Am I talking bollocks?” Maybe she is, or maybe Williams is the wisest fool in town.

The Fool/Wise Woman-o-Meter starts pointing more strongly towards Fool once she breaks off from this line of self-questioning to accept a job that’s just popped up on her phone. At least Williams has the presence of mind to pester Eleanor into joining her in taking out Laila; the pills she took earlier are “playing merry havoc with [her] depth perception”. Her biggest mistake so far was not waiting for Eleanor to arrive before aiming that rifle with its laser sights at Laila, because now they’re both pinned down, taking heavy fire from their supremely pissed-off would-be target. Obviously, now is the time to make a grand love confession and try to get Eleanor on board. The girl just loves to multi-task. 

We leave things on a double cliffhanger with these two, to jump back in time to the Elizabeth Reed of old and learn more about this fateful mission in East Berlin of 1988, where she’s the undercover agent embedded in the Black Doves’ long-term operation keeping tabs on Kestrel. Like Helen, her assignment was long-term, and extended to giving birth to her target Franz’s daughter, now a five-year-old named Vita. Franz’s latest scheme is helping a disaffected KGB agent defect; naturally, that agent is Alexi Chernov, and in spite of her fellow Black Doves’ reluctance to refrain from intervening, their station chief Peter Maddison decides to let it play out. Under Franz’s leadership, Kestrel has risen in strength and status among anarchists, so Peter wants to see how much further they can go (and how much more valuable intelligence he can send back to the home office). 

Stop me if you think you’ve heard this one before, friends, for Reed and Peter are in an illicit relationship, and she would really like to wrap up her responsibilities and return home with Peter and Vita. Open-ended undercover work has taken its toll on her, but predictably, Peter wants to let it ride and loves his work in East Germany too much to leave. Reed may intend to shine it on for a while longer, but just as Helen has been doing in her assignment, that’s also her real life with Wallace and the kids; she is the agent under the most pressure and living with the consequences of decisions others are making about her. People have limits, and Reed’s is Franz’s plan to move her and Vita to Amsterdam, where he’ll join them to launch a new branch of Kestrel. We’re going to franchise, honey, isn’t that great? 

Well, no. Reed is so desperate to stay in East Berlin that she fabricates — seemingly on the fly, mid-conversation with Peter — the car-bombing threat that prompts the London office to authorize expedient demise, a new-to-me euphemism for “yeah, we’re going to have to just murder everyone in Kestrel”. This is the opportunity to be savage that Spitfire/Melanie mentioned to Sam just before he shot her. She was not exaggerating! Every Black Dove attends to their duties with all deliberate stabbing, throat-slitting, and shooting speed, except for Reed. She tries to reason with Franz, urging him to flee with Vita so they can have a safe, happy life together (and she can stay with Peter), but he can’t wrap his head around the truth and gets his throat slit by Peter for his troubles. The whole situation devolves from there, with Reed having to shoot Peter to prevent him from strangling her, destroying all of the surveillance tape, and hopping into a getaway car with Zeus and Spitfire after a very cursory search for Vita. 

No wonder Reed is a hardened, world-weary handler by the time she arrives at Sam’s Italian getaway spot to re-recruit him for some intelligence and assassination work on her behalf. She had thought Franz dead for decades and that chapter of her life fully closed, but by some miracle, Franz did not die in a pool of his own blood back in 1988, and has been spotted in Rome. This has nothing to do with Sam, really; he’s just laying low in this charming little town since running after that mess of a home invasion that nearly killed Michael in 2017. If she could bring herself to share the vital detail that Franz was an important part of her past, not just someone she needs to make sure is dead, she might be able to impress upon Sam the dangers of revisiting, let alone living in, the literal scene of the crime.

She knows all about Aldo, of course, having assigned Sam to kill him, but has no grasp of how important this town and Aldo’s surviving close friend (who was also in love with him) have become to Sam. Reed likes to play-act an impression of warmth and understanding, but she’s pruned whatever parts of us are in charge of developing and maintaining genuine connections with others. It’s been a winning strategy, so why should she change? She’s not unlike Patrick from Kestrel, really; in her book, vulnerability is weakness, and if it’s the only mode of being that allows us to have substantive relationships with others, then she’s simply not going to have them. 

Sam’s time befriending the wine bar owner (whose name I don’t think we ever learn — it’s not in my copious notes or in the series’ IMDB entry as of this writing the week before this season drops) unfolds most tenderly, just moment after moment of existing in close proximity. Sam can’t help offering his assistance, can’t help confiding about Michael, can’t help making dinner together and eventually working in the wine bar. He misses Helen and hates himself for allowing his friend to confide in him, as the image of shooting Aldo in the head plays over and over again in his mind. It’s a terrible and apt self-punishment, and is the closest he can get to making amends to the man who is effectively Aldo’s widower. 

Sam’s investigative efforts in Rome lead to Franz’s most recent forwarding address, a cottage in Dorset, but he tells Reed he’s not interested in taking the job any further. She’ll have to find someone else, and that someone else is, of course, Helen. She’s just a few months postpartum with Ollie and Jacqueline, whose favorite hobby seems to be screaming while in the car, and is struggling. She tells Wallace as much and puts the newly minted Defence Minister on notice that he’s going to need to be a very involved father for them all to survive this season of their lives. Mazel tov to Wallace, but for my money, the biggest moment on this miserable, rainy family holiday is the revelation that Nanny Marie has been with the Webbs since the beginning. 

This Dorset getaway includes yet another massive revelation, as we can now pinpoint it as the moment when Helen’s brief expanded from intel-gathering and reconnaissance work to include assassinations. As Sam did with Spitfire before he shoots her, Helen has a little chat with Franz before shooting him. He’s not surprised to die, only that Reed herself didn’t come to him in the end, so he has to entrust Helen with a special message: He’s found Vita. So there were two survivors of the 1988 East Berlin operation. Vita would have been born in 1983, and would be in her early 40s now. The past isn’t gone, but we sure are being borne ceaselessly back into it, aren’t we? 

Back in the present, Williams pre-empts any response from Eleanor, opting instead to throw a smoke grenade to provide visual cover for their escape. They only have a few hours before Sam arrives to bring them along on his and Helen’s Reed rescue mission. It would be so cool if they’d had enough time to make a firm decision about whether or not to take the contract to kill Sam, but that, along with the status of their relationship, is just going to have to be part of the mix in the next episode, I guess! 

Strange Times to be Nefarious

• A blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment that punches way above its weight: in the church, Reed assures Sam that Helen and her babies are fine and healthy. She doesn’t recall the name of Helen’s daughter, telling Sam she’s called Jessica or something. A woman who considers herself to blame for the death of her own daughter probably wouldn’t invest much energy in memorizing the names of other baby girls. She might even exert some effort in not remembering them.

• Another season, another slew of reasons to appreciate the music supervision on this show. This episode is a highlight, featuring needle drops by Can, Einstürzende Neubauten, and Laura Marling. They all thread the needle of supporting the vibe and narrative of the scenes they play under, without knocking viewers over the head with their over-familiarity and lyrics spelling out how to feel.

• If Young Franz looks familiar to you, it could be because he’s played by Artjom Gilz, who co-starred in Ponies, of blessed memory, as the KGB agent Andrei Vasiliev.