Black Doves Recap: ’Twas Ever Thus

Black Doves
Put Your Head on My Shoulder
Season 2 Episode 2
Editor’s Rating ★★★★
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Sam and Helen are having what is, at base, the same midlife crisis. After investing so many years in their illicit but exciting careers, they must now face facts: The jobs will never love them back, and they may be aging out of their related fields. At least Helen’s work has forced her to create some aspects of a real life that can exist outside of espionage, but her loving relationships with Wallace and their children may not survive the next couple of weeks. The revelation that the woman they know as a loving (if often distracted and not always present) wife and mother has been committing treason almost daily for the entirety of their relationship with her could ruin it all. 

Sam’s situation is even worse. He has no family (remember, he assassinated his own father to seal his commitment to the life). He has no friends outside of Helen, and it’s clear that prior to their call while she’s safecracking in Paris, the two of them haven’t spoken in months. He lives in a hotel where the staff has a betting pool going on what his career could be. His isolated existence is bleak, especially for such a bighearted person naturally inclined to love others.

At every turn, Sam is reminded of both his own mortality and his lack of a ready answer to the question of what he will do with the time remaining in his one wild and precious life. He’s already sort of taking a page from Lenny’s book by surrounding himself with younger colleagues to mentor and assign work to. This is a smart move, and there are bound to be more Williamses and Eleanors out there for him to mold into the next generation of triggermen. But will it be enough? When he goes to kill Spitfire, a.k.a. Melanie Ambrose, she tells him that choosing to retire early (rather than being retired) gave her about 20 more good years of life before he turned up at her door. She’s got the adorable flat to show for it, too — it’s a basement, but her kitchen gets lots of light and the balance of cozy to expansive is just right — yet has retained enough assassin-spy skills that she’s able to maneuver Sam into the living room and herself close to the gun she keeps by the door. His reflexes are better, though, so RIP Spitfire.

Helen is deeply vexed by this turn of events. Would it kill Sam to hold off on killing the people she needs to talk to before she can talk to them? Her ever-shortening list of agents associated with Wildflower leads her to attempt to team up again with Laila, who Conteh says was dropped from active duty about six months ago and has been AWOL ever since. The first one-on-one meeting between handler and agent isn’t promising. There has always been friction between Reed and Helen, but in the main, Reed has been successful in using a shifting combination of wheedling, scolding, complimenting, and threatening to ensure Helen fullfils her mission objectives. Conteh needs some practice in this area or at least to accept a certain degree of independent action from her. He clearly knows Helen well from Reed’s reports to the steering committee and from her file, but that’s a totally different experience from managing a field agent. The episode brings out an interesting tension in Conteh. He says he doesn’t think much of assassins because of their fundamental incuriosity; he always has questions and always wants answers. But does he really? Or does he mean he wants to be the one to find answers? He’s certainly not a fan of Helen’s seeking answers on her own. The fastest way to get her onside would be to show that she can trust him, but he seems more invested in asserting his authority over her. It’s too bad because if he strikes the right balance, their partnership could be very fruitful!

At one point, Helen remarks that as the prime minister’s wife, she has to be careful about whom she’s seen with, and this feels like a moment to wonder aloud about the advisability of the Black Doves meeting with their handlers in public in a city blanketed with CCTV cameras. There’s a funny nod to this in the episode’s big set piece, in which Laila reluctantly meets with Helen and they lead several teams of Black Doves security guys on a chase through Somerset House. The whole thing — Laila’s irritation at Helen’s spy-wife assumption that she hasn’t been followed, the ease with which she dispatches the guys who try to kidnap her, how their improvisational fighting style lets them escape, and all the banter in between — is the high point of the episode. Ambika Mod gets all the best lines, and her spiky chemistry with Keira Knightley is so much fun to watch.

It’s clear that Laila’s dismissal of her as a spy-wife continues to make Helen desperate to prove she’s more than that. So desperate, in fact, that she goes off and does a whole bunch of spy-wife things, such as summoning Laila to a meet where she didn’t notice she was being followed (while wearing a pretty useless disguise of a brown tweed baseball cap and large sunglasses). That wild chase through Somerset House only strengthens her reckless determination to get to the bottom of what’s going on with Reed and the Black Doves in general. In the end, Helen’s biggest challenge as a Black Dove that day turns out to be the most spy-wife thing she could do: follow Reed’s advice, digging deep into her arsenal as an accomplished liar to convince Wallace she doesn’t want an exit strategy from their marriage and certainly has never cheated on him. 

If only Reed knew she had such good reason to be proud of her girl. She definitely enjoys learning about Helen’s exploits with Laila (another managerial challenge whom Reed clearly enjoys working with; I’m so curious about who her handler was and how she got pulled from active duty), but that’s the high point of Conteh’s visit. Otherwise, he’s all business; as far as he can tell, all roads of the murders of three Black Doves lead to her and this bizarrely underreported East Berlin mission from 1988. She’s the sole survivor and was the undercover asset there for five years, so Conteh knows there’s a much bigger story for her to tell. Now is the time for Reed to try to clear her name. 

Of course, we know what Conteh does not (and perhaps Reed suspects), which is that Kestrel (through Patrick) is behind it all and that someone else must also have survived that operation. Poor Sam wishes he didn’t know about Kestrel, but under Helen’s curiosity-driven influence, he enlists Lenny’s help to track down Patrick and get some answers. For the third time in two seasons, Sam is forced to sever a relationship, and this one may be the most painful, the most cruel, because in killing Jerry, Sam is destroying potential. Maybe he and Jerry would have had a long, lovely life together; maybe it would have been only a romantic interlude, but he’ll never know. Whatever life Jerry had ahead of him, with or without Sam, as a concierge or something else entirely, is over because Sam got too curious and then had to choose between the love (or hell, even just the date at the nice shared-plates restaurant!) he might have had with Jerry and the love and protectiveness (and sometimes resentful obligation) he already shares with Helen. Once Patrick shows Sam the video of Helen shooting an older man in the head, it’s game over for Jerry. Once again, Sam feels he doesn’t have a choice, but Lenny’s right: He does have a choice; he just dislikes one of the options too much to take it.

Before heading out into the night to break his own heart, Sam tells Williams that she should tell Eleanor that she’s in love with her. She’s miserable carrying her love around like a big secret and waiting for Eleanor to notice, but if she tells Eleanor, she’ll know for sure what’s on the other side of sharing it. Assassins don’t have a superlong life expectancy, Sam reminds her, and does she really want to wake up one day years from now only to realize she has no one and nothing long-lasting in her life? Tell her! 

Strange Times to Be Nefarious

• Three lines are in a dead heat for best of the episode: (1) Eleanor’s bewildered, mocking “What, are you gay Miss Marple and lesbian Poirot now?” (2) Laila’s up-to-here line with Helen, “It was nice knowing you — we’ll always have Paris. Don’t call me again!” and (3) Lenny’s (Kathryn Hunter can do no wrong) “If you came to kill me, you better fucking not have — I’ve got goulash on!” 

• You don’t bring in Neve Campbell for just a couple of scenes, and I look forward to Cecile Mason making more of a pest of herself at No. 10 as we get closer to the Defense Summit. Joe Barton has written the United States’s Defense envoy to sound a bit like a mid-20th-century screwball heroine (via Texas, maybe?), which is both odd and tantalizing. 

• My hat is off to the costume-design team. Lenny leaning all the way into cheetah print; Conteh’s luxurious, extremely buttoned-up layers; Laila’s belligerently cool streetwear — the personalities and priorities conveyed in the costuming are knocking me out.