Black Doves review – Ben Whishaw, Keira Knightley and Sarah Lancashire are spine-tinglingly good
Series two of this rambunctiously entertaining espionage drama might be implausible. But it’s a magnetically acted tale of friendship, with moments of genuine poignance
Is Helen Webb Britain’s busiest mum? Or Britain’s least busy mum? On the one hand, she’s got two kids, is the wife of the recently promoted prime minister and also a deep cover spy, who spends her days passing information about her husband’s work to a shady intelligence organisation and her nights on covert missions which often involve acts of bloody slaughter. Yet the reason she can do all this is that nobody expects her to do anything at all: she doesn’t have to look after her children (she has an ever-present nanny – who, unbeknown to Helen, is in fact another spy), manage the household, hold down a job or even sleep in her own bed at night. Forget getting away with murder – how does she get away with not doing the school run?!
I don’t think you’re meant to spend Black Doves obsessing over Helen’s domestic arrangements, but if you like cataloguing the ways spy dramas stretch credulity to its absolute limits, Joe Barton’s thriller will certainly scratch that itch. This is a show so relentlessly preposterous it’s practically nihilistic: not just because Black Doves’ excessive body count makes life itself look cheap and worthless, but because searching for coherence in its bewildering storylines quickly starts feeling like a waste of time too.
Yet the appeal of this show isn’t in the conspiracies, which in series one included Helen (Keira Knightley) tracing the murder of the civil servant she was having an affair with – I’m now leaning towards busiest – back to a plot involving the CIA and the Chinese ambassador. Instead, the attraction is the characters and the cast. Knightley is perfect as the kind of middle-class woman for whom disingenuous social performance is simply a way of life, whether they’re really a gun-toting spy or not. Ben Whishaw is magnetic as her beloved hitman pal Sam, an increasingly weathered sprite-like figure who offs people with a sweet melancholy that makes you feel as if he’s the real victim, while Sarah Lancashire is predictably spine-tingling as Helen’s cold-blooded handler Reed. Joined by cartoonishly irreverent young assassin duo Eleanor and Williams (Gabrielle Creevy and Ella Lily Hyland), they’re a motley crew – something echoed in the tone, an amusingly incongruous mix of Tarantino-esque camp, Richard Curtis schmaltz, chilly espionage drama, hectic farce and wry Britishcore.
Still, ludicrousness remains a top note. Series two finds Sam strolling out of a block of flats after a hit, only to find himself surrounded by police. This is highly unusual, because in Black Doves nobody ever faces any legal repercussions for their ceaseless killings. And lo, it turns out to be a setup: at the station, he gets a visit from a mysterious man (Sam Riley) who somehow has the power to get him off scot-free if he agrees to commit another set of cryptic murders. Meanwhile Helen, newly installed in No 10 (there’s an arch joke about a wallpaper-heavy Carrie Johnson-style refurb), discovers Reed has gone awol, so she ropes in Sam and his trigger-happy associates, plus new frenemy and the show’s third bonkers young female assassin, Laila (Ambika Mod) to help find her boss. All this while trying to fend off the man from MI5 who has noticed major discrepancies in her backstory – something that finally arouses suspicion in her spectacularly incurious husband.
The latter matter is the most compelling element of Black Doves, closely followed by the tense moment when Williams and Eleanor ask Helen what music she likes, and the only singer she can think of is Olly Murs (the moral: you can bury your backstory all you like, cringe millennial mum is in your DNA). The non-stop gunfights might look great, but they’re devoid of jeopardy: no matter how many adversaries they face, Helen and co alwayscome out on top. This lot are bulletproof. I think literally.
Black Doves does have a serious side, asking questions about the nature of identity like: does lying about your past really make you any less of a devoted wife and mother? If you perform all the tasks and say all the things – if you are actually there– does it matter what’s going on inside your head? As philosophical conundrums go, it’s not a particularly tricky one (the answer is: yes). Yet despite its absurdity, this rambunctiously entertaining drama does still possess a poignancy and a message that rings true. Essentially, this is a portrait of Sam and Helen’s friendship enduring amid a backdrop of merciless scheming and grisly horror. Life is pain, death is coming: delight in someone else’s company – or, in this case, banter with your best mate as you blow someone’s head off with an assault rifle – is the only happiness we can truly count on in the end.
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