Black Doves Recap: If They’re After You, You’re Already Dead

Every spy thriller that prioritizes being an Entertainment needs a bunch of really solid action sequences. Black Doves has given us quite a few impressive close-quarters fights, but most of that violence has been on the one-on-one and less flashy side, so it’s fun to be served a massive and rather impersonal slab of Grand Guignol violence. “Merry Christmas to all” is the message I’m getting from the big, loud, candy colors in the darkness opening scene as Sam, Williams, and Eleanor very stylishly destroy Hector Newman’s club hideout. Everything about this set piece is TV catnip to me, and I particularly love their approach to the club, cued to Johnny Cash’s rendition of “Little Drummer Boy,” a choice that’s even more apt on rewatch. There are three assassins, as there were three wise men; the refrain of pa-rum-pum-pum is a not-too-distant cousin of gunfire’s own onomatopoeic rat-a-tat; their finest gifts are guns, knives, and a wee bomb, and they intend to lay them, after a fashion, before Hector, who was nearly a baby the last time Sam was hunting him, and who fancies himself the young king of South London.

If earlier foggy, dim scenes suffused with red and green light have suggested some of the romanticism of In the Mood for Love, the blue-and-pink neon-soaked sequence at Hector Newman’s doomed nightclub is shouting Miami Vice and Birds of Prey. Between the lush visuals and the scale of the damage Sam, Williams, and Eleanor are doing, there’s a chaotic glee and panache to the proceedings that are impossible to achieve as a lone gunman. Obviously, Williams needs to keep Sam alive to pay her (before she later kills him), but there’s a note of real camaraderie in her voice when she tells him that “there’s nothing sadder than an old hit man, but I’m not letting you die tonight, you fucker!” The showmanship of this sequence is a high-water mark for stylish violence in the series so far.

Naturally, nothing can go entirely right for our slightly maniacal beloveds. After bringing an unconscious Kai-Ming back to Williams’s place, they still have to wait for her to regain consciousness and for Lenny to hassle Sam one more time about Hector. The window to off this guy is closing rapidly, not least because the kids “shot 17 people in a discotheque last night!!” It’s not the lowest-profile move of all time. Here’s my question about Lenny and Hector: Why didn’t she hire someone else to kill him in the seven years since Sam failed to do so? Is Hector’s death only a matter of urgency when Sam is around? Did Lenny feel in her bones that Sam would return to London this year?

Until Cole Atwood, Olympic-level spiller of beans, hopped into Sam’s ostentatious big vintage four-door BMW, I hadn’t felt the full weight of how murky and stifled Sam and Helen’s investigation into Jason’s death really was. They’ve been forced to take an incremental approach, and Cole’s vital intel as Kai-Ming Chen’s boyfriend sheds a massive floodlight on what’s actually happening. Jason’s involvement in any of this is still unclear, and it’s a mystery to Kai-Ming, too, though it sounds as though Cole was far less under the influence than she was when they returned to her apartment and found her father’s corpse. He also corroborates quite a bit of her story.

Thanks to Cole’s ready-and-willingness to bring us all up to speed, we now know that while he is a CIA agent, he didn’t kill Ambassador Chen and fled the scene out of genuine, not play-acted, panic. As it turns out, his target was not the Chinese government but the Clark crime family. They’re the shadowy bad guys who people keep alluding to! They’ve spread from London, where they established their “Kray twins meet the Freemasons” methodology of relentless and ruthless elimination of other crime enterprises and acquisition of powerful and influential government employees, to New York, Los Angeles, and Miami. They’re secretive, they’re brutal, and Cole believes they’re the ones behind Ambassador Chen’s death because they’ve been methodically scrubbing the record of what happened and of all who were present. He’s been holed up at the Embassy ever since in an effort to stay off their radar, because “if they’re after you, you’re already dead and you just don’t know it.”

Cole appears to be almost grateful to unburden himself of these details, and of his blunt assessments of Kai-Ming and her heroin dealer, Trent. She’s “just a fucking stupid rich junkie with political connections,” while Trent, who is the son of the Clark family’s London branch chief Alex Clark, is “a trust-fund baby moron” and “the weak link” in the entire messed-up chain of events leading us to this point. On the plus side, Trent will follow a summons from anyone with information about Kai-Ming’s whereabouts.

As if all of the above weren’t enough, Cole drops a perspective-shifting bomb on Sam and Helen as they pull up to the rendezvous point to meet Reed: He’s not helping them for the vast sums of cash Helen believed she was offering him at the Embassy. That envelope contains threats against his family’s lives, and he just wants them to be okay. Reed lied to her — of course she did — and now it’s time to pivot to protecting Cole so they have some chance of luring the Clarks into the open. Hit the gas, Sam!

It’s impossible to overstate what a breath of fresh air Cole and Kai-Ming’s appearances provide at this point in the story. They’re very firmly supporting characters, but their presence and vital new information highlight how wan and dull Jason and Hector are by comparison. I can only kvetch so much here; I know that Jason’s purpose in the story is not to be a fully realized character but to be the gender-flipped version of the angelic and tragic young woman who drives a male anti-hero’s righteous vengeance. Even Helen acknowledges that the substance of her relationship with Jason may not have been much of anything at all. It felt like love, but was it really anything more than a tantalizing fever dream? As for Hector Newman, he’s lost all of his muscle and barely escaped with his life after leaving a whisper-light impression as “What If Eddie Redmayne” or “Possibly a Long-Lost Weasley, But Kind of Evil?” Sam is once again lying to everyone about having seen Hector at his club, so he’s bound to turn up again at some point.

Someone I would pay good money to if it meant she’d stop turning up is Dani. Kudos to Agnes O’Casey for finding a way to make her assiduously ego-stroking character not merely irritating but menacing. This tiny, doe-eyed waif is the one making things deeply and unpleasantly weird in an interaction with her very powerful boss. To me, there’s a massive gap between what she thinks she’s doing (being very appealing and solicitous to Wallace) and what Wallace perceives her as doing (overplaying her hand and disrespecting both him and Helen in the process). I’ve never before felt moved to comfort a Tory, but between his near-total breakdown over Yarrick’s death and being relentlessly hit on, I feel for Wallace. At least he was present when his very cocky prime minister got taken down an entire coat rack’s worth of pegs by the CIA station chief after he asked, “We were sat here, chatting and wondering if, just between us girls, there’s a chance you had the Chinese ambassador murdered?” Whatever station chief Mitch knows, he’s entertaining no notions of sharing it with the PM, as it’s an open secret that his government is about as watertight as a sieve.

I want to close out on something that’s been percolating across four episodes so far: the degrees of reality in each of the three romantic relationships at the heart of Helen’s and Sam’s lives. She seems to be interrogating her earlier belief that she isn’t a real person because she’s known only to others as Helen Webb, and Helen Webb is an identity she’s constructed and refined over ten years of life with Wallace. It’s notable that Jason rejected that belief, and that although we repeatedly see her telling him she needs to confide in him who she really is, she never says anything about that woman. By contrast, her relationship with Wallace started out as purely transactional on her part, and of course she betrays his trust every time she accesses his work computer and hands over to Reed the information she gleans, but I think there’s also real love and affection between them. I wonder if the threat of Dani (who showed up at Helen and Wallace’s house the morning after Yarrick’s body is discovered) is a factor in Helen’s thinking. Sam and Michael are a bit of a different story, as they met and fell in love organically. The swoon factor of their first date, with its focus on their adoring eyes back and forth, is almost unmeasurably high, so reminiscent of the reunion between Chiron and Kevin in Moonlight. Still, it’s easy to imagine Michael’s long-overdue howl, “You let me fall in love with someone who didn’t exist!” emerging from Wallace’s mouth, too, should he learn that he was ever Helen’s mark.

Closing Doors, Opening Windows

• The wit and wisdom of Eleanor: Kai-Ming describes heroin as the greatest feeling in the world until it starts sucking the life out of you like a vampire you’ve sicced on yourself. Eleanor’s takeaway is “so, a seven out of ten overall, then?”

• Sam’s car is the second of two very small outward nods to his inheritances from his late father; the other is the revolver he uses at Hector Newman’s club.

• With the reveal of the Clark family as the season’s Big Bad, we’re now fully in Gangs of London’s territory of underworld hostile takeovers. If that kind of story is your jam, all three seasons so far are on Netflix.

• Sam is so far off his game at the prospect of any kind of reunion with Michael that he slips pretty badly in his fake emergency call with Vanessa at the U.S. Embassy, telling her his name is Kent Brockman, the TV anchor on The Simpsons.