I entered Black Doves really wanting to like it. I’d first been introduced to series creator Joe Barton’s work with his screenplay for the TIFF premiering film My Days of Mercy, which told a love story with complication because of personal connections to the death penalty. Black Doves stars actors I find charming in Keira Knightley and Ben Whishaw and is set during Christmas, which is often a great driver for story conflict and/or comedy, as seen in other non-traditional holiday classics like Die Hard and the more recent Disney+ series Hawkeye. The trailer presents the premise of a long-embedded spy whose cover may have been compromised (Knightley as Helen) and someone from her past with whom she had a close relationship (Whishaw as Sam) coming back to get her out and to the bottom of it. It seemed like fun and games, and while the characters themselves are a lot of fun, the world created becomes intertwined and messy, and the attempts to wrap up the threads at the end, while leaving the possibility for future seasons, just makes the characters seem incompetent at their jobs. And while the series would like you to believe they are great at their jobs, to end up in the situations they are in, they have already made unwise choices.
Marketing and trailers are a grab-bag, and this series’ trailer was pretty effective. It presented an accurate view of the premise while also playing up certain aspects to potentially bring in viewers even if they did not hide the actual truth in the advertisement. In this case, I’m referring to playing up the relationship between Knightley’s Helen and Whishaw’s Sam, pulling lines and scenes that make their past relationship seem to have a romantic tone rather than the friendship tone it carried even though the trailer doesn’t fully hide that Sam is gay with a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot of him with Michael (played by Omari Douglas). But creating that intrigue amongst your leads, especially in a show about spies and secret lives, works because watching it with little info about their past relationship but the hint that it was close if you came from the trailer believing that it might have been romantic and that she had just lost her lover, that creates a good viewing dynamic going forward. But watching the series, I was glad that was not chosen as the actual dynamic for their relationship because it feels played out. The old lover comes back to help out, and that love rekindles, we’ve seen it. While these characters love each other deeply, they are not romantically in love, and you rarely get to see that dynamic between male and female characters at the heart of spy film/tv, though, while I love seeing queer representation on screen, and Black Doves had a lot, I do think there is a tendency to avoid close male-female friendships unless there is no chance at romance by one of them being LGBTQ+ (see also Stanger Things and Robin and Steve).
EXTREMELY SPOILERY: While the characters themselves were interesting, it was how they weaved together within their world that left a lot of questions. If Lenny (played by Kathryn Hunter) wanted Hector dead, why wait until Sam returned to have him do it, letting Hector gain a foothold in the city? The convergence of the characters was a little convenient, with practically everyone being MI5, CIA, and Black Doves, not to mention multiple rival turf gangs in London who essentially have their own intelligence or connections to authority. The series begins with Reed (played by Sarah Lancashire) suspecting Helen’s cover may have been burned because of the affair she was having with Jason (played by Andrew Koji), who is killed in the pilot along with two others. Reed has already planned to replace Helen because she had caught onto the affair, but at the end of the series, Reed is ready to commit back to Helen because, after the events of the series, Helen will be placed in a position to get even more information for the Black Doves. However, the audience knows now, even though Reed believes Helen’s identity to be secure, that she is burned. A CIA operative knows who she is, even if he says he can keep a secret that is leverage. For a spy series, this seems like a big loose end. And that’s not the only loose end that is left. Many people leave loose ends, leading with heart over head, which is a theme in this series, and while I think it’s a lovely sentiment, it doesn’t ring true when you know not everyone is playing by those rules.
Christmas did not feel ingrained into the story but rather tacked on as an ornament, and it didn’t add anything to its adornment.
Black Doves is streaming on Netflix.
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