CLOAK AND DAGGER

Forget ‘Slow Horses’—This Is TV’s Best Spy Show

Keira Knightley’s “Black Doves” is an exceptional espionage adventure in its second season.

With all due respect to the Gary Oldman-led Slow Horses—and the Michael Fassbender-starring The Agency—Keira Knightly’s Black Doves is the best espionage series on television, and it fortifies its king-of-the-hill position with a superb second season.

Melding hard-hitting action, serpentine storytelling, and empathetic character drama with a deft hand and a dry sense of humor, Joe Barton’s Netflix hit (Nov. 5) is a rare TV affair that wholly avoids lulls, its writing as brisk and cutting as its performances are nuanced and compelling.

With Knightley and Ben Whishaw spearheading a stellar cast whose repartee is sharp and chemistry is sharper, and an intricate tale of regret, vengeance, and betrayal that organically intertwines the personal and the professional, it’s a superior cat-and-mouse game that expertly sets itself apart from its genre compatriots.

Loyalty is a tricky thing to come by for a spy, and love is even harder to find (and hold onto). That latter struggle energizes Black Doves’ return engagement. In the aftermath of last season’s events, Helen (Knightley)—a covert agent known as a Black Dove—is having marital troubles with her husband Wallace (Andrew Buchan), who’s about to become Prime Minister and doesn’t know that his wife was assigned to be with him by her handler Reed (Sarah Lancashire).

Wallace feels like Helen isn’t completely honest with him, and with good reason. His chief concern, however, is an upcoming defense summit in London that’s brought heightened security and, with it, prying eyes.

Life isn’t any easier for Helen’s mentor/friend Sam (Whishaw), an ace assassin who, following his latest hit, is greeted outside by a squadron of police officers. Even more surprising, he’s subsequently visited in prison by Patrick (Sam Riley), a suave stranger who offers him a deal: in exchange for agreeing to kill four targets (no questions asked), he can immediately walk free.

Sam suspects that this is a Faustian bargain but, considering his situation, he must accept. Unsurprisingly, this causes considerable trouble: After offing the first man on his kill list, he learns from Helen that the guy was actually a Black Dove, putting Sam in the lethal organization’s crosshairs.

Simultaneously, at a gala event, Helen is ordered to steal intel from the safe of Russian oligarch Alexi (Goran Kostic), who wants in on Wallace’s summit, and this mission­—pairing the heroine with snarky and deadly Laila (Ambika Mod)—concludes with the first of Black Doves’ no-holds-barred centerpieces.

Creator/showrunner Barton routinely has Knightley and Whishaw engage in brutal shootouts, car chases, and hand-to-hand combat, and the stars’ competence at this nastiness amplifies the proceedings’ electricity. Such moments also keep the pace vigorous, and they’re routinely embellished with amidst-the-chaos bickering and romantic heart-to-hearts that establish the material’s cheekily gung-ho tone.

Black Doves isn’t cartoony, but it has a distinct action-movie vibe, and that extends to Sam’s assassin accomplices Eleanor (Gabrielle Creevy) and Williams (Ella Lily Hyland), wisecracking lesbians who get in the mood for their work by listening to “murder playlists” and have no qualms about taking whatever jobs come their way. Still, no matter their goofiness, they’re wracked by serious emotional turmoil, as is Sam, whose misery over his vicious vocation and the loneliness and emptiness it’s begat has him considering a change of course—perhaps with the hotel concierge with whom he spends his nights.

As Sam tries to figure out who’s pulling his strings, Helen embarks on a quest to locate Reed, who, after receiving the material Helen pilfered—related to the codeword “Wildflower”—mysteriously vanishes. Helen’s fear that something is dangerously amiss is furthered by the news that she’s been assigned a new handler in Robert (Babou Ceesay), and in short order, Black Doves is entangling her in a conspiracy that dates back decades and is directly tied to Sam’s homicidal jobs, all of which involve him taking out individuals with ties to Helen, Reed, and the rest of their Black Doves cohorts.

Knightley seems, on the surface, far more cut out for political soirées than kicking mercenaries through windows, so her adeptness at the latter gives the material its verve. Black Doves is rife with tensions between appearance and reality, ruthlessness and compassion, honor and duplicity, and affectation and authenticity, and Knightley’s turn captures those schisms with dexterity. So too does the droll and soulful Whishaw as Sam, a weary hired gun whose cold blood slowly warms, complicating tasks whose roots stretch into the past.

Between Lancashire’s steely pitilessness and Hyland and Creevy’s banter-y silliness, Black Doves comes across as both hard and soft, and that contrast is emblematic of a series about dual lives, allegiances, and aims. No one can trust anyone in this world of sinister subterfuge, and Barton fleshes it out with a host of memorable supporting players, the most colorful of which is Kathryn Hunter’s Lenny Lines, a gruff-voiced badass who’s quick with a nasty quip and yet surprisingly kind-hearted toward Sam.

Nonetheless, everyone is in top form, including season two additions Mod as the cocky, big-mouthed Laila, Ceesay as shadowy Black Doves bigwig Robert, and Neve Campbell as Cecile, a United States envoy frustrated with Wallace’s reckless embrace of Alexi.

As with Slow Horses, Black Doves runs a compact six episodes, although it has less excess fat than that similar streaming sensation; by having its male and female killers often work out their issues while executing (pun intended) their duties, it avoids wasting time on exposition-heavy scenes. As shown in a flashback-centric fourth episode, the series occasionally pauses to catch its breath.

However, it never loiters, and Knightley and Whishaw’s terrific dynamic means that Helen and Sam resonate as like-minded lost souls bonded by both their desire to reconcile their warring impulses and their staunch devotion to each other.

Black Doves’ assuredness is epitomized in its closing chapter, which satisfyingly wraps up the story while naturally laying the groundwork for future thorny endeavors. Nimbly balancing his multiple concerns with just the right amount of wit and poignancy, Barton proves himself a master of intrigue and violence.

With any luck, Netflix will give him plenty more opportunities to ply his cloak-and-dagger trade.

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Nick SchagerEntertainment Critic

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