When we’re first introduced to Helen Webb (Keira Knightley), the heroine of Netflix’s latest spy thriller “Black Doves,” she wears a nice dress and perfectly coiffed hair that doesn’t budge an inch. Life for Helen, the wealthy wife of Defense Minister Wallace Webb (Andrew Buchan), has given her a big house, two children, and a Christmas tree full of gifts. But Helen has a secret. She is a member of a private detective organization named the Black Doves, who has no loyalty, working only for the highest bidder.
While her marriage began as a simple mission, her relationship with Wallace has become complicated yet real. At the center of this complexity is a case involving civil servant James Davis (Andrew Koji), who is murdered along with two others at the beginning of the show’s first episode. Helen’s closeness to James, and the secrets she tells him, may be the reason why her employers want her back in the game. Or perhaps, there are other secrets lurking beneath the surface of Helen’s fractured disguise, secrets so big that they attempt to shatter the foundation of the country.
In Helen Webb, Knightley is given the role of a lifetime, forcing her to balance her comedic style with her physicality. Although she has always been an extremely talented dramatic actress, after a fascinating career in “Black Doves”, she has been given the opportunity to give audiences a performance of hers that they have never seen before. Helen is balanced and sophisticated in the life she has built with her politician husband, but once her past comes back to haunt her, this sophistication slowly wears away, revealing a broken interior that Bound to disintegrate before the end of the season. Knightley is joined by the equally brilliant Ben Whishaw, whose role as his partner in crime Sam is the emotional anchor of the show.
She also suffers from the burden of her past, namely the burden of the lover she abandoned when she ran away to London 7 years before the series began. It is in Sam that the emotional core of the show can be found; Faltering while apologizing, excessive blinking of eyes, shedding tears before falling. At the beginning of the series, Helen is described as “a coiled spring; a weapon” and it is clear that neither she nor Sam are really moved by this description. Although they have become accustomed to their lives of espionage and murder, the secrets they have attempted to bury stubbornly continue to rear their heads, exposing both characters as the fractured humans they are. Really are. In Helen’s case, this leads her to uncover many of the mysteries at the center of the series, but with Sam, it leads her to become even more frustrated with the life she is living.
The streaming market is nearly saturated with spy thrillers, but it’s clear that creator Joe Barton understands this. Instead of just directing an extravagant political thriller with Knightley and Whishaw, he gives these actors some of the best material they’ve been given in years, allowing them to live out two of the most interesting characters he brought to the table. Screen this year. Both Helen and Sam – and the side characters who join them on their mission – are struggling with two different versions of themselves. One is the person who does what they are told and doesn’t ask any questions, and the other is the person who is tired of the system they find themselves in and are desperate to find a way out.
This is where “Black Doves” beats all its peers; In its willingness to challenge its genre and in the empathy it offers its central characters. Although the Black Doves is an elite and often apolitical intelligence agency, the people who are part of it are imbued with a code of ethics that directly conflicts with the agenda of the organization they are serving. Even the most playful side characters, who enter the show with an air of psychopathy, gradually turn into fleshed-out humans whose depth is not reflected in their work. This is an exciting series where we get to see some great action sequences, yes, but we also get a chance to fall in love with these characters when they are at their most ordinary.
Throughout its six-episode runtime, the series never loses its wit, style, and heart. From the shootouts to the tender confessions of love, “Black Doves” feels like a revelation in a genre that grows stale year after year. Even its most painstaking stories spark various government agencies racing to uncover the murder of a politician. Where most shows like this falter due to a bloated story or suffer from uninteresting characters, creator Joe Barton has created a series that is desperate to show why it’s different. Thankfully, it delivers on this promise on all fronts and looks like it will become one of the most-loved spy thrillers of the decade if given a second season.
The entire series was screened for review. On Netflix December 5th.