‘You might have compromised yourself. And now, it’s time to go to work...’
The slow-burn success of Slow Horses has brought the spy subgenre roaring back to our screens with several spy-based films and TV shows appearing in the last year or so. As it’s a subgenre that I’ve never really cared for (I’ve never seen a James Bond movie all the way through (!)), I was going to skip Black Doves but the cast enticed me and I’m a sucker for anything set at Christmas time. I probably shouldn’t have bothered…
From writer-director Joe Barton (Humans, The Lazarus Project), Black Doves begins with the murder of Andrew (Jason Davis) and then spends six episodes following his lover Helen (Keira Knightley) as she attempts to avenge his murder. Helen is a spy who has been installed in the corridors of power as a sleeper agent who maintains a secret identity whilst being married to Wallace (Andrew Webb) – the Secretary of State for Defence. Elsewhere, Sarah Lancashire portrays Helen’s wonderfully sharp-tongued boss Reed and Ben Whishaw is a tortured killer for hire.
There is some good stuff here. The Christmas setting is subtle enough whilst also providing some lovely moments of festive cosiness. Lancashire has an enormous amount of fun playing someone who is a lot more suave than her usual working-class heroes and Whishaw is as compelling as ever in what is a nuanced and layered role. The problem is Keira Knightley. She never really convinces as a spy and her relationship with her lover Andrew, pivotal to the plot, never rings true either. As a result of this Black Doves kinda fizzles out after a promising opening episode and by the end, I didn’t really care either way what happened to Knightley or her quest for revenge.
Black Doves has been renewed for a second season but for me, it doesn’t do enough in its first six episodes to justify any more story – a frustrating disappointment.
