At long last, it’s a cool and engaging project for which Keira Knightley can embrace her creativity. This is the first time the star of Love Actually and the Pirates of the Caribbean films appears in Black Doves – a new espionage thriller series that is now streaming on Netflix. The novel rolls on a timeline where Keira Knightley is shown as a conflicted operative battling between a relationship, her career and a traumatic past. For the actress, who has rather garnered good fortune with a decent ensemble cast including Ben Whishaw (No Time to Die, TV’s Fargo), Sarah Lancashire (Julia, Happy Valley), Wallace Webb, Omari Douglas and Sam Troughton, this is rather her zenith.
Joe Barton (The Lazarus Project) achieves this wonderful blend of good intrigue and exceptional character work in this Christmas spy thriller, one of the most compelling of the year. Take Slow Horses or perhaps Hunters, think of the dense universe so beautifully woven that we the viewers, couldn’t help but plunge into it and yearn to come back for more. That is the case through out Black Doves.
Helen Webb is the character portrayed by Knightley in the show. The character has a history as a spy and is fully capable of infiltrating any of the top offices in the British government, or anywhere for that matter. To keep herself undercover, she put on a false wife mother of twins persona. Wallace (Andrew Buchan) is her husband who is a government official which gives him an ideal cover as she aids the Black Doves in several of their spying and espionage operations.
When Helen’s love interest Jason (Andrew Koji) along with two other Jason’s associates get assassinated, Helen is made a target by Reed, Helen’s Lancashire boss. This created a rapid chain of situations where everyone is curious to know who Helen is and who committed the murders. The series itself declares the danger that is set in during this time, the events intensify one after the other without breaks such that the only amount of thrill one gets makes the entire season an entertaining watch.
Reed had the same curiosity about Helen on meeting with Sam Whishaw, saying “The husband, the house, the twins…” this was after an interaction where Sam was told how to act during meetings with Helen as secrets can’t be easily kept. “You expect to find me an assassin” is the reply Sam gave Reed only to leave to help her out.
Sam shows up at the scene at a crucial time in Episode 1 when Helen is in dire straits. All of a sudden, Helen and Sam make a promise to search for the killer together. Look at how Whishaw shines throughout this outing. Yes, because he is a brilliant actor, however also because his role is a most pleasing surprise-a gay hitman with a most interesting history. Come on.
In Episode 2, through flashbacks, we get to know how Helen started working with the Black Doves and married Wallace. It is also interesting to note how the series has so many ways to achieve action packed sequences as well as the great dialogues written for characters such as Sam and Helen. At one point, Sam looks at her “You really are a tough woman, you know that?” This is after all, coming from someone who has just had an explosion blast. Helen quipped: “You ought to have witnessed how I, on a Wednesday noon, pushed a pair of human beings out of my vagina.”
It is about that way over here. It gets wickedly fun, fast, and very entertaining. Observed how the showrunner criminally abuses characters by putting them in and out of episodes and how new ones are added in a seamless manner to cover the characters’ storylines, not to mention how beautifully the series takes us to the gloomy London underworld that starts after midnight, where Helen goes through big hours of invasion, followed by stabbings and several attacks and then somehow manages to sleep next to her husband. That’s one way of putting things in their right place, Helen.
“Some things ought to rest in time,” Sam’s friend says to him at one point. “Some ought to be resurrected.” That becomes more than just a throwaway line. By the end of the six-part first season, you witness the constant shaping of these characters and the reasons for them evolving in such a manner as the episodes develop. Such flashbacks are quite well done and Joe Barton, the showrunner, successfully establishes himself as a competent storyteller, who knows how to increase tension at the end of each episode.
Things take a leap forward in the narrative when the Chinese ambassador to the UK is found dead under suspicious circumstances of possible heroin overdose. Even worse is that his carefree daughter is unaccounted for. This raises questions in the minds of both the spies and the government as whether the ‘Yanks’ had something to do with the assassination of the ambassador. At the same time, there’s someone who also killed Jason and who wants to get their hands on something crucial that Jason left, making Helen a person of interest. Jason’s killing also implicates Helen making Reed suspicious of her which provides a fine conflict between both of them suitable for the nuances of their characters.
Make sure to catch Kathryn Hunter impressing you with her performance in Lenny — yes, with tracksuit looking great – a person from Sam’s unsavory past wanting something from him now. Ella Lily Hyland and Gabrielle Creevy are a hip pleasure as the younger gender neutral hit men. Such distinct creative details also get diffused into the entire series making it appear very deliberated and well thoughtful, and splendidly dedicated towards amusing plots and well established characters.
Admittedly, the series sometimes tends to be a good but wannabe pulp fiction, but once the action shifts the focus towards the later episodes as the variegated spy glass rotates and spins, it is hard to let go of the work. Also, big applause for the production value throughout, too. In Short: Knightley is a gem, a pure natural phenomenon and at the same time Whishaw becomes the star of the series. You will want Season 2 sooner rather later. In Other Words, watch out for this bold and brilliant surprise. It is a keeper.
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