‘Black Doves’ Offers a Sentimental Take on the Spy Genre

In the new mystery thriller “Black Doves,” the secret agents’ mandate can include school plays, bedtime stories and holiday decorations. By day, Helen Webb (Keira Knightley) is the model wife of the British Defense Secretary (Andrew Buchan) and loving mother to their two young children; at night, she passes her information to her mistress, Mrs. Reed (Sarah Lancashire), who sells the information collected by “black doves” like Helen to the highest bidder. This is when things go well. In the second episode, things go wrong: an assassin bursts into Helen’s kitchen, where she and the intruder face off in the dark, their breathtaking fight lit by the glow of a Christmas tree . After gaining the upper hand, Helene threatens him like an angry domestic goddess. “I have a cheese grater in the dishwasher,” she says. “I have a peeler. I have skewers. I have a kettle. With vicious insistence, she adds: “I have a NutriBullet.” The next morning, she has a dead body in her garden shed and is worried about the dried blood under her fingernails.

“Black Doves,” a six-episode Netflix series created by Joe Barton, is populated by opportunists and mercenaries who nevertheless form real partnerships. Helen, in her dual role as wife and political mole, feels twice as much pressure to keep up appearances. (Her gift for espionage also has consequences in the family sphere, as when she taps her husband’s phone and is upset to find evidence of a flirtation with a pretty young assistant.) The suspicious death of ‘a Chinese ambassador and the disappearance of his hard-partying daughter gradually traps Helen in a traditional spy plot, but the questions that seem most pressing are interpersonal: namely, how she and her former coach, Sam (Ben Whishaw ), have become friends, and what ultimately broke their relationship. bind. When Sam surprises Helen after seven years of absence, she says she thought she would only see him again if he was hired to “retire” her. “You know I would never take this job,” he replies. “Unless the money is really good.”

His cynicism, like hers, quickly reveals itself to be a posture of self-protection. It’s probably no coincidence that this sentimental take on the spy genre puts women and gay men at the forefront – and that love, not geopolitics, is the guiding force in the lives of its protagonists . Sam’s return to London is complicated by unfinished business with her civilian ex-boyfriend, and Helen is propelled by the murder of her own lover, to whom she had confessed her double life. The case supervisors and crime bosses are also women, played by veteran actresses such as Lancashire, Tracey Ullman and the gnomic Kathryn Hunter. Respectable-looking women can go unnoticed more easily than their male counterparts; Helen’s husband, still oblivious, mistakes Mrs. Reed for a government official when she sneaks into a party he is throwing. In fact, she speaks so softly that even Helen regularly underestimates her cruelty.

In many ways, though, “Black Doves” is like a box of candy given on vacation: pleasant, elegant, forgotten as soon as it’s eaten. Like so many spy tales, the series is driven by a complex plot rather than meaningful character development. Helen’s indifference toward the sale of state secrets, in particular, is difficult to reconcile with the decency she displays in other facets of her life. Her friendship with Sam is too thinly sketched for its sticky denouement to achieve any real resonance, and the few glimpses we get, via flashback, of her affair are insufficient to give her revenge plot much emotional weight. She regrets that neither she nor anyone around her knows her true personality, but the series fails to delve deeper into this existential crisis. The most poignant admission comes from Sam’s ex, Michael (Omari Douglas), who says that after discovering that everything he knew about his boyfriend was just a facade, he had to struggling to trust him again, for fear of falling in love with another man who didn’t exist.

Douglas evokes a beautiful chemistry with Whishaw, who wears his character’s world-weariness like a second skin. Yet these more grounded performances are undermined by the show’s need to deliver the kind of action that haunts its heroes. One of Sam’s most unlikely allies is a young hitwoman who throws punches between attacks and proves alarmingly determined to deploy a rocket launcher. His joyful bravado contrasts strikingly with his inner turmoil; It’s also pretty stupid. But, as an old contact suggests after Sam’s return, times have changed. The show is in order. “It’s not like your time,” the other man said wistfully. “At least you killed people with a touch of class.”

If “Black Doves” aspires to inject some comfort into the generally cold spy genre, “The Agency,” on Paramount+, turns the thermostat down all the way. Compared to the gentle subversions of the Netflix series, this remake of the French thriller “The Office” emphasizes the loneliness of saving the world. Michael Fassbender plays a CIA agent who is abruptly removed from a mission in Ethiopia, where he had met the love of his life, a historian named Samia (Jodie Turner-Smith). Now stationed in London, he is nicknamed Martian by his colleagues and has reconnected with his resentful college-aged daughter (India Fowler). Martian, often the smartest man in the room, chafes at his employers’ insistence on monitoring him for signs of “post-mission disorders,” a condition that remains unexplained. His grievances intensify when he secretly rekindles his romance with Samia, whose role in sensitive diplomatic matters he never imagined.

Fassbender’s calling card is his intensity, which exposes the raw humanity of his characters — or something terrifying in them that doesn’t seem human at all. That ferocity is an indispensable asset to “The Agency,” but even great performances from Fassbender, Richard Gere and Jeffrey Wright can’t make up for its slow, syrupy pace and reliance on familiar tropes. Worse still are his vague and laborious meditations on the psychological toll of clandestine life. When a CIA psychologist (Harriet Sansom Harris) questions Martian’s state of mind, he seems to channel the Joker, insisting that his unease is what allows him to get the job done. “You’re not trying to help me,” he said. “You fear I have become sane.” He reassures her with a line so idiotic that even Fassbender can’t save her: “The person sitting across from you is, was, will remain purely, profoundly, one hundred percent identifiable crazy.” »

“The Agency” opposes a renewed Cold War and strives to assert its relevance to the present. A subplot takes place in Ukraine; another concerns Tehran’s nuclear efforts. But the six episodes made available to critics are too preoccupied with Martian’s apparent madness to say anything about our world. The so-called international stakes of the “Black Doves” – that the ambassador’s death could somehow trigger a Third World War – seem just as far from reality. In the face of these recent missteps, it’s worth asking whether today’s spy drama can – or even wants to – serve as anything other than escapism. The rare exception to the rule is the excellent “Slow Horses,” a British series on Apple TV+ that conveys both the institutional rot and the sense of personal betrayal that comes from being considered useless by your own government. But many of the show’s American counterparts failed, even though real-world national security issues have rarely seemed so pressing. Disinformation is rampant and Tulsi Gabbard, a former congresswoman infamously accused by Hillary Clinton of being “a Russian asset,” was appointed by Donald Trump to oversee the country’s eighteen intelligence agencies. A new world order – one that would decenter America as the planet’s reigning superpower – appears ascendant. Such narratives are present in our daily lives but unusually absent from our popular culture, which has historically distilled the anxieties of the times. Removing spy thrillers from our own political tumult can make them feel comforting; it also robs them of their stamina. In the end, it’s the drama unfolding on the news that sticks.