Spoilers below.
On its surface, Black Doves is about a pair of trigger-happy spies alarmingly eager to commit treason so long as a woman with an austere gray bob pays them for it. But scratch away that shiny (if silly) veneer, and by the end of the Netflix thriller’s first season, you’ll understand it’s about the importance—nay, the necessity—of friendship. Not on board for such an earnest parable, even during the Christmas season? Keira Knightly and Ben Whishaw do their darnedest to make it more palatable to skeptics with an onslaught of knife- and gunfights.
Still, the finale, “In the Bleak Midwinter,” takes pains not to spend too much time wallowing in blood. When the episode opens, Sam (Whishaw) wakes to find himself lying on the floor of the Clark family hideout, where he discovers his assassin frenemy Eleanor (Gabrielle Creevy) and the Chinese ambassador’s daughter, Kai-Ming (Isabella Wei), blinking back at him from the chairs in which they’re bound and tied. We know it won’t be long before Helen (Knightley) shows up to rescue them, of course, but not before she gets in a few sharp words with Austere Gray Bob, a.k.a. Mrs. Reed (Sarah Lancashire), who’s lost faith in both Helen and Sam as they’ve grown increasingly sentimental about their domestic lives in London.
Frustrated with Reed’s constant manipulation, Helen refuses to hand over the coveted recording device she discovered last episode—which, as a reminder, depicts Trent Clark (Angus Cooper)’s accidental murder of Kai-Ming’s father, the Chinese ambassador. Instead, Helen and her fellow assassin Williams (Ella Lily Hyland) track down Trent at London City Stables, where they show him the recording and demand he set up a hostage swap with his mother, Alex Clark (Tracey Ullman). Trent agrees to do so, not because he has a way of escaping the trail of evidence, but because his mother is holding Kai-Ming captive—and he’s in love with her.
That hostage swap ends up going about as poorly for the Clarks as one could imagine. Helen gets emotional (not a good thing for a Black Dove, as Reed loves to remind her), and Trent proves to be a terrible negotiator. As Helen and Williams enter Borough Market for the meet-up with the Clarks, Helen secretly slips a gun into Trent’s coat pocket—I have a hard time believing he wouldn’t notice its weight, but then again, he’s consistently written as inept—and pulls it on Alex, despite Alex’s warnings that “if something were to happen to me, the consequences would be bubonic in nature.” That’s at least partially in reference to her alliance with the British Prime Minister, who texts Alex midway through this confrontation to warn her “the Americans [are] on their way.” (In other words, the PM’s in the pocket of the Clark crime syndicate.)
But Helen wants justice—or, at least, revenge—for the murder of her secret MI5 boyfriend, Jason Davies (Andrew Koji). Alex is baffled, insisting she had nothing to do with Jason’s death. So Helen puts Alex’s claim to the test, asking Williams to call the number provided to her in the event she’d found anything in Jason’s apartment way back in the premiere episode. Williams does so, and when the phone rings, Trent’s pocket buzzes. Trent ordered the hit on Jason!
As the Americans and the Chinese close in on the Clark hideout, Trent drops to his knees before Helen, whom he begs for mercy. He was only trying to cover up his mess! Jason knew too much! He’s sorry he’s such a screw-up! The tension finally breaks when Alex lunges for Helen, desperately trying to deflect attention from her son. Sam leaps to protect his best friend, wrenching away a gun from Alex’s bodyguard and using it to shoot both the bodyguard and Alex herself. Helen leaves her own gun aimed at Trent, and Sam realizes Helen’s about to kill “a kid”—to commit the act of violence he himself could not when Lenny Lines (Kathryn Hunter) sent him to kill the young Hector Newman (Luther Ford) years ago. As his father’s voice plays in his head, reminding him that “every job in the world has a code,” Sam at last breaks that code and shoots Trent in the head. In doing so, he prevents Helen from having to live with such a sin herself. At first, she’s furious with him for having stolen what was meant to be “her” vengeance. But she realizes, eventually, that Sam acted out of love.
Helen, Sam, Williams, Eleanor, and Kai-Ming manage to escape, despite a mysterious message left on Alex’s phone that warns them they “have been watched and will be held accountable.” On her way out, Helen slips the recording of the ambassador’s murder to CIA agent Cole Atwood (Finn Bennett), thereby exonerating both him and the Americans as a whole. The threats of World War III are over—for now. Cole reveals he’ll keep an eye on Helen and her husband, Wallace (Andrew Buchan), which seems both a promise of protection and a threat. Wallace, for his part, seems to be “clean,” even as he accumulates power in a deeply corrupt British government. He suspects Helen is keeping secrets from him, sure, but what those secrets might be? He hasn’t a clue, and I doubt suspecting her of being a spy isn’t at the top of his list.
And so Helen meets with Mrs. Reed to go over exactly how this all happened. We learn that jewelry-shop assistant Maggie Jones (Hannah Khalique-Brown) had been selling stories about Kai-Ming to the British tabloids when MI5 asked her to start selling them the stories instead. (Thus why she had a recording of the Chinese ambassador’s murder in Kai-Ming’s flat.) Philip Bray (Thomas Coombes), Maggie’s tabloid journalist contact, shared Maggie’s access to the footage and tried to get more information from London Metropolitan Police Commissioner Stephen Yarrick. All three of them wound up dead when Yarrick went to the Clarks and Trent attempted to cover up the debacle. Finally, we learn Jason Davies’ involvement: He was Maggie’s MI5 ally. He’d been assigned to investigate Helen as a potential source of government leaks, but he indeed fell in love with her, and he protected her Black Dove secrets to the end—even lying to MI5 on her behalf. “At great risk to himself, he saved you,” Reed tells Helen. Cue the “aww”s.
Finally, Reed divines Helen’s future: In the spring, the PM will resign, and Wallace will step up to bat, putting Helen herself at the pinnacle of government access. Nor will she be the only one with a more prominent political role to play in Black Doves season 2: At the home of his lost love Michael (Omari Douglas), Sam encounters the (now adult) Hector Newman, who offers to hire Sam as his protector now that his crew have been wiped out. Together, they’ll attempt to fill the power vacuum left by the Clarks, currently down if not out. “If you want to stay, then you’re in the game, and you’re with me,” Hector warns. But Sam, tired of running from his loved ones, indeed wants to stay in London—and with Lenny agreeing to “let bygones be bygones,” perhaps he can.
After tossing Reed’s file on Jason into the Thames, Helen invites Sam to Christmas festivities at the Webb house. (He brings the Webb children toy guns as presents, to which Helen cheerfully exclaims, “Oh! Guns!”) This choice is the clearest sign yet that Helen has realized her position as Wallace Webb’s wife is more than a cover story; it is, in fact, a key part of her identity. It is “real.” As is her relationship with Sam, whom she’s no longer willing to hide. Wallace and Sam are both part of the package that comes with Helen herself. Try as she might to compartmentalize them, they are equally tethered to her—and, in fact, she wants it that way. She loves them both. She needs them both.
Therein lies the real secret of Black Doves season 1: not the identity of the Chinese ambassador’s murderer, but the reality of Helen and Sam’s fundamental weaknesses as spies. They do not know how to treat their relationships as necessary collateral, no matter how much Reed or Lenny (or even, at one point, Williams) might prefer they do so. As hard as they’ve tried not to, they’ve made friends! Good friends! The kind of friends who, I suppose, kill people on their behalf! And with friends comes vulnerability. With friends comes a chip in the facade. Wallace is starting to see that chip in Helen now—how much longer before the others in her life see it, too?
For that inevitable outcome, Reed has a Plan B: The Webbs’ family nanny seems to be in her employ. Is the nanny a Black Dove, too? Probably. And with two Black Doves under the Webb roof, the tension is about to skyrocket in season 2—unless, of course, they too can put the good of their friendship first.