Black Doves Recap, Episode 4: Go Bang Time

Black pigeons

If they come after you, you’re already dead

Season 1

Episode 4

Editor’s Rating

4 stars

****

Photo: Ludovic Robert/Netflix

Any spy thriller that focuses on entertainment needs a series of really solid action sequences. Black pigeons gave us some impressive hand-to-hand combat, but most of the violence was one-on-one and less flashy, so it’s fun to be served a massive and rather impersonal helping of Grand Guignol violence. “Merry Christmas to all” is the message I get from the big, loud, candy-colored opening scene in the dark, where Sam, Williams and Eleanor destroy Hector Newman’s club hideout in very stylish fashion. Everything about this set piece is TV catnip to me, and I particularly like their approach to the club, which takes its cue from Johnny Cash’s rendition of “Little Drummer Boy,” a choice that’s even more fitting upon rewatch. There are three murderers, just as there were three wise men; the refrain of pa-rum-pum-pum is a not-too-distant cousin of Gunfire’s onomatopoeic Rat-a-tat; Their best gifts are guns, knives, and a small bomb, and they intend to present them, in a sense, to Hector, who was almost a baby the last time Sam hunted him, and who believes himself to be the young king of South London.

Earlier misty, gloomy scenes drenched in red and green light hinted at something of the romance In the mood for lovescreams the scene in Hector Newman’s doomed nightclub, bathed in blue and pink neon MiamiVice And Birds of prey. Between the lush visuals and the scale of damage Sam, Williams and Eleanor cause, there’s a chaotic joy and verve to the action that’s impossible to achieve as a lone gunman. Obviously, Williams has to keep Sam alive to pay her off (before she kills him later), but there’s a hint of genuine camaraderie in her voice as she tells him, “There’s nothing sadder than an old assassin, but I won’t have that.” “You die tonight, you asshole!” The showmanship of this sequence is a high point of stylish violence in the series so far.

Of course, nothing can go right for our slightly crazy loved ones. After they bring the unconscious Kai-Ming back to Williams, they still have to wait for her to come to and for Lenny to pester Sam about Hector again. The window to take this guy out is closing quickly, not least because the kids “shot 17 people in a nightclub last night!!” It’s not the most subtle move ever. Here’s my question about Lenny and Hector: In the seven years since Sam didn’t do it, why hasn’t she hired someone else to kill him? Is Hector’s death only an urgent matter when Sam is around? Did Lenny have a feeling that Sam would return to London this year?

Until Cole Atwood, an Olympic athlete, jumped into Sam’s flashy big four-door vintage BMW, I hadn’t felt the full weight of how dark and stifled Sam and Helen’s investigation into Jason’s death really was. They’ve been forced to take a step-by-step approach, and Cole’s vital information about Kai-Ming Chen’s friend sheds huge light on what’s actually happening. Jason’s involvement in all of this is still unclear, and it’s a mystery to Kai-Ming as well, although it sounds like Cole was far less under the influence than he was when they returned to their apartment and found their father’s body . He also confirms some of her story.

Thanks to Cole’s willingness to update us all, we now know that, despite being a CIA agent, he did not kill Ambassador Chen and fled the scene out of real, not feigned, panic. As it turned out, his target was not the Chinese government, but the Clark crime family. They’re the shadowy villains that people keep alluding to! They have spread from London, where they established their “Kray twins meet the Freemasons” method of relentlessly and ruthlessly eliminating other criminal enterprises and taking over powerful and influential government employees, to New York, Los Angeles and Miami. They are secretive, they are brutal, and Cole believes they are the ones behind Ambassador Chen’s death because they have systematically purged the record of what happened and everyone present. Since then, he has holed up in the embassy, ​​trying to stay off their radar because “if they come after you, you’re already dead and you just don’t know it.”

Cole seems almost grateful to hear these details and his blunt assessments of Kai-Ming and her heroin dealer Trent. She’s “just a fucking stupid rich junkie with political connections,” while Trent, the son of the head of the Clark family’s London branch, Alex Clark, is “a trust fund baby idiot” and “the weakest link” in the whole mess is. A chain of events leads us to this point. On the bright side, Trent will obey any request that has information about Kai-Ming’s whereabouts.

As if all of that wasn’t enough, Cole drops a perspective-altering bombshell on Sam and Helen as they pull up to the meeting point to meet Reed: He won’t help them for the huge sums of money Helen thought she was offering him in the embassy. This envelope contains threats against his family’s lives and he just wants them to be okay. Reed lied to her – of course she did – and now it’s time to protect Cole so they have a chance of luring the Clarks out into the open. Step on the gas, Sam!

It can’t be overstated how fresh Cole and Kai-Ming’s performances are at this point in the story. They strongly support the characters, but their presence and important new information make it clear how pale and boring Jason and Hector are in comparison. I can only say this much here; I know that Jason’s purpose in the story is not to be a fully realized character, but to be the gender-swapped version of the angelic and tragic young woman who furthers the righteous revenge of a male anti-hero. Even Helen admits that the content of her relationship with Jason may not have been anything special at all. It felt like love, but was it really more than a tantalizing fever dream? As for Hector Newman, he lost all his muscle and narrowly escaped with his life, having made a whisper-light impression like “What if Eddie Redmayne” or “Possibly a long-lost Weasley, but kind of evil?” Sam is once again lying to everyone about seeing Hector at his club, so he’ll definitely show up again at some point.

Someone I would pay good money to if it meant she stopped showing up is Dani. Kudos to Agnes O’Casey for finding a way to make her zealously egocentric character not just irritating but menacing. This tiny, doe-eyed countrywoman is the one who makes things deeply and uncomfortably strange when dealing with her very powerful boss. To me, there is a huge gap between what she thinks she is doing (being very responsive and caring towards Wallace) and what Wallace perceives of her (overdoing her hand while disrespecting both him and Helen). I’ve never felt like I was comforting a Tory, but between his near-total breakdown over Yarrick’s death and his relentless attacks, I feel for Wallace. At least he was there when his cocky prime minister had entire coat hooks torn down by the CIA station chief after he asked: “We were sitting here talking and wondering if there was any chance among us girls.” Was the Chinese one Ambassador murdered?” Whatever station chief Mitch knows, he doesn’t think of telling the Prime Minister because it’s an open secret that his government is as tight as a sieve.

I want to end with something that has transpired in four episodes so far: the level of realism in each of the three love relationships that are at the core of Helen and Sam’s lives. She seems to question her previous belief that she is not a real person because others only know her as Helen Webb, and Helen Webb is an identity that she has built and refined over the course of her ten years living with Wallace. It’s notable that Jason rejected this belief and that, although we repeatedly see her telling him she needs to confide in him about who she really is, she never says anything about this woman. In contrast, her relationship with Wallace was initially purely transactional, and of course she abuses his trust every time she accesses his work computer and passes on the information she has collected to Reed, but I think there is also genuine love between them and affection exist for them. I wonder if the threat of Dani (who showed up at Helen and Wallace’s house the morning after Yarrick’s body was discovered) is a factor in Helen’s thinking. With Sam and Michael it’s a slightly different story, as they spontaneously met and fell in love. The swoon factor of their first date, where they focus on their admiring glances back and forth, is almost immeasurably high and is so reminiscent of the reunion between Chiron and Kevin Moonlight. Still, it’s easy to imagine Michael’s long-overdue wail: “You made me fall in love with someone who didn’t exist!” would also come from Wallace’s mouth if he learned he was ever Helen’s mark.

• The Wit and Wisdom of Eleanor: Kai-Ming describes heroin as the greatest feeling in the world until it starts sucking the life out of you like a vampire you’ve brought upon yourself. Eleanor’s conclusion is: “So, a total of seven out of ten?”

• Sam’s car is the second of two very small external nods to his inheritance from his late father; the other is the revolver he uses in Hector Newman’s club.

• With the Clark family revealed as the season’s Big Bad, we’re now all in Gangs of LondonThe territory of enemy underworld takeovers. If this type of story is your thing, all three seasons are available on Netflix so far.

• Sam is so far removed from the prospect of reuniting with Michael that he goes off the rails in his fake emergency call to Vanessa at the U.S. Embassy, ​​in which he tells her his name is Kent Brockman, the TV host The Simpsons.