BLACK DOVES Review: Killers Like Us

The most popular new show on Netflix reflects Keira Knightley's presence atop a European spy thriller.

Black Doves
All six episodes are now streaming on Netflix. I've seen all six episodes.

In Black Doves, Keira Knightley stars as a covert intelligence officer for a private agency in the UK, where her husband is the Defense Minister. In The Day of the Jackal, Eddie Redmayne stars as an assassin for hire, with a wife and child hidden away in Spain. In Lioness, Zoe Saldana stars as a CIA operative with a license to kill, with her husband and children safely at home in the U.S.

All three kill people as part of their job. All three endeavor to keep their jobs and their family lives separate, but ... it's complicated, to put it lightly.

All three are compartmentalizing their lives, not only to keep their killing skills out of sight of their loved ones, but also stuffing it away from their own self-examination. They don't have time for feelings about their actions, no time for regret, no time for sorrow for the loved ones of their killings.

No, they've justified it to themselves, and explained it to their mates in a manner that elides the extent of their deadly actions; any possible repercussions are minimized or explained away, casually, as though it were of no account.

In Black Doves, created and written by British TV veteran Joe Barton, Keira Knightley stars as Helen Webb, a cheery sort of wife and mother who loves her husband and loves her children without reservation. Except she also fell into an affair with a good-looking fellow, who is killed in the initial sequence, along with two of his mates in separate locations.

Her motives for the affair are never clearly delineated by her character. Was she bored by her husband's devoted yet dull administrative thinking or the time he spent away from home? Was she weary of her agreement to become a covert spy and feed information she learned from her husband to the agency, led by the resolutely authoritative Mrs. Reed (Sarah Lancashire)?

Her best friend in the series is Sam (Ben Whishaw), an assassin and dependable support figure, who is always the 'man on the spot' and can always be counted on to kill whoever might be threatening him or her or anyone else in the vicinity. He has his own troubling affair to worry about, and that provides a measure of diversity, if nothing else too terribly convincing.

Answers are eventually provided, of a sort, but they are not terribly satisfying, and the whole thing smacks of a series that was carefully laid out in advance to plug plot holes and create many, many situations where action could explode as often as possible, and as lethally as possible, to the point where the death of another few people triggers little meaning to the viewer. By the end, when I saw many artfully-arranged dead bodies littering the street, I imagined the director calling "Cut!" and all the dead bodies getting up and congratulating each other for another bloody good scene.

Perhaps it's good that the series does not explore the emotional toll involved for any of the principals, because then it would be difficult to enjoy the series as it was intended: a bloody, pulpy, silly show, fit for holiday viewing by the older members of the family, just as long as they don't think about it too much or wrangle with the emotional toll upon any of the characters or their families.

People who kill people are just like us, only they are all better-looking and all get paid much better.