Well, the Brits sure know how to make a spy thriller. My wife and I just binged the second season of Black Doves, all six episodes up on Netflix since the day before last, and we loved it. Here are some of my reasons:
- The shoot-em-up action was even better than it was in the first season. If you accept the premise that the Black Doves and those whose guns they hire are invulnerable and invincible, every episode is a heart-pounding pleasure to watch. If you find that premise hard to swallow, are you a James Bond fan? He's pretty close to triumphing in every deadly encounter, and the pleasure in seeing those movies is not if he'll triumph, but how he manages to do that. Same for the assassins and spies in Black Doves
- There's love running deep in this story, especially between the two main characters, Keira Knightley's Helen and Ben Whishaw's Sam. And that love transcends romantic love, because it's not quite that, at least in part because Sam is a gay man. But it's also more than friendship, sibling, or other family love. In fact, watching this second season, it seems to me that Black Doves almost has depicted a special kind of love I don't recall ever quite seeing on the screen.
- The supporting characters and cast are outstanding, too. Ella Lily Hyland's Williams and Gabrielle Creevy's Eleanor hit-women team could be the subject of a series themselves.
- Joe Barton -- whose television work I first became acquainted with when I watched every season of The Lazarus Project, which I thought and think is the best time travel series I've ever seen -- brings his skills to bear in every scene, including the music. It was great to hear the covers of Peter, Paul, and Mary's "Five Hundred Miles" and Cher's "Bang Bang".
