‘Black Doves’ Netflix Review: Keira Knightley And Ben Whishaw Make A Far-Fetched Spy Story Hold Together

There is a fascinating concept in film analysis known as «suspension of disbelief.» What does it mean? Basically, when we enter into a cinematic experience, we put on hold all the evidence that would otherwise make the stories we watch seem implausible. It can be understood as the viewer’s conscious decision to ignore a story’s lack of logic or realism in order to enjoy it. Or, if you prefer, as the invisible agreement through which audiences accept little lies, exaggerated coincidences, or dramatic liberties so that the plot can move forward or become more exciting. When that suspension works and we believe what we’re watching, everything flows. When the agreement breaks down, it’s hard to connect with what we see.

There are as many possible agreements as there are viewers. Some people have no trouble believing just about anything and enjoying their movies and TV shows, regardless of how implausible they might be. Others see something that doesn’t correspond to reality and immediately get annoyed, unable to keep watching. Every movie or series establishes or proposes its own internal logic, a sort of pact, and expects the audience to buy into it. In that sense, Black Doves is an interesting case, because emotionally it manages to engage us in a credible, human way, while just about everything else is practically impossible to believe. Almost nothing that happens makes logical sense to anyone watching. And yet — which is perhaps the strangest thing of all — the series somehow works as a whole.

Let’s say that having the British prime minister’s wife working as a secret agent for some mysterious organization is already a pretty strange premise. But it could work if the series made it believable. It doesn’t. The first lady in question moves around the city with seemingly no security, holds secret meetings, and finds herself in all sorts of tense situations — fights, chases, shootouts, and so on — day or night, without anyone raising an eyebrow or suspecting that something unusual might be going on. The idea of a first lady moving around without a security detail is already strange enough, but having her running around shooting people without anyone seeming to notice pushes things well beyond the limits of credibility.

And yet there’s something about the anguish Helen (Keira Knightley) brings to her actions, and the suffering her friend and ¿colleague? Sam (Ben Whishaw) goes through, that makes us put the absurdity aside and get caught up in their stories. They’re usually accompanied by a strange assortment of agents who function more as comic relief than anything else (played by Ambika Mod, Ella Lily Hyland, and Gabrielle Creevy). These characters seem to have wandered in from another series — a Guy Ritchie one, let’s say — but even they don’t quite manage to break the pact. The show holds together despite the absurdity and implausibility of 90 percent of what happens. And that, my friends, is practically a miracle.

The season’s central conflict seems to borrow from a recent storyline in Slow Horses, involving in this case the murder of several members of the mysterious spy organization known as the Black Doves. There’s an incident from the past that might explain everything, along with a few enigmatic figures apparently tasked with carrying out that mission. And Helen and Sam find themselves directly caught up in it. On the one hand, there’s the initial disappearance of Helen’s boss, Mrs. Reed (Sarah Lancashire). On the other, Sam is forced into a deal that requires him to kill people in order to escape a murder conviction. Both sides of the story are connected to the Black Doves’ past, but they also have consequences in the present.

The series also deals — and here it’s on firmer ground, and considerably less implausible — with the emotional responses of its protagonists. Both have romantic complications to sort out, find themselves in trouble far more complicated than the usual kind, and share a solid friendship that seems capable of surviving just about anything. It’s one thing to be assigned a mission to spy on a Russian agent or even kill some mysterious foreign operative. It’s another when either of them is forced to deal with people they’re close to, know well, and even care about. That’s when things get much more complicated.

It’s the dramatic credibility Knightley and Whishaw bring to their respective characters that allows the rest of the series’ somewhat ridiculous, vaguely James Bond-like machinery to hold together. The humanity of its protagonists is the foundation that allows the writers of Black Doves to do pretty much whatever they want without descending (or not entirely descending) into ridiculousness. Without those two at its center, the series would be dancing on nothing but thin air.

The plot is convoluted but almost always easy to follow, and the show manages to explain things without resorting to lengthy speeches or anything of the sort. Anyone who’s watched spy movies and/or TV shows has seen similar versions of these stories, in which agents have missions to carry out but end up questioning their bosses more than anything else. And that’s what happens when the Black Doves organization turns out to be darker than it once seemed: the characters no longer know where they stand. And they won’t find out until the very end.

The plot and the specific situations in which the characters spring into action are, as I said before, right on the borderline between plausibility and outright ridiculousness. But as long as the two leads continue to believe in their characters and in what’s happening to them, viewers will keep enjoying the show. They may, however, come away thinking that the British have the least professional intelligence services in the world. Back in the Cold War days of John Le Carré, this sort of thing didn’t happen…