It’s basically a swamp where I live in Canada right now, with epic rainfall taking turns with suffocating heat and bumper crops of mosquitos hatching daily, so I’m hiding inside right now! With you! And Sarah Lancashire and Black Doves woooo! Rolling into my Black Doves series 1 episode 3 The Coming Night recap after the break!

We open back in 2014 with Sam Young (Ben Whishaw) in a car, smoking moodily into the rainy night staring at the window curtain we know Helen Webb (Keira Knightley) (well, she’s not a Webb then, but soon to be) will be closing to signal safety. Helen does her bit, so Sam drives off.

He meets with Mrs. Reed (Sarah Lancashire!!) in a deserted Bingo Hall to pass over a (drive?) device of some type, and avoid her gentle questions about his career aspirations as a triggerman. He’s approached Lenny Lines (Kathryn Hunter) and ooh, we met her last time! In the present! She’s not happy with Sam swanning off, so clearly he was successful in his aspirations.

But Mrs. Reed in 2014 isn’t sure ‘hired murderer’ is Sam’s best chance at life: they can’t work together any more if he does this. He’s sure, though, and a dismayed Mrs. Reed watches him walk away before pulling out her Bingo card.

Sam rolls up on Lenny at Poseidon Fish and Chips; she mentions a blood relation to killing and what does that mean? His first assignment is killing a man who has broken the business code of cheating the wrong people (no honour among thieves, perhaps), at a Chinese restaurant the following Tuesday at 8 pm.

We watch slight Sam enter a restaurant wearing a motorcycle helmet with a full face plate, one shot and he is gone.

**I’d be a miserable hired killer, they’d say someone was sitting in a booth in the East corner and I would be in jail for lack of spatial awareness.

He raised his mask just before shooting, so he has blood splatter on his face to go with his shaky bloody hands. The blood streaks down from his eye, looking like a lone teardrop. After sitting there for what felt like an hour, Lenny calls and he drives away as she tells him that would be the hardest one he ever did. He sees a face when he closes his eyes later.

Six months later, he must be sort of working for Mrs. Reed again as he’s training Helen on self-defense and also murder and general mayhem.

Drinks after, with Helen drinking ‘like a submarine captain having a mental breakdown’ and getting Sam’s backstory. It was his dad’s face he saw when he closed his eyes after his first killing; and his dad Lenny was referring to. He was a legendary triggerman; Sam didn’t know his dad well but the smell of cordite and gun oil brings the memory of him.

Sam defends his new profession to Helen, who’s being judgy; he never pulled a trigger that didn’t make the world a better place.

As a former boss of mine said: you see what you want to see.

Helen leaves Sam at the bar, to be ogled by a fresh faced young man rolling a joint. Sam takes his own rollie outside and that’s how we meet lovely Scottish Michael (Omari Douglas). We meet Michael properly when Sam takes him for dinner at the same.restaurant.he.killed.his.first.target.

I mean. That’s a choice.

And according to the server, he comes there a lot. What??

But on with the date, they don’t actually know each other’s names, they are, respectively:

– Sexy Pub Man Good Hair (Sam does have great mussy hair)

– Smoking Area Fit Guy? (Michael)

Michael flirtily asks what Sam meant when he said he *almost* didn’t text Smoking Area Fit Guy? Sam takes a breath and stares at where the brains of his first target were splattered, and says he would see Michael’s eyes when he closed his own, and he wouldn’t usually see something lovely when he did that, so here he is. They hold hands while I wonder if Sam is using Michael as a sage smudging wand, to make this a good place again with his gentle energy.

Training continues with Helen, they gossip about their boyfriends and Sam seems a little…lonely, even with his lovely artist boyfriend.

Fast forward to 2017 with Sam and Michael still going strong at their housewarming party, aw he and Michael lived together! Sam watches Helen on the TV as her Conservative spouse Wallace Webb (Andrew Buchan) celebrates his party’s election win.

Cut to Sam giving away one of his lame housewarming presents to Lenny and she giving him an assignment to kill all four Newman brothers, who are getting a bit of a foothold in the south. She’s got pictures of all but the fourth, Hector.

We are in the rainy tunnel again with Sam pretending his car has broken down, we’ve seen flashes of this enough times that we know this is important. A vehicle approaches, he wastes a few seconds yammering on about his car before he starts shooting. He opens up the back door to find a terrified young boy covered in blood, breathing.

Sam flashes back to his own boyhood, remembering his assassin dad’s justification of his murdery business: he never killed a man who didn’t deserve it, and never pulled a trigger than didn’t make the world a better place.

Sam closes the door, the child left alive.

He calls in the kill to Lenny, who calls him ‘good old reliable Sam.”

Good old reliable Sam goes home to a lovingly cooked home meal with his lover Michael, the shot of them on the bed together the following morning is beautiful.Their idyllic morning is ruined by two assassins intent on Sam’s death, I’m not sure which is more upsetting to Michael: the attacks or Sam’s brutal self-defense.

Outside, 2 more cars pull up, one with a smug little boy, whose freckles we can see much better now that his family’s blood’s been washed off them.

So. Sam has to find Hector, round two. We know Hector as the drug king-pin who had the Chinese Ambassador’s daughter on camera in a sketchy basement, he used to be the young freckled boy intent on revenging his family’s murders.

Helen was planning to leave with her recently murdered boyfriend, she had a bag packed and her real passport ready to go with her children’s. She puts them back.

Sam has come up with an unlikely plan; he’s rounded up Lenny’s two murderous henchwomen, Williams (Ella Lily-Hyland) and Eleanor (Gabrielle Creevy) who aren’t as grammatically confident as they are in possession of a literal rocket launcher. Williams has been super clear about just biding her time until she can kill Sam, too, so this is an…unusual choice of allies. Apparently it’s a good enough self-marketing opportunity, and our assassins are in.

Sam and Helen meet; she sets him at her husband’s best friend and advisor – Stephen Yarrick (Sam Troughton) who Wallace accused of having something to do with Philip’s death. Hang on, who’s Philip again? Okay, Philip was the journalist that was killed at the same time as Helen’s lover Jason, directly after speaking to Jason. The implication made by Wallace at Jason’s funeral was that Philip had a video of Stephen saying something about Kai-Ming (ambassador’s daughter, currently an unwilling (?) guest of Hector’s) and then Philip was killed.

ANYWAY, Helen and Wallace are super close family friends with Stephen and his family, which means that Helen knows where Stephen will be today: at the school watching his children and Helen and Wallace’s children awkwardly act through a nativity play. She sends Sam there at the same time, with a caution to not hurt Stephen. Unless he has to.

Sam separates Stephen from the herd of slowly stampeding parents with a phone call and a gun, in that order. In a colourful classroom with tiny chairs, Sam asks questions in a sing-songy tone, but we can see Stephen’s face and we know Sam’s not taking this seriously enough. Stephen walks out. Sam drops the phone with Helen, who pulls up the same message Sam checked: is the contact ‘Repair Shop’ Mrs. Reed? Or is it Lenny?

Wallace has been summoned to a secret meeting with the Chinese to discuss their dead ambassador, he and Helen will be having Christmas drinks tonight.

Sam rolls with Eleanor and Williams, and his bickering with the latter puts the former’s teeth on edge. “Literally a car full of assassins trying to find the moral high ground.”

At the party, Helen meets the woman her husband was building up to an affair with, hi Dani! (Agnes O’Casey) Dani is quite adorable, if not in possession of absolutely treacherous cheekbones like Helen. Perhaps she’s less…spy-y. A change is as good as a rest, they say.

An awkward moment or so later, Stephen Yarrick’s cell phone rings, it’s the Repair Shop and they want whoever has this phone to know they mean business. After some typical cliche-villain stuff, they send a video of Stephen mid-torture.

Wallace meets with the Chinese envoys, Wu Lin (Tai Yin Chan) and Chang Hao (Dan Li) have been conducting their own unofficial, unsanctioned investigation of the Chinese ambassadors’ death due to their belief that the Metropolitan Police were involved in that death. Because they have a video of a Cole Atwood (Finn Bennett), CIA agent and the ambassadors’ daughter’s boyfriend, fleeing the scene of the death and heading straight for the US embassy, where he has remained since.

I will break down their conversation thusly:

• They believe their ambassador was killed by an American CIA agent
• They believe this was with the UK’s full cooperation
• They would like Wallace to influence the UK government to accept Chinese weapons supply contracts
• Or there will be escalating violence

Speaking of…Helen has been watching videos of Stephen being tortured one after the other, ending with his throat being cut.

Helen and Wallace leave the party, Helen flashing back to trying to leave the Black Doves when she was incredibly pregnant with the twins. Mrs. Reed listens skeptically, but pragmatically brings up Helen’s replacement, should she choose to leave. ‘A door closes, a window opens’ she murmurs, as does Dani, as Helen walks away.

That would make sense if Dani was in place to take over once Helen left with Jason, as she did plan to do, right up until his murder. Does that makes Dani a sort of ally? Or an enemy?

Back with pregnant Helen, just as she’s packing, she gets a call from Sam, who is in the middle of a firefight with 13 year old Hector Newman and needs to get his lovely boyfriend to safety.

Sam walks his boyfriend out, Michael crouched low behind him with closed eyes, until he opens them in a moment of silence to see birds floating past in the sky. Then more shooting. Then a beautiful smile shared with Sam, then more shooting and Sam is shot and then finally Helen is there and she saves them both.

How are we ever supposed to get over Ben Whishaw’s teary face? Ever?

Helen called Mrs. Reed, who will not just extend the type of help Sam needs unless…Helen agrees to stay. Helen gives up and agrees to stay to save Sam’s life and Michael from retaliation.

In the present, Sam, Williams and Eleanor prepare to enter Hector’s lair, Sam flashing back to his first kill for Lenny, first kill ever, while holding his dad’s gun, the gun he killed Hector’s family with but not Hector, while Lenny’s lecturing about this being the business of codes.

Omigod

Omigod the first person Sam killed was his own father. He shot his own father as a test for Lenny, as a kill. He killed his father while looking him in the eye, as his father taught him, and walked out. He’s been eating in that restaurant for years, sitting where he killed his father and I. I don’t know how to feel about any of this. I’m going to go process. Is that why he always saw his dad’s face when he killed someone??

On a completely different note, perhaps a while later, I have to give the props to the production of this series. It’s gorgeous, lush and the music and editing makes it almost painfully watchable. To Sarah Lancashire’s crisp and wry malapertness to Ben Whishaw’s devastating emotional palate of a face, it’s gorgeous. Not to say it doesn’t bite.

Until next time, cheers, you lot.