Black Doves is a 2024 spy thriller series streaming on Netflix that blends British deadpan humor with blazing bullets and dangerous spy networks to make for an entertaining watch. The series follows Helen Webb, a woman married to the Defense Secretary of the UK, whose seemingly normal and boring life is shaken up after a Justice Department worker is mysteriously murdered. Helen’s real identity and alliances come crashing out of the closet, and she has to protect the secret from her family and the rest of the world, all while solving the murder mystery as well. Overall, Black Doves is quite a thrilling series to watch and is a rare presentation by Netflix standards, with characters worth rooting for.
Spoiler Alert
What is the Netflix series about?
Set entirely in London, Black Doves begins on a night only a few days before Christmas, with a man named Jason Davies realizing that he is being followed. Jason calls up two others, a woman named Maggie and a man called Phillip, both of whom panic at this development, before the very worst hits all three of them. While intruders kill Maggie and Phillip at their respective homes, Jason is shot dead by a sniper, and his body is found by the police the next morning, on a public bench by the river. Before being killed, though, Jason leaves a voicemail message, expressing his deep and sincere love for someone, and the recipient of the message happens to be a woman named Helen Webb. Helen happens to be the wife of the Defence Secretary of the UK, Wallace Webb, and is also the mother of their twin kids, meaning that her relationship with Jason had been kept a secret from the world. Yet, Helen’s love for Jason had been genuine too, despite them having been extramarital lovers, and she is deeply shocked and saddened by his mysterious death.
Therefore, Helen decides to come out of retirement, or rather she is made to do so when her past employers find links between her and Jason, who had been a civil servant working for the Justice Department of the UK. As it turns out, Helen was once a spy for a private organization known as the Black Doves, which deals in acquiring secret information and putting it to use, and while she had taken more of a passive role in recent years, her ex-handler, Reed, warns her about the present situation. Although Helen had actually told Jason who she was, at least partially so, she lies to Reed that the man was just an extramarital lover who had no clue about her identity as a spy. But Helen quickly realizes that this lie might get exposed very soon, and both in order to keep the matter a secret from her family and the rest of the world and also to understand why Jason had been killed, she decides to assume the role of a spy once again.
On the other side, a man named Sam Young is contacted in Rome and is flown back to London for some specific task, once again by the Black Doves boss, Reed. She orders Sam to investigate Helen and find out whether the high-profile politician’s wife is also being targeted by assailants. It is made clear that Helen and Sam have some connection from the past, and this is primarily why he has been brought back to the country and to the spy network for the job. As Helen and Sam both resume their roles as Black Doves, the UK government is spooked by a developing tension with the Chinese authorities, following the strange death of the Chinese ambassador to the UK.
Why had Helen and Sam left their jobs as spies?
Black Doves also presents scenes from 2014 occasionally, when Helen had returned to England after staying away from her home country for 10 long years. She was known as Daisy Bradshaw back then, which is actually her real name, and she had been applying for various jobs to start a new life in London. She had applied for the position of a translator at some private firm since she had spent ten years in Europe and had picked up quite a few languages, but the job interview did not go as planned. Instead of questioning her about her skills, Daisy was asked why she had kept the existence of her step-sister a secret and how she had strangely vanished from the country right when the step-sister was arrested for having murdered their father. Her prospective employers clearly had a lot of inside information about her and were not from any usual firm but were actually workers in the Black Doves agency.
Daisy was soon introduced to a woman named Reed, who became her handler, and after proving her mettle, she was given the task of stealing confidential government information from a politician named Walter Webb. She was also given a new name, Helen, so that nobody could trace her real identity, and this is how she first met Walter. While Helen got hold of the information on their very first night together, she felt a genuine romantic connection with him and decided to keep seeing the man. Eventually, Walter and Helen even got engaged and then had twin children together, which was when she decided to stop working as a spy and sever her ties with the Black Doves.
On the other side, Sam Young was almost destined to be a spy and a professional hitman, as his father had also worked the same profession. Having grown up in a trailer with his unpredictable and emotionally cold father, Sam did not know to do anything better than to follow in his father’s footsteps. He started working for Reed as a spy, or more of a problem-solver, and around the same time was put through to a woman named Lenny Lines, who hired him as a hitman. In a twist of tragic irony, Sam’s first victim was his own father, as a hit had been put on the man by professional rivals. As he continued killing people for money and maintained a staunch principle of taking the lives of criminals only and not innocent people, he was ordered to carry out a hit on the Newman brothers.
While Sam had been ordered to kill all four brothers, he could not take the life of the youngest, Hector, as he was just a young boy. Sam left Hector alive, but told Lenny that he had completed the job, and this soon created more problems for him. The Newman brothers, a violent group of drug dealers, had quite a gang at their disposal, and young Hector launched an attack on Sam with this gang to seek revenge for his brothers. At the time, Sam had established a very intense romantic relationship with a man named Michael, and the two were even thinking of spending their lives together.
Michael did not know about her boyfriend’s secret identity and was naturally shocked beyond limits when gangsters started shooting up his apartment, and he had to be taken away by Helen, whom Sam had called for help. Thus, Sam had to flee London following this attack, and he too stayed away from the country for 7 long years, after having abandoned Michael and their plans of a life together. This meant that Sam left the Black Doves agency as well, and he now returns only to ensure his close friend Helen’s safety.
Who had killed the Chinese ambassador?
The main puzzle at the center of Black Doves is the death of the Chinese ambassador to the UK, Mr. Chen, who is officially claimed to have died from a drug overdose. Not only is the man found dead under mysterious circumstances at his residence, but his daughter, Kai-Ming, a popular face in the rich party circles of London, goes missing. The Chinese are quick to smell some foul play in the matter, and they claim that the CIA must have had their ambassador killed, and the British authorities must have helped the Americans cover it up. As a direct repercussion of this supposedly political murder, the Chinese government wants their British counterparts to award military supply contracts to them, which would obviously help the Chinese establish a political stronghold over the UK. There is even a shootout between Chinese and American intelligence operatives later in the show, but ultimately, the truth behind the ambassador’s death is revealed to be completely different.
Instead of any political conspiracy, the murder actually involved a dangerous criminal network known as the Clarks, who are an international gang based out of London. The Clarks’ operations in London are overseen by a woman named Alex Clark, and her son, Trent, is meant to be her successor in the business. But at present, Trent works as a drug dealer, and he happened to be the supplier of Kai-Ming, and he had gone to the ambassador’s residence to supply drugs to his daughter. But Chen obviously did not want his daughter to be involved in such acts, and he confronted Trent, leading to an altercation between the two. Most likely under the influence of drugs at the time, Trent pushed the man and accidentally killed him, meaning that he was the real murderer of the Chinese Ambassador. Knowing that this mistake of his would have horrific consequences, Trent immediately involved his family, and Alex Clark got in touch with a high-ranking politician, Stephen Yarrick, to deal with the situation.
Yarrick, and in fact even the Prime Minister of the UK, were all in cahoots with the Clark family, and so the police covered up the murder and made it seem like a drug overdose. However, there was one more catch to the situation, as a childhood friend of Kai-Ming’s, named Maggie Jones, had been secretly recording videos of her for gossip magazines and tabloids. The Chinese ambassador’s daughter taking drugs was obviously lucrative content for such magazines, and a journalist named Phillip Bray had appointed Maggie, a jewelry store worker, to record videos of the acts. Therefore, Maggie had placed a hidden camera in the living room of the apartment, and this camera naturally recorded the exact manner in which the ambassador was killed by Trent.
When Maggie retrieved the camera and handed it over to Phillip, both of them realized what it contained, and the journalist started demanding answers from Yarrick. When the politician ignored him, Phillip even approached Wallace, and so he had to be dealt with. The Clarks had to hide their involvement in the matter, and so they had Maggie and Phillip killed. However, there had been a third victim as well—Jason Davies, and when confronted by Helen, Alex Clark claims that she had no part to play in it. It is revealed that it was Trent himself who had hired an ex-military sniper to kill Jason, because he knew that Jason and Maggie were partners, either professionally or in some other way. Trent did not want to keep any loose ends around, and so he had had Jason killed.
Meanwhile, Kai-Ming’s boyfriend, Cole Atwood, turns out to be a CIA operative, and so the Chinese believe that it must have been he who had killed the ambassador. Kai-Ming had actually lost her senses while at the den of the drug dealers, was then kidnapped by Hector Newman, and is finally rescued by Helen and Sam. Everyone finds out about the secret video recording, and both the Chinese and the British governments want to get hold of it. Ultimately, Helen realizes that Jason had left her a hint about the location of the video, and she retrieves it from the jewelry store. She then goes to confront the Clarks, and Helen and Sam end up killing both Alex and Trent Clark.
What was Jason Davies’ real identity?
Helen is initially taken aback when she learns that Jason Davies and Maggie were partners in some capacity, and she wonders whether they were actually in a relationship. Helen and Jason had shared a very intense romantic bond, and she could not believe that her boyfriend might have had a secret life, and she also could not understand how exactly he was involved with the ambassador’s murder. This mystery is solved by Reed at the very end of Black Doves season 1, when she gets a background check performed on Jason Davies and finds out about his real identity. Jason was a spy working for MI5, and so was Maggie, who had been strategically hired by MI5 to keep an eye on the Chinese ambassador’s political movements through his daughter.
As Maggie found the footage of the murder on her hidden camera, she had to inform Jason about it, and this is how Trent spotted the two of them together and realized that Jason had to be eliminated as well. Trent also saw Jason and Helen at a restaurant together, and this is why he had sent the ex-military sniper to Helen’s house. While all of this is definitely shocking to Helen, what stuns her even more is that Jason had actually been planted by the MI5 to investigate her, as there had been some reports about her being a spy. In fact, the Black Doves had also placed a spy in Helen’s life, in order to keep an eye on her movements, as the new secretary at Wallace’s office, Dani, is also an employee of Reed. Therefore, she feels that Jason must have faked their love and promises to be with each other only to carry out his investigation into her identity.
However, Reed confirms in the end that Jason had reported to MI5 that his investigation had found nothing suspicious against Helen Webb and that she was not a spy. In reality, Helen had indeed admitted to Jason that her name and her current identity were false ones and had clearly suggested that she was a spy, without any inkling that her boyfriend was supposedly investigating her. The fact that he had lied to the agency and had covered for Helen proves that his love for her was very real, and he sincerely wanted to protect her at all costs.
What happens to Helen and Sam?
During Black Doves season 1’s ending, Reed gives Helen a data drive containing whatever information she could find on the real identity of Jason. However, Helen ultimately decides to not take a look and honor the memory of her boyfriend just as she had known him. She had also realized how her husband still loved her as much as before, even after knowing that she had cheated on him, and thus Helen chooses to stay with her family. Therefore, she is seen spending Christmas with Wallace and their kids at the end of Black Doves, season 1. On the other side, Sam apologizes to Michael, and the awkward distance between them is resolved, but they do not stay together. Instead, Sam is visited by Hector Newman, who he had once again spared for a second time. Hector wants Sam to work for him, and ultimately, Sam Young does seem to take up the job offer, distancing himself from both Reed and Lenny Lines.
Black Doves has also been renewed for a 2nd season, meaning that Helen and Sam’s story will continue for at least one more season. Season 1 has already hinted at Helen’s troubled past, suggesting that it was actually she who had murdered her stepfather, while her stepsister, Bonnie Weir, had been framed and imprisoned for it. This might mean that Bonnie might actually show up in Helen’s life and create problems for her in the future. When Helen and Sam kill the Clark mother and son, they instantly receive a warning over the phone, with a gangster stating that they will have to face the consequences of their action. Thus, other members of the Clarkes gang will possibly return and try to kill the protagonists. It is also suggested that Wallace will be the next Prime Minister of the UK, meaning that Helen will be the wife of the PM and will have to be even more careful about her secret identity as a spy. Sam’s new partnership with Hector might also lead to interesting scenarios, while his past employers might just turn against him as well. Ultimately, the plot in Black Doves season 2 will probably be about something new, as the main story of season 1, about the murder of the Chinese Ambassador, is solved. Nonetheless, we can certainly expect the characters to return and get involved in some new mystery the next time around.
