Murder Mix
Season 2
Episode 5
Editor’s Rating
4 stars
****
The mission to save Reed gets complicated by friendly competition among assassins.
Photo: Netflix
Rescue heist! At last, the rescue heist is upon us! And son of a gun if it’s not a riff on Helen’s chapter in “The Opportunity to Become Savage”: Helen and Sam are Helen and Wallace; Williams and Eleanor are Ollie and Jacqueline; Reed is Franz; and Laila is Nanny Marie. Mum and Dad are trying to get their fractious children to settle down, the opinionated children wear down their parents to ensure they can listen to their music, the target is acquired and delivers a monologue that answers some questions and raises others, and then the energetic nanny arrives to get everyone back in order.
I’d never heard of a kill mix (or a murder mix) before, but in these days of algorithmically generated playlists, I love that Williams has a hand-selected mix of psych-up jams to get her in the right headspace for her contract work. The gig economy is so competitive; any little advantage you can give yourself sets you apart from the rest. No intergenerational group project can move forward without a bit of conflict, and Sam seems more than ready to go several rounds today. First, he puts on some Nick Cave (strong marks thematically; you’ve got a solid chance of firing up a murder ballad even if you hit “play” on a Nick Cave song at random), then trolls Eleanor by suggesting a bunch of Welsh artists (“You fucking racist!” she yells). (“No Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci?” I wonder aloud.) After some podcast bickering and the kids mocking Helen for even suggesting her kids’ favorite artist, Olly Murs, Sam and Helen finally agree to return to the murder mix, leading to Williams and Eleanor rocking out while “Nobody Speak,” by DJ Shadow feat. Run the Jewels, rings out.
Sam being Sam, he’s got a full armory in the boot of his car, including walkie-talkies, and urges everyone (1) to be mindful of their tone of voice so as to be respectful of Williams and her hangover and (2) to approach the house where Reed is being held with caution. Let’s keep everything as low-key as possible and not attract maximum attention from the 20-to-40 armed guards the Black Doves have outsourced this job to, okay? Absolutely not. Williams and Eleanor have bigger fish to fry, specifically, the pros-and-cons list that could be about their nascent relationship or about taking the contract to kill Sam. What’s the difference, really? Degree of difficulty, concerns about regrets and potential damage to their friend/colleague group — all relevant for both topics when you think about it.
Eleanor and Williams spend the remainder of the episode doing what they’ve always done: bickering and bantering at high speed, quipping while dispatching foes, and working their way toward sincere emotional conversation. Their screwball antics are so funny and heartfelt, and the balance of tartness and sweetness is calibrated just right. How can Eleanor take Williams’s declaration of love seriously if she has never told Eleanor her first name? Learning it’s Fionnula sends the two of them down a rabbit hole of family history and cultural allusions punctuated liberally by the casual gunning down of the faceless gunmen and occasional bludgeoning with a darling retro dusty-pink telephone.
It’s all intercut with Helen and Sam’s adventures, in which our besties are having the most serious argument of their friendship. Sam has been holding back information from Helen, partly for her safety and partly to forestall conversations like this one. She resents his making decisions about what information she can and can’t access, and as is usually the basis of arguments like this, they’re both partly right and partly wrong. He’s right: Helen often is impulsive, and her now-firm decision to fight for the life she has built affects him, too. The revelation of what a joyless, bleak vacuum Sam’s life has become now that he has “pushed every person who ever threatened to love [him] away, and the ones that [he] didn’t push away are killed” hits hard. He has nothing left to give her, but like his admirable fellow countryman Rick Astley, he’s also never gonna give her up, let her down, run around, and desert her. Their argument isn’t over, but he’s going to hold off these hired goons as long as he can. There are so many of them. Sam, Eleanor, and Williams are mowing them down, but Conteh (whom Reed sniffily describes as “suffer[ing] from a terminal lack of imagination”) keeps sending more.
It’s very interesting to hear Reed explain what has been going on to Helen. The mask of cool detachment and unflappability she has worn for so long is too precisely fitted to remove, but some glimmers of normal human feeling do come through. Her admission that she didn’t lose Vita but abandoned her and that she deleted all references to her daughter from the operation’s file is about as self-lacerating as Reed can get. Even that is delivered in a smooth, even tone of voice as if she were reading aloud from a field report, and it’s really no different from what she did with all official traces of Helen’s existence prior to her joining the Black Doves.
The piece of her story that is more fleshed out than what we’ve seen already pertains to Vita, Franz, and Alexi Chernov. Franz popped up on Reed’s radar when it became clear that he had been blackmailing Chernov for vast sums, threatening to expose his attempted defection in 1988. This wasn’t just for fun but to resurrect Kestrel and pass it down to Vita herself. Alert viewers will have already made a reasonable guess as to the current identity and location of the woman formerly known as Vita.
Meanwhile, the waves of hired goons keep coming, so Helen hands Reed a small shotgun and the two sally forth to try to rendezvous with Sam, Williams, and Eleanor. If only Laila could see how decidedly Helen is kicking the asses of the heavily armed guys standing between her, Reed, and the exit. Shooting, knifing, kicking! Who’s a spy wife now, huh? Eleanor and Williams are squabbling their way toward fully mutual love confessions. Nothing says a love built to last like addressing your beloved as a twat and then throwing a grenade out the window at the bad guys. Romance is alive and well among the professional assassins of the greater London metropolitan area!
Although there’s a brief moment when it looks as if our anti-heroes will be gunned down by Conteh’s forces, Laila shows up to save the day. Huzzah! I love how she’s framed in this moment: a small woman in profile firing a very large gun. It reminded me of how Teyana Taylor appears in a memorable scene of One Battle After Another. Immediately after dispatching the remaining goons, Laila checks in with Mrs. Reed, and I love the juxtaposition of her one-woman murder squad with sincere care for her (once and future?) boss. Laila’s arrival reenergizes the whole group, which is handy because they’ve got one more round of mercenaries to deal with before making it back to London, where they all agree a round of drinks is in order.
Reed makes Sam’s life easier by letting him know that she knows this hasn’t been a rescue mission after all. Leila does the same with Eleanor, and even Patrick extends a similar professional courtesy to Sam with a timely heads-up about the contract out on his life. None of these people will be as easy to kill as any of the folks Sam has been hunting all season. Before she and Sam head out on their fateful walk home, Reed offers Helen her best attempt at sincere warmth, giving her a tiny shoulder squeeze and thanking her protegée. This should set off some very high-decibel alarms to Helen, but I can’t blame her for being just a bit too tired to hear them.
• I hope Sam finds it in himself to believe Helen when she says his strength and friendship strengthen her, too. He has been walking around believing Patrick’s claptrap about the strong needing others to be weak, but that’s all it is.
• The pain at the heart of Helen and Sam’s relationship finally comes to the fore in this episode, something Keira Knightley and Ben Whishaw reflected on in our interview. Whishaw said it was interesting to play “because it’s the first time they really argue seriously — they have some real disagreements,” with Knightley picking up the thread that “the whole root of the relationship is these are two people that can’t be themselves with anyone other than each other, and all of a sudden in this season they’re keeping things from one another.”
• Was this our most Wallace-forward episode so far? This has to be the most we’ve seen of him without Helen. Perryman makes the most of his private audience with Wallace and might have gotten somewhere with his latest pieces of Heleniana, especially the photos Wallace has clearly never seen, had he not been preempted by the commissioner from the Met. Wallace did well to save Helen’s and his own bacon after instantly recognizing Sam’s face in the surveillance photos by asking to have them sent to his secretary. The commissioner doesn’t bat an eyelash, and why would he? Wallace has this summit to pull off tomorrow; he’s going to let the man get back to work!
• There’s something off about the scenes with Cecile Mason. Neve Campbell’s performance seems built on top of her approximation of Kim Dickens’s voice as Joanie Stubbs in Deadwood run through a filter set to Aaron Sorkin–esque. Every time she’s onscreen, I wonder if this character was more significant in earlier drafts or if the role got pared down in editing. The way she’s talking and the influence and access she clearly thinks she ought to have seem disproportionate to the way everyone else perceives her. Then again, that may well be the point.
• Reed easily gets the line of the episode, sighing to Helen, who has just blown a hole in the door to the room where she’s being held, “Sometimes I wonder if you have ever truly understood the concept of undercover.”
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