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Black Doves<\/a><\/p>\n Murder Mix<\/p>\n \n Season 2<\/p>\n Episode 5\n <\/p>\n \n Editor\u2019s Rating<\/p>\n 4 stars<\/p>\n ****\n <\/p>\n \n The mission to save Reed gets complicated by friendly competition among assassins. Rescue heist! At last, the rescue heist is upon us! And son of a gun if it\u2019s not a riff on Helen\u2019s chapter in \u201cThe Opportunity to Become Savage\u201d: 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.<\/p>\n I\u2019d 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\u2019ve got a solid chance of firing up a murder ballad even if you hit \u201cplay\u201d on a Nick Cave song at random), then trolls Eleanor by suggesting a bunch of Welsh artists (\u201cYou fucking racist!\u201d she yells). (\u201cNo Gorky\u2019s Zygotic Mynci<\/a>?\u201d I wonder aloud.) After some podcast bickering and the kids mocking Helen for even suggesting her kids\u2019 favorite artist, Olly Murs, Sam and Helen finally agree to return to the murder mix, leading to Williams and Eleanor rocking out while \u201cNobody Speak<\/a>,\u201d by DJ Shadow feat. Run the Jewels<\/a>, rings out.<\/p>\n Sam being Sam, he\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s the difference, really? Degree of difficulty, concerns about regrets and potential damage to their friend\/colleague group \u2014 all relevant for both topics when you think about it.<\/p>\n Eleanor and Williams spend the remainder of the episode doing what they\u2019ve 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\u2019s declaration of love seriously if she has never told Eleanor her first name? Learning it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n It\u2019s all intercut with Helen and Sam\u2019s 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\u2019t access, and as is usually the basis of arguments like this, they\u2019re both partly right and partly wrong. He\u2019s 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\u2019s life has become now that he has \u201cpushed every person who ever threatened to love [him] away, and the ones that [he] didn\u2019t push away are killed\u201d hits hard. He has nothing left to give her, but like his admirable fellow countryman Rick Astley, he\u2019s also never gonna give her up, let her down, run around, and desert her. Their argument isn\u2019t over, but he\u2019s 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 \u201csuffer[ing] from a terminal lack of imagination\u201d) keeps sending more.<\/p>\n It\u2019s 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\u2019t lose Vita but abandoned her and that she deleted all references to her daughter from the operation\u2019s 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\u2019s really no different from what she did with all official traces of Helen\u2019s existence prior to her joining the Black Doves.<\/p>\n The piece of her story that is more fleshed out than what we\u2019ve seen already pertains to Vita, Franz, and Alexi Chernov. Franz popped up on Reed\u2019s radar when it became clear that he had been blackmailing Chernov for vast sums, threatening to expose his attempted defection in 1988. This wasn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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!<\/p>\n
\n Photo: Netflix\n <\/p>\n