'Black Doves' Recap, Episode 3:

First things first: Sam’s initial job as a triggerman was to kill his own father, who had been a contract killer himself, and I have questions. Did Lenny know she was sending Sam to do a partial Oedipus? It’s deeply messed up, and Sam seems never to hint at the bizarre circumstances of the event, even to Helen. I believe Lenny did know what she was sending Sam to do. If that’s the case, it’s the start of a pattern showing how much she relies on withholding information from him to sidestep any disagreements and get him to comply with the assignment as received once he’s in the moment. It also insulates her from the fallout of adverse consequences such as her triggerman balking at pulling the trigger, which is exactly what happened when she assigned Sam the murders of the four Newman brothers in 2017. She claimed not to have a photo of Hector, and Sam was brought up short at the sight of Hector, who turned out to be a very scared child in the back seat of a large SUV.

He could have pulled the trigger. It’s the job he’s being paid to do; he has already killed Hector’s three brothers and fulfilled his duty to the Code his father taught him: He owes his targets the respect of looking them in the eye before killing. Technically, by his father’s and his own lights, he’d be doing his work the right way, but we know Sam is a decent sort who also lives by the other piece of guidance his father imparted: The murders he perpetrates should be ones that improve the world in some way. The world won’t be improved by Hector’s death, and Sam won’t shoot a child in cold blood, or, as Lenny puts it, he’s “got a warm heart and blood on his hands.” I think we could also reasonably refer here to the enduring wisdom of Omar Little, who proudly “never put [his] gun on no citizen.”

Some people, those who hired Maggie, Philip, and Jason’s killers, for example, are not pledged to uphold any honor code among triggermen. Right now, they are nameless, known only as the voice that answers Stephen Yarrick’s calls to a number marked “Repair Shop,” but they’re still pretty terrifying. These as-yet-unnamed shadowy bad guys are the Keyser Söze of Black Doves, the kind of people who prompt Yarrick to warn Sam, “If you were smart, you’d already be running.” I’m inclined to believe him because, just hours after issuing that warning, Yarrick is being beaten within an inch of his life and then having his throat slit by whoever is staffing the Repair Shop. This is quite the unfortunate turn in his relationship with the Repair Shop because, according to his calls and messages log, he spoke with them several times the night of Ambassador Chen’s death (as well as Maggie, Philip, and Jason’s).

Having interrogated Yarrick in an empty classroom during the Nativity play in which both Yarrick’s and the Webbs’ children are performing, Sam drops Yarrick’s purloined phone into Jacqueline Webb’s backpack for Helen to review later. The degree of operations-security inanity that follows is outrageous, and I am outraged just thinking about it. Now, I’ve never been a clandestine information-gathering professional, but it seems to me that since Helen knows that Yarrick is entangled to some degree in Chen’s death and that Philip knew about it before he was murdered, she might consider not taking Yarrick’s phone home with her. Might not her clever little hacking device also have some phone-cloning capabilities she should use instead? Surely, his phone’s location can be tracked, and taking it to her house, which is still not secure, seems foolish at best.

For her to tauntingly text Repair Shop is a doubling down of recklessness that made me yell at the TV. When she learns unidentified Repair Shop Goons have kidnapped Yarrick and later witnesses his grisly murder as they stream it to his phone, I had to get up and get some fresh air. Has Jason’s murder now overridden all her better judgment and training? After attending the memorial drinks in Jason’s honor, Wallace tells Helen that nobody seems to have known Jason particularly well. Is it possible Jason was a spy? Could that be why he seems so calm when Helen confides in him that her identity is a fake? On a more immediate and practical level, why isn’t Yarrick’s wife blowing up her missing husband’s phone with calls and messages? How is she going to live with the knowledge that the death of her husband’s steadfast friend is, to some degree, her fault?

At the moment, I’m thinking of these lapses in judgment as being on the intense end of the spectrum of Helen’s established recklessness when she’s intent on protecting someone she loves, and this episode helpfully furnishes some evidence for that theory. Remember Sam’s failing to kill the very young Hector Newman? When that decision came back to bite him on the tush the following morning in the form of a multi-assailant retaliatory home invasion (one seemingly masterminded by Hector himself, observing the proceedings in the manner of a psychopathic boy-emperor from the safety of another SUV), Sam’s first and only call for backup was to Helen. They’d gotten quite close while spending years working on her fight skills, and though their lives diverged pretty significantly as she got more swept up in her assignment with Wallace and Sam fell in love with Michael, they’re still there for each other when it counts.

Sam knows it’s a huge ask — by 2017, Helen was the heavily pregnant wife of Wallace Webb — but he doesn’t know that Helen raced across London to save his and Michael’s bacon shortly after demanding that she be exfiltrated from her assignment. She came in hot and prepared to trade her and her children’s future life for Michael’s safety and Sam’s exit strategy; if that’s not profound, reckless love, what is? I don’t think Sam is aware of the full extent of her sacrifice on his behalf, but she doesn’t lord it over him either. It’s worth noting, too, that though this episode provides more details about Sam’s first hit, by devoting far more time to the Newman retaliation set piece, it also suggests that not shooting Hector was a more significant and decisive moment in Sam’s life.

It also taught him he can’t go it alone in his reluctant new pursuit of Hector. What’s left to him but to recruit Williams and Eleanor to help with the job? Yes, he will be paying lavish sums to the same Williams and Eleanor who will kill Michael should Sam not deliver on killing Hector, and the same Williams who has announced her intention to kill Sam to avenge her late partner Kent’s death. The recruitment scene is another masterpiece of comic timing among the three characters; I would happily watch many minutes of bloopers, improvisations, and cut scenes of this trio. En route to Newman’s secondary hideout, Eleanor, clearly the tartly observant youngest sibling of the group, delivers the best line of the episode, yelling at Sam and Williams to knock off their pointless argument about whom they kill and why: “You’re doing my head in — literally a car full of assassins, trying to find the moral high ground?!” Get real! Less of Helen endangering her family and more of this, please! These three are sensational together.

I hate to end on a tremendous downer, but this is the midway point of a spy thriller, where everything in the plot is required to start snowballing directly downhill. Yarrick’s death — which, at this point, only Helen knows about — is bad for even more than the obvious reasons; it’s going to delay the Chinese government’s own investigation into Chen’s death. They give Wallace a seemingly quite justified earful as they present their theory of the case, complete with stills from outdoor CCTV footage that suggest his killer was Kai-Ming Chen’s American boyfriend, Cole Atwood, who is also a CIA operative. At minimum, they want to talk with Cole, who fled to the U.S. Embassy in Nine Elms. They suspect Stephen and the entire apparatus of London’s Metropolitan Police of being complicit in covering up Chen’s murder, so they’d love to speak with Stephen, too, but they’re so sure of the strength of their hand that they’re trying to use what they already know as leverage to force Wallace’s department to reconsider their applications for certain highly lucrative military-contract proposals. This feels a little too close to indulging in the “crafty Orientals” stereotype, and it’s a rational play on the part of any government looking for extrajudicial recompense for their ambassador’s incredibly suspicious death.

• At the twins’ school Nativity play, Jacqueline reveals herself to have strong comedic timing as one of the Three Wise Men, and there’s a literal “NO ROOM” sign hanging up outside the inn in Bethlehem. Reader, I chuckled.

• While Wallace is having his uncomfortable conversation with his Chinese counterparts, Helen is over by the bar having a cute little chat with his new aide, Dani. She drops an aphorism we and Helen recognize as one of Reed’s favorites: “When a door closes, a window opens.” Did Dani do this on purpose to needle Helen? It’s a common enough phrase, but Reed did tell Helen in both the first episode and this one that should she be exfiltrated from the Webb household, a replacement would easily and swiftly be put in play. Something to bear in mind!