Harold von Engestrom

Black Doves is a puerile, artificial, and convoluted effort to bring a mix of humour and woke cool to the spy genre. This is as bad as it gets when it comes to parroting some of the comic elements of Slow Horses yet making a mess of plotting and character development. If one ranks the The Night Manager at the top of streaming espionage dramas, then Black Doves grovels at the bottom. One of its central errors is deviating from the initial plot point involving Keira Knightley as a mole married to a British government cabinet minister. By the end of episode 2 and 3 the series begins to fall apart when one of Keira's fellow agents - Sam Whishaw as the most uncovincing assassin in the history of film/TV - is suddenly confronted by a pair of foul-mouthed lesbian assassins working for his former employer. The scene is so absurd and jarring that it immediately signals that Black Doves is yet another woeful Netflix attempt to deliver content to a Gen Z audience. Black Doves is also contaminated by staggeringly poor dialogue, dozens of illogical plot twists, and slow-moving scenes that try to establish back story or otherwise flesh out the thinly drawn characters. My greatest Christmas gift to audiences in cyberspace is to avoid this series at all costs.