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Black Doves has always thrived on the tension between the ordinary and the lethal and P Is For Poison delivers the formula with even greater assurance and bite. The stakes have climbed higher and the personal costs are starting to show more clearly on every face.
The episode picks up in the immediate aftermath of Sam’s latest assignment. Ben Whishaw plays the exhausted hitman with the same weary precision that made him so compelling in the first series, only here the weariness has deepened into something closer to quiet despair. After the business with Jerry he cannot even face the hotel, so he pitches up at Lenny’s place. Kathryn Hunter’s Lenny remains one of the great comic creations of the show, all sharp edges and reluctant maternal instinct. She confiscates his gun, banishes him to the kitchen and still somehow leaves you smiling at her tone. The next morning Patrick appears, with an unsettling blend of concern and threat, and hands Sam his new target: Alexi Chernov. The philosophical lecture that accompanies the order is pure Black Doves, half rationalisation and half recruitment pitch for a rival organisation that claims moral superiority while ordering the same cold work.
Meanwhile Helen is running her own operation with characteristic resourcefulness. Keira Knightley continues to make Helen’s double life look both effortless and utterly exhausting. Late at night she breaks into Dani’s flat and persuades the reluctant younger agent to help her dig through the Black Doves archives for anything on Wildflower. The scene adds a layer of comedy over the pressure: Dani in the stacks with a special contact lens, Helen monitoring from outside, and then the sudden arrival of Mr Conteh. Agnes O’Casey is great as Dani, all nervous energy and self-preservation, and the moment she lies her way out of trouble feels both funny and genuinely tense. Helen’s determination to locate Reed is driven by loyalty, suspicion and a growing sense that the organisation she has served for so long may no longer be a safe harbour.
The two strands begin to tangle when Helen realises she needs more muscle and information. She recruits Laila, Ambika Mod’s sharp-tongued and anarchic new addition to the ensemble, and the pair set about kidnapping one of the more Conteh’s loyal Black Doves operatives in order to extract Reed’s location. At the same time Helen keeps calling Sam, who is busy assembling Williams and Eleanor for the Chernov job. The argument that erupts when they finally meet is one of the episode’s emotional high points. Sam has had enough of the Black Doves and sees little reason to risk everything for Reed. Helen still believes the life she has built is worth protecting. Their friendship has always been the beating heart of the series, and here it is tested by conflicting loyalties and accumulating bodies. Knightley and Whishaw play the scene with the easy intimacy of people who know each other’s darkest corners yet still manage to surprise one another.
The dinner at the Chancellor Club is a procession of controlled chaos. Wallace and Helen host Alexi and Katia Chernov while Sam, Williams and Eleanor work the kitchen and the dining room. The political conversation at the table is deliberately dry, all careful talk about the upcoming summit and Russia’s unofficial presence, while the real drama happens out of sight. Helen engineers a private conversation with Katia in the toilet, pressing her about the Paris hotel incident, the dead housekeeper Ida Povetkin and any lingering echoes from Alexi’s old KGB days in East Berlin. Knightley handles the interrogation with perfect poise, never raising her voice, never tipping her hand. Meanwhile Eleanor, disguised as a waitress, engineers a small scene at the table so that the poisoned dish reaches its target without suspicion. Later, in the car, Alexi dies. The way it all pays out is elegant, darkly funny and completely cold-blooded, exactly the tone the show does best.
Helen’s domestic life is not left untouched. Before the dinner she is summoned for a security interview with Officer Perryman of MI5. The questions about the cemetery in Kenya where her parents are supposedly buried and the name Bonnie Weir land blows that she wasn’t expecting. Helen lies with practised skill, but the encounter leaves her furious and newly aware that her carefully constructed past is beginning to fray. The flashbacks that punctuate the episode, particularly the one in which Reed informs a younger Helen that she is about to become the wife of the next prime minister, deepen the sense that Helen has been shaped by other people’s decisions for a very long time.
By the end of the episode the various plots have dangerously started to twist together. Laila succeeds in extracting Reed’s location and passes it to Helen. Helen then confronts Sam about the Chernov killing, furious that he acted without telling her. Conteh, meanwhile, has received word that both Sam and Laila are linked to the recent deaths of Black Doves agents and quietly puts contracts out on them. The final image of Laila noticing a red laser sight on her chest is pure cold water. And then comes the twist that lands hardest of all: Sam’s final target for Kestrel is Wildflower herself. Reed. The same woman Helen is determined to rescue the following morning.
The episode balances all these moving parts without ever losing its sense of humour or its emotional core. The banter between the assassins remains as sharp as ever. Williams and Eleanor continue their awkward romantic dance with the same mixture of violence and vulnerability that made them scene-stealers in the first series. Helen’s ability to move between Downing Street politeness and clinical interrogation never ceases to impress. And Sam’s growing disillusionment feels like he has no way out.
The back end of the season is set up nicely. Helen is preparing to break Reed out of whatever hole the Black Doves have put her in. Sam is under orders to kill the same woman. Laila is wounded or worse. Contracts are out. MI5 is asking inconvenient questions. And the peace summit that Wallace is trying to host still looms on the horizon, its geopolitical stakes quietly entangled with the personal vendettas and organisational power struggles that drive the Black Doves themselves.
P Is For Poison is thrilling without being bombastic, funny without undercutting the genuine stakes, and character-driven even when the plot is twisting in several directions at once. The performances are uniformly excellent, the writing remains razor sharp, and the sense of a larger conspiracy tightening around the central characters is almost tangible. Black Doves continues to prove that spy drama can be both gleefully entertaining and surprisingly human, and this episode stands among its finest.
Where to watch Black Doves – Season 2, Episode 3: P Is For Poison: