We Have Issues offers audio versions of articles using Instaread. Some words may be mispronounced.
Black Doves has always thrived on its sharp blend of dark humour, brutal violence and the tangled personal lives of people who sell secrets for a living. Season two continues that tradition with even greater confidence, and episode four stands as one of its most revealing and gripping so far. It is the episode that finally peels back the layers on Sarah Lancashire’s formidable Mrs Reed, delivering a long, meticulously crafted flashback that gives us an understanding of who she is.
The episode is bookended by the assassins Williams and Eleanor professing their love for each other during an attempted hit on Laila, providing moments of unexpected levity amid the rising danger. Yet the real weight of the hour arrives when the narrative shifts into carefully structured chapters of the past.
The longest and most central of these is the 1988 East Berlin flashback that explains Reed’s hardened exterior. Here we meet a younger Elizabeth Reed, operating under the codename Wildflower, deeply embedded in a long-term Black Doves operation designed to keep tabs on the shadowy group known as Kestrel. Reed’s assignment has gone far beyond ordinary surveillance. She has built an entire life with her target, Franz, and the two share a young daughter named Vita. The domestic scenes are played with a quiet authenticity that makes the eventual rupture all the more devastating. Franz, restless and ambitious, announces his intention to relocate the family to Amsterdam so he can expand Kestrel’s operations. For Reed the prospect is unbearable. She has grown attached not only to the city and the work but to her station chief, Peter Maddison, with whom she has been conducting a secret affair. The idea of abandoning that life and the man she truly wants fills her with quiet panic.
What follows takes the series to some of its darkest places. In a conversation with Peter, Reed improvises a story about an imminent Kestrel terror attack involving car bombings. The fabrication is accepted at face value by the London office, which promptly authorises the elimination of the entire Kestrel cell. When Franz somehow learns that Kestrel agents are being killed, he races back to the apartment to protect Reed and their daughter. Instead of the reunion he expects, he is confronted with the full truth of Reed’s identity. She admits she has been a Black Doves agent all along and that she has used him. Peter arrives and slits Franz’s throat. Peter then turns on Reed herself, attempting to strangle her in a rage over the chaos she has unleashed. She shoots him dead. Standing over the two bodies, Reed recovers the surveillance tape containing her admission of the fabricated threat, ensuring the Black Doves never learn the full extent of her personal motives. She searches briefly for Vita but ultimately leaves the child behind, fleeing with fellow agents Zeus and Spitfire. The abandonment is not presented as pure callousness but as the only option she can see in the moment, a choice that will haunt every subsequent decision she makes.
Interwoven with Reed’s story is a beautifully observed flashback to Sam’s time in Italy. After the violent home invasion that nearly killed Michael, Sam has fled to a quiet village, seeking something close to anonymity. He begins helping at a local wine bar, forming a tentative friendship with the owner. The scenes are languid and tender, full of shared meals, quiet conversations and the simple rhythms of ordinary life. Sam confides about Michael and even begins to imagine a different existence for himself. Yet the peace is constantly undercut by his own guilt. He is haunted by the memory of having killed the village priest, Aldo, on an earlier Black Doves assignment. The image of that shooting replays in his mind as he works alongside the man who was effectively Aldo’s closest friend. When Reed tracks him down around Christmas and asks him to locate Franz, who has survived and been spotted in Rome, Sam investigates far enough to find a forwarding address in Dorset but ultimately refuses the job. The refusal feels like a rare assertion of self-preservation. Ben Whishaw plays these scenes with remarkable restraint, his eyes conveying the exhaustion of a man who has tried and failed to outrun his past. The Italian interlude is one of the episode’s most affecting stretches, suggesting the life Sam might have had if the Black Doves had not claimed him so completely.
Helen’s own flashback arrives lnext and carries equal force. Set in the English countryside shortly after the birth of her twins, we see her struggling with the demands of new motherhood while Wallace is newly elevated in government. Reed contacts her with an urgent assignment: Franz is staying in a nearby cottage, dying of cancer, and must be eliminated. This is the moment Helen’s role expands from intelligence gathering into direct assassination. She resists at first, but eventually retrieves the gun Reed has hidden and goes to confront the old man. The conversation between them is brief yet charged. Franz is unsurprised by his fate. He only expresses mild disappointment that Reed herself did not come, then entrusts Helen with a message: he has found Vita. Helen carries out the killing. The act is clinical and necessary in the logic of the organisation, yet her face registers the cost. This is also the killing that later provides Kestrel with the recording used to blackmail Sam. Keira Knightley conveys Helen’s reluctant crossing of a moral line with quiet intensity, making clear that the decision will echo through everything that follows.
The structure of the episode is particularly effective. Rather than intercutting present-day scenes with the past in the usual rapid fashion, the writers allow each flashback substantial room to breathe. A significant present-day scene involving Williams and Eleanor is split and used to bookend the historical material, creating a sense of unfinished business that carries real emotional charge. We return to Helen and Sam dealing with the immediate consequences of Reed’s disappearance and the growing threat from Kestrel, only to understand at last why that organisation has been so determined to settle old scores. The revelation that Reed’s actions in Berlin directly led to the deaths of Kestrel’s founders, and that she has spent decades covering her tracks with off-book operations, snaps the season’s central mystery into sharp focus.
What elevates the episode beyond a simple origin story is the way it explores the personal cost of institutional loyalty across three different lives. Reed’s desire to stay with Peter is not framed as a grand romantic gesture but as a deeply human, almost selfish need for connection in a life built on lies. Sam’s Italian interlude shows a man desperately trying to reclaim some fragment of ordinary humanity, only to have the past reassert itself. Helen’s first kill marks the point at which her carefully constructed domestic identity begins to fray under the weight of what the Black Doves demand. Lauren Moakes playing the young Reed, Whishaw and Knightley each bring extraordinary precision to these moments.
The episode gives us a richer, more complicated understanding of all three characters and of the forces arrayed against the Black Doves. The knowledge that Reed abandoned her own child and murdered her lover in order to protect a lie she invented for personal reasons changes every interaction she has had with Helen. Sam’s refusal to finish the job in Italy and Helen’s reluctant acceptance of it bind their fates more tightly to Reed’s secrets. The past is not simply backstory; it is an active, living threat that continues to shape the present. The final moments leave several threads dangling in the best possible way, ensuring that the revelations of this chapter will continue to resonate through the remaining episodes.
Episode four succeeds because it trusts us with complexity. It refuses easy answers about loyalty, love and the price of survival in a profession built on betrayal. Reed, Sam and Helen emerge as people who made irreversible choices under pressure and have spent years living with the consequences. In an age of spy thrillers that often prioritise spectacle over substance, Black Doves continues to demonstrate that the most compelling stories are those rooted in the messy, contradictory hearts of the people who carry the secrets. This episodes the series at its most confident and most human, a reminder of why the show clicks.
Where to watch Black Doves – Season 2, Episode 4: The Opportunity To Become Savage: