The new heavily-advertised Netflix series Black Doves, which landed last week, on 5 December, registers and exploits some ideological shifts in the spy genre, harvesting some recent tropes and selling them back to us.

Set up

Don’t worry, this is just about the set up. No spoilers. Keira Knightley is “Helen Webb,” though we quickly discover in back-story flashbacks that this is not her real name; the “Webb” bit is from her marriage to Minister of Defence nice-guy who is tipped to become Prime Minister “Wallace Web,” a bland kind of figure worrying about big-scale events (the kind of figure my local obedient Labour MP perhaps wishes to be). Keira as Helen is styled here as an attentive wife to her hubby, but cuts a hard-faced Princess Kate image, good with her kids but handy with a gun. She is working undercover, and not even Wallace knows.

Ben Whishaw is “Sam Young,” his black hair slicked back, an outsourced contract “odd job” (as Helen puts it) man to assist our heroine in the occasional hit, and in the gathering of information about what is happening in government circles. Sam Young is much taller than Paddington, but has a similar sibilant carefully enunciated soft whisper, so it’s pretty disturbing hearing him talk about taking people out. He is gay, so nothing is up beyond an affectionate working bond in the Helen-Sam duo.

Sarah Lancashire plays the classic Bond “M” figure, here as “Reed,” the one who has finally recruited Helen to the spy business after a screening interview where Helen thought she was applying for a translation job (she speaks Russian, French and “conversational German”). Reed manages Helen, gives her assignments, and waits for the info to flow from the husband, future PM. She is, we assume as we watch her mannered polite interactions with Helen, an avatar for Judi Dench, and so, evil she might be, and working for our government she is definitely not, she is still implicitly, semiotically some kind of national treasure.

Politics

A first thing to notice is that “politics” here is as murky and inexplicable as in many of the old classic spy thriller movies, the Bond series being a case in point, and so it operates, whether the writers and producers of Black Doves like it or not, as a feeding ground for conspiracy theory “explanations” of what is going on in the world. The personal set up here is that Helen has unwisely had a secret liaison with a civil servant who has been murdered, and she wants to know why he was topped and by who.

It is not clear what political party Wallace Webb is a member of, which party is in government. One clip indicates it is Tory, but that does not seem to matter. It seems not. Interwoven with this personal narrative are the high-level diplomatic tangles that her husband is dealing with, and which are splashed over every television screen that appears in the background of many scenes. Bothering the politicians and spads most is the death of the Chinese ambassador and the disappearance of his daughter, fun-loving Kai-Ming.

There are cryptic references to US involvement, to the threats made by the Chinese who claim that the death was not an accident, and to machinations at the heart of government, but with no context elaborated. This is of a piece with the old Bond franchise, of course, but the sense now is that there will not be any resolution, no understanding even of what is at stake. This will run and run into the mud, using the confusing complicated scenario as the opportunity for “reveals” that will not, finally, reveal anything of substance at all. It was announced that the series had already been renewed for a second season by Netflix, even before the first season was released.

Identities

The Judy Dench “M” figure orchestrates the work of Helen and Sam, and so continues working a seam of the woman-centred thriller genre, but note how she corrects Helen on their first encounter; Helen repeats her name “Reed,” naming her as “Miss Reed,” and Reed quickly puts her right, no, it is “Mrs Reed.”

Helen Webb, with her cover surname borrowed from her MP husband is a Nikita kind of figure, but also, note, how she stays with this guy after a first assignment to get info from him, marries him, and is fiercely protective of her kids; for her, national interest is secondary to family. Gay Sam is easily incorporated into this kind of scene, not a threat to the family, but, as one of his handlers has it, he is “sentimental” about family-style relationships.

This gender shift runs alongside nods to “race,” but still with an old dose of stereotypes; a black spy recruited from previous work in Afghanistan is quickly dispatched, and some Irish and Welsh psychopathic women operatives menace poor Sam (at the behest of wonderfully gravelly-voiced Kathryn Hunter as cockney menacing “Lenny Lines”). And, of course, Helen herself has a backstory that includes the offer of a studentship at Cambridge, and now access to the upwardly mobile class layer that is the world of a cabinet minister.

Privatisation

In the old days there was an often unvoiced understanding, that the good guys, the spies we were encouraged to root for, were acting on behalf of good Western governments. Against this were the bad guys, characters like Rose Klebb who was working for Soviet intelligence before being recruited by SPECTRE, and their allegiance was always suspect, anti-Western if not pro-Soviet or pro-Chinese. With the neoliberal rise of corporate mercenary security organisations, however, this allegiance to nation states starts to dissolve.

When Helen is recruited, she asks Reed, “Mrs Reed,” who she is to be working for, and is told that the organisation is beyond “ideology;” it is, Reed says, a “capitalist” enterprise. Helen points out (correctly) that this does not at all mean that such an enterprise is beyond ideology, surely that it is capitalist means precisely that it is ideological. Reed humours her, noting that she has had a good potential Oxbridge education to thank for that observation.

Now it is unclear, along with the other ideological conspiracy-complicit muddles, what state, para-state or private organisations are at work competing against each other, whether they Helen’s and Sam’s employers or the rivals organised by the likes of Lenny Lines.

Fantasy

Series like this on Netflix, which is itself a private commercial outfit – something which speaks to the kind of corporate outsourced world that is represented in Black Doves – channel fantasy, but they also send a message about what fantasy is today. The series evokes a world in which humdrum everyday reality is potentially shadowed by another life, a life in which we could all be secret agents, spies, operatives, maybe even assassins, a life in which we do have the agency we are usually denied.

Helen lives this fantasy for us to identify with and enjoy, the thought that we too could have a gun hidden in a drawer, take off and leave the kids with their nanny for the evening, and, even with our dear husband unawares, have affairs and kill bad people. This is a particular acute paradox the week Black Doves was dropped into our screens, a week in which the CEO of a large private health insurance company in the US was killed (a killing that many applauded even while they were queasy about the role of individual terrorism as a mirror-like response to a world in which we are reduced to spectators of public life).

Politics, identity, privatisation and fantasy are ideologically interwoven in popular entertainment; it is thrilling, but better if you also step back from it when you turn the TV off. Or, maybe in this case, given what an ideological bloody mess this thing is, I should have given it a miss.

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