We're officially off to a great start in Black Doves season 2 on Netflix, and the mystery just took a major turn. Episode 3 ended with an incredible twist. Sam (Ben Whishaw) was given Reed (Sarah Lancashire) as his next target.
To make it all the more hectic, he’s going to find Reed with Helen (Keira Knightley) in the morning and break her out of the place the Black Doves are keeping her.
Laila is alive, thankfully
You’ll also recall at the end of episode 3 that Laila (Ambika Mod), who found Reed and told Helen was shot at, but we’re not sure if she lived or died. The good news is that Williams and Eleanor picked up the job to kill Laila offered by the Black Doves, but Williams was quite drunk when she got the text about the job, and she missed her first attempt to kill Laila.
We catch up with Williams (Elly Lily Hyland) and Eleanor (Gabrielle Creevy) as they’re pinned down now, while Laila returns fire. As they wait, they talk about their relationship and what they are to each other. They basically express their love for each other in a very round about way. Williams even says that she probably, definitely loves her. Then, Williams makes a run for it and nearly dies in the process.
Wildflower is Reed's codename on a Berlin mission with Kestrel that went completely wrong
Finally, we catch up with Reed next. She’s being held somewhere in the countryside. When we find her, she’s looking through her old photos, and that’s when we find out what’s been really going on this whole time.
We flashback to 1988 in East Berlin, which is before the fall of the Berlin Wall. We find a young Reed on a mission. She’s undercover with the Black Doves embedded in Kestrel, a rising organization trying to find footing in international politics. They’re approached by a KGB officer, Alexi Chernov, who is defecting. Kestrel wants to help him and get in with the Americans.
Oh, and Reed has a daughter.
The Black Doves decide to allow Kestrel, which is more like a terrorist group by the sounds of things, to keep working with Chernov to see if it brings them more fruitful information down the road.
Reed isn’t exactly cool with that plan. She’s sick of living in Berlin, and she wants to go to London. Her boss, who is also her lover, is not interested in that plan.
Meanwhile, Franz, Reed’s partner and baby daddy, has passports ready for the three of them, including her daughter Vita, to flee East Berlin and go to Amsterdam to grow Kestrel there. Reed isn’t into the idea, but she plays along.
Reed makes up a lie that Kestrel is planning a terrorist attack, and the Black Doves are not interested in letting that happen. Orders are given to kill all the Kestrel members to prevent the bombing. For the mission, they are all given nicknames. Reed is given the name Wildflower, which we already knew.
Somehow, Franz learns that the Kestrel agents are being killed, and he comes back to his apartment to rescue Reed and Vita. Instead, Reed turns the tables on him. She reveals that she is a Black Doves agent, and she’s been using him. She tries to get them both to leave before the Black Doves kill them.
Unfortunately, Reed runs out of time, and it appears that Franz is killed in the process when Peter shows up to their door.
Then, the truth comes out. Peter learns that Reed just lied about everything. She did it because she wanted to be with him. Peter tries to strangle Reed because of what happened, but she shoots and kills him.
With Peter and Franz dying on the floor, Reed doesn’t know what to do. She recovers the tape with the admission of what actually happened to ensure that the Black Doves don’t find out about her betrayal. While she’s doing this, Vita escapes.
While looking for her, Reed is picked up by the other Black Doves agents, Spitfire and Zeus. Reed claims that Peter, Franz, and Vita have all been killed, but we know now that there was a survivor from that night, Reed’s daughter, Vita.
For those not getting the full picture, we just learned what happened. Reed betrayed the Black Doves for love when she found out that Franz, her partner, was planning to move to Amsterdam with their daughter. She wanted to be with Peter, who was running the Black Doves operations in Berlin, so she crafted the story that Kestrel was planning a terror attack to try to get out of the situation she found herself in. Clearly, everything went terribly wrong, and Peter and Franz were killed, or so we think, in the mayhem. Vita escaped, too, and as far as we know, Reed has not connected with her, but that’s unclear.
Reed hires Sam to kill Franz, but he won’t do it
From there, we got to Italy, where Sam goes to a small village in Italy to hide out after everything that’s happened. He killed a priest in this town years earlier. This is before the events of the first season. He spends his time growing close to a barkeep and restaurant owner. He’s helping out at the restaurant, and he’s doing well.
Around Christmas, Reed shows up. Somehow, she found him, and she wants him to go find Franz, her ex, who was recently living in Rome. How he lived, we don’t know. Sam seems reluctant to take the job, but he heads to the city to see what’s going on.
He finds Franz’s old flat, but he’s gone. He moved back to England, allegedly.
Reed makes Helen kill Franz, and she does
Finally, we catch back up with Helen, who is vacationing in the English countryside with Wallace and her very new babies. Marie, their nanny, has also joined them.
Then, Helen gets a call to go and kill someone for Reed, which is not something she does. That person is Franz, and that killing also happens to be the one that Kestrel has a recording of, which they used to blackmail Sam.
After much pushback, Helen grabs the gun Reed hid in their cottage, and she heads to the other cottage to kill Franz. It’s painful to watch. The old man is on his last legs anyway, dying of cancer. Helen does her job, and she passes along the message to Reed that Franz found Vita.
Reed looks stunned, knowing that her daughter is still alive out there, and she probably knows just who Reed is if her father found her.
Overall, this is the biggest revelation of the season and potentially the series so far. Reed was doing a lot of off-book missions, including the killing of her former partner and father of her child to keep her betrayal as Wildflower in Berlin in 1988 a secret.
The episode ends with Sam, Helen, Williams, and Eleanor heading to find Reed at the secret Black Doves hideout.
Everything has officially come into focus heading into Black Doves season 2 episode 5!
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