Black Doves Recap Season 2 Episode 2 ‘Put Your Head On My Shoulder’
When Sam pulled the trigger that ended the life of his erstwhile lover — after repeatedly muttering what felt like a triggerman mantra to himself, ‘I am the setting sun. I am the coming night. I am the last word in your story.’ — for a moment, I thought, are we never going to see Sam happy?
Sam’s relationship with Michael in the first season provided the narrative with dramatic heft and a believable, touching story of love and loss. They did not make it, which was not surprising given Sam’s profession as an assassin and Michael being a civilian with a young daughter. By the second season, Sam had taken to drinking heavily and doing lines of coke in his hotel room. Asking the concierge whose name was not uttered in the first couple of episodes (I looked it up, it’s Jerry) out to dinner was a tiny step toward a bit of normalcy. Melanie Ambrose had told Sam that she had 20 good years after she got out of the game. Sam was just making a tentative step toward a bit of life outside his violent world, and just like that, he was forced to choose between Helen and Jerry. Sam chose Helen, and poor innocent Jerry, whose father died at 43, and who had been feeling the weight of mortality at 42, was now dead.
Why was Jerry an acceptable loss, and Helen was not? The mysterious Patrick had told Sam, ‘Love is a weakness, and you’re full of it’, as he punished Sam’s curiosity with the sadistic choice between the friend he owed and the lover he had started to imagine a future with. Sam was filled with love, he has experienced choosing love over the cold calculus of a solitary assassin’s life, but he remained a person who could pull the trigger. He has been spiralling — the heavy drinking, the drugs, the hesitation before he killed Mark Moore — and with each new day, it was as though a part of him was being chipped away. Wallace said Helen had a sadness in her, but this was a far more appropriate description of Sam.
Let’s back up a bit and trace how we got to the shattering point at the end of the episode. At the safehouse where Sam killed Erik Klein, he found a ticket to a luggage drop at King’s Cross. He and Helen got the luggage which contained a flash drive. It was a recording of Ida Povetkin’s October 22 report in Moscow. Ida had been tasked to search Chernov’s files for information relating to a historic Black Doves operation. Ida passed on the information to Reed but did not hear back. She thought her cover was compromised and she had decided to end the operation. A week later, her body was found. Helen and Sam deduced that Reed sent Helen to Paris to retrieve the Wildflower files that Ida found.
Two known associates of Reed, Ida and Erik, were already dead. Sam himself killed Erik at Patrick’s behest. They needed to know who Sam worked for, and so he and Helen asked for Lenny’s help.
Soon enough, the next target, Spitfire, was delivered via another posh envelope. Sam tried to get Melanie Ambrose to talk, he even dangled the possibility of not killing her. When he asked about Wildflower, Melanie’s response about getting an opportunity to be savage and taking it was cryptic but not exactly helpful. Melanie grabbed a gun and Sam shot her before he could gain more information.
Helen reasonably asked Sam that the next time he received a target, give her the name first so she could talk to them before he killed them. Conteh, who got Sam’s name from one of Erik’s security men (before Conteh coldbloodedly killed him), had asked Helen where Sam was, along with Laila Joshi. Conteh clearly did not believe Helen’s denials, because when Helen met up with Laila, she was followed. Conteh’s men grabbed Laila, who escaped, and went on a foot chase with Helen in a city with many cameras. Helen, the Prime Minister’s wife, protected only by a cap, engaged in hand combat in front of witnesses. She would later come home to Downing Street wearing the same clothes and coat, though she ditched the hat at some point.
After a furious Laila left her, Helen went to Reed’s flat, where she found a cell phone hidden within a wall, along with a notebook with names and addresses, a Romans 3:13 quote, and a photo that looked like a young Reed with Peter Maddison.
Black Doves did not wait long in solving the Reed mystery. Reed was abducted by Black Doves and kept prisoner in a safe house surrounded by armed guards. Conteh said an anonymous source tipped them that she was in Paris. He played Ida’s Wildflower report for her, and showed her a file with a photo of a Black Doves cell in Berlin in 1988 — Peter Maddison, the station chief, Erik Klein and Melanie Ambrose, both foot soldiers, and Elizabeth Reed, the undercover asset. Peter was killed in the same year, whilst Erik and Melanie were both assassinated by Sam.
Conteh asked about the mission in Berlin, which Reed said was the infiltration of an anarchist political action group called Kestrel. Conteh pointed out that Reed was undercover for five years, yet the file was barely a page. Reed had sent agents to Alexi Chernov’s penthouse, Chernov who happened to be a former KGB officer. Ida said she believed Chernov was looking for a survivor from Berlin. Conteh wanted to know who that was. Well, if we believe Peter Maddison was dead, then the only survivor was Reed, no? Conteh thought Reed was involved in a ‘violent act of subterfuge’ and spoke of controlling Helen Webb. Pal, you’re new here. Much of the drama comes from Helen refusing to be controlled.
And so we reach the point of Helen’s drama. She was late to therapy, but it was fine because the therapist, Daryl, had to leave on a family emergency. Wallace sat there, calm as he usually was, and asked Helen if she had ever strayed from their marriage. The seeds of his doubt were planted by Dani, his erstwhile assistant and the Black Dove Reed at one point thought could replace Helen until Helen put the beatdown on her. Helen said Dani was in love with Wallace and was insane. She denied having had an affair, and Wallace, who has quietly put up with the late nights and the unexplained absences through 12 years of marriage, bluntly told her he did not believe her.
Wallace spoke of an exit strategy, once he was no longer Prime Minister, which could be soon. When Helen asked if he was asking for a divorce, he said he was asking for honesty. I feel like by this time, Wallace had reached the point where he was certain there was this massive secret that his wife was keeping from him. Perhaps it was an affair, but I wonder if he was also considering that it was something else. I am so tempted to watch ahead but no, one episode at a time, one recap at a time.
Helen responded with anger, and did what Reed told her to do, to stay good at lying. She hit some fair points, that she was stressed from the move to Downing Street, that she was possibly perimenopausal, that there were times when she would think of a life with someone else, times when she did not want to touch Wallace. She framed these as signs that she loved him deeply, otherwise, she would have strangled him or left him or had an affair, which she resolutely denied. Then, she stormed out of the room.
What happened afterwards was at the heart of their current conflict. Wallace did not follow her. He did not try to comfort her. He did not try to reassure her of his love, the way he did when he first considered that she was having an affair. A good man who loved with an open heart and genuine affection has reached the point when he no longer trusted his wife. He has erected a barrier Helen would have to figure out how to break if she wanted to preserve their marriage.
Then there was Helen, who treated Wallace as a job, one that she did well, one for whom she performed so well that with her by his side, he reached the pinnacle of political power. Yet Helen kept a piece of her closely guarded. When she considered leaving the Black Doves, she thought only of keeping her children with her, not her husband. When she had an affair with Jason, she fell in love deeply enough so that she told him the truth about her work as a spy. Wallace was a job, until he wasn’t. When Helen stormed out of the room, when she paused by the hallway, it was as though it had begun to dawn on her that when she told Wallace she loved him deeply, it might not be as much of a lie as she once thought.
And so we circle back to Sam, who held in his hand the fragility of Helen’s cover. Lenny came through. She found a man called Ethan Bishop, who at one point was in a similar situation as Sam. He got arrested and a mysterious man showed up and offered him freedom in exchange for work. The work was to drop off a load of weapons at a certain address. Lenny’s scolding of Sam was hilarious, but her advice was serious – kill the man before he got his claws deeper into him.
Sam went to the address and found Patrick there, who told him that broke their contract. Patrick showed him a video of Helen shooting a man in the head inside his house. He told Sam to do exactly what they told him to, and the video would never see the light of day. As a way for Sam to show he could still be trusted, he added an extra target to the contract, and it needed to be done that very night. The target was Jerry.
Why was Jerry an acceptable loss, and Helen was not? The frank answer to that was that Helen was a main character in the series and Jerry was not. In-world, however, it was more complicated. Sam and Helen had a long and deep history. Helen gave up her one chance to get away from the Black Doves whilst pregnant with her twins to help Sam and save Michael. They were friends in a world often peopled by betrayers. There was also a part of Sam that perhaps did not quite believe in what Jerry offered – an uncomplicated lover, a quiet dinner, a pocket of happiness in an often disappointing world. Perhaps what Sam was killing was not just Jerry, but the hope Jerry represented. In the darkness where he lived and thrived and was many times the ultimate arbitrator of life and death, the finger on the trigger, he could continue to exist with sadness but few questions. Perhaps he thought that was better, until he saw the blood, and the life ended, and the permanence of his work, and the tears fell.
Rating: A-
Strays
🏠Lenny is darkly hilarious and I have enjoyed all her scenes so far this season. It was she who identified the man Sam killed before he got arrested, Mark Moore.
🏠Cecile Mason, US Defense Envoy, has arrived to bug Wallace about the summit.
🏠The happiness on Jerry's face, seen through the scope of Sam’s sniper rifle, as he got ready for their first ever dinner, was heartbreaking.
🏠There was a quick flashback of young Reed with blood all over all, holding a gun whilst sitting at the back of a vehicle.
🏠Sam told Williams to tell Eleanor how she felt.
Episode Title: Put Your Head On My Shoulder
Episode Writer: Joe Barton
Episode Director: Julian Farino
Release Date: November 5, 2026