Black Doves Recap Season 2 Episode 4 ‘The Opportunity to Become Savage’
For an episode that mostly gave us answers through flashbacks, this was a rather punchy episode, well structured, with a lot of heart. It began and ended with Williams and Eleanor, with Williams finally telling Eleanor she loved her, with Eleanor admitting that she and Lydia broke up, with Eleanor later saving Williams’s life. The core of a good show is good writing, and writing structure-wise, this is amongst Black Doves’s best. Let’s get on with it.
A drunk and drugged out Williams was in a club when she received the contract to kill Laila. She called Eleanor and gave her the address, because no matter their current conflict, they were still work partners. Remember that neither of them knew Laila, she was only known to Helen and Sam.
Eleanor found Williams pinned down, because when she shot, she missed (understandable, given her condition), which gave Laila a chance to hunker down and fight back. They spoke through the gunfire, with Eleanor saying that she thought she and Williams would be partners, then it became Sam, Williams, and Helen. Williams declared that Eleanor was the most important person to her, and that she loved her. When Eleanor did not respond right away, a pained and still strung out Williams stood up to serve as distraction so Eleanor could get out. Eleanor ran and saved her, and they both managed to get back to Eleanor’s boat.
The next morning, before they had the chance to speak, Eleanor received the next job, Sam. She told Williams that at that price, if they did not do it, someone else will. When Williams refused, Eleanor pointed out that Sam killed her old partner. If he got the job to kill them, would he not do it? They had not reached a decision when Sam showed up needing help to get Reed. The three of them piled into a car with Helen.
The Williams and Eleanor story was the bookend, whilst the episode was split into three parts. The first part, titled ‘What are you hiding, Elizabeth?’ was a flashback to East Berlin in 1988. Reed was embedded with Kestrel, where she worked with her lover Franz (they had a daughter, Vita). Their Berlin cell included Bernard, Julia, and Thomas. It was Thomas who brought Alexi Chernov in, who told them he was defecting.
The group that Reed truly worked for was Black Doves. The Berlin cell was headed by her lover Peter Maddison. They also worked with Erik Klein and Melanie Ambrose. When Reed reported the Chernov defection, Peter decided to let it happen. A stronger Kestrel was good for them, he reasoned out. People would want their contacts and intel, and would pay Black Doves good money to steal them.
Reed was not happy with this decision. She told Peter she wanted to ask for a transfer out of Berlin. She was even willing to become a desk agent in London if only to get out; realistically, she could not be in the field with a five-year-old daughter. She wanted Peter to come with her but Peter insisted Berlin was his station, he could not leave.
In contrast to Peter’s coolness, Franz was thoroughly in love with Reed. He told her that they would get Chernov across the checkpoint the next day. He also showed her the diplomatic visas he got for Reed and Vita. His plan was for the three of them to head to Amsterdam and expand Kestrel from there.
Naturally, Reed rushed to tell Peter, who only wanted surveillance. In her desperation to get out of Berlin, she came up with a particularly atrocious lie. She claimed Kestrel was planning an attack; they were going to fill Chernov’s car with explosives and detonate it on the American side of the checkpoint. She claimed she saw the explosives herself. This was a development Peter could not ignore, so he took it up the chain of command. The decision was to kill them all.
I described Helen as cold in the past recap, but this was colder than anything we have seen her do so far. Reed formed a family with Franz; they shared a five-year-old daughter (unless Vita was Peter’s, which I could not quite discount). She had spent the past six years with him and the rest of the members of the Kestrel Berlin cell. Because she was desperate to get out of undercover work, because she wanted to be with Peter, she sentenced people she knew and worked with to die.
Whoever was behind Patrick knew about the Berlin operation, because the code names in the fancy envelopes matched their code names that night. Chernov was Cowboy. Peter was Thunder (he was not amongst Sam’s targets). Melanie was Spitfire. Erik was Zeus. Reed was Wildflower.
It was Melanie who killed Bernard inside the bar he owned. Julia’s throat was cut inside her car; Thomas was shot. Franz headed back home looking for his gun, and warning Reed they needed to get out. Reed cooly told Franz she had packed his and Vita’s clothes; they were to head to Mitte and lay low. She told him she was part of Black Doves. From her point of view, she was saving his life, he could start over somewhere else, with the daughter she had no intention of taking with her as she left Berlin.
An incredulous Franz was about to storm out when Peter surprised him as he opened the door and slashed his throat. Franz fell to the floor, alive but barely, blood gushing out of his wound. Peter had come to recover evidence of the bomb plot. He told Reed that they had picked up Chernov but he knew nothing.
There was no evidence; Reed had made the whole thing up. Peter was furious; he who was her lover, whom she loved far more than Franz, reached for her throat and strangled her. Desperate to breathe, Reed reached for Franz’s gun in her pocket and shot Peter. Then, she tried to save him.
Young Vita heard the commotion and went out of her room. She saw her father Franz bloodied on the floor, and her mother Reed crying and trying to save a stranger. When Reed next checked, Vita was gone. She tried calling out for the kid out on the streets, but Vita remained hidden. Vita watched as Reed got into a car with Erik and Melanie. Reed told them that both Peter and her daughter were killed by Kestrel.
Part 2 was titled ‘You need to run’, and it was about Sam’s post-Michael life in Italy. Two years prior, Sam came to this little Italian town on a job, the assassination of a priest named Aldo. Sam could have gone anywhere, yet he chose to return to a place where he committed a crime. Even when he realised that the bar owner who befriended him, Matteo, was Aldo’s close personal friend and remoured lover, he stayed. He worked at the bar where he found a measure of peace and happiness amongst a community who embraced him.
Then, Reed came to town. Reed had Sam meet her at the very church where Aldo was killed. She told him Michael was safe with his mother, whilst Helen had given birth to a boy and a girl. Reed told him that a man named Franz Meyer, whom she wrongly believed was dead, recently resurfaced in Italy. Reed wanted Sam to find him.
Sam resisted and told her he did not do that kind of work anymore. When Reed threatened to spill who he was to the townsfolk, Sam had no choice. He tried to ask what the priest did to merit an assassination contract, but Reed merely told him it did not matter.
Sam found Franz’s landlord in Rome, who told him Franz left for England weeks ago and gave him his forwarding address. When Sam reported this to Reed, he tried to find out about the priest again, and Reed still refused to give him answers. Sam gave the location – Tanner Cottage, Dorset Downs – but he told Reed to find someone else to do the kill.
Part 3 was that ‘Someone else’, Helen with her young family and their nanny Marie driving down to a holiday cottage because Helen made them to at Reed’s command. Wallace had just learned that he would be made the Secretary of Defence. Helen was still lactating. Nanny Marie was struggling to quiet the babies.
Helen got the photos of the man staying at Tanner Cottage, and after she sent them to Reed, Reed told her to kill him. Helen at first resisted, she was a spy, not an assassin, after all, but Reed insisted and Helen followed her order.
Franz was an old man. He looked very sick; he told Helen he was dying. When he murmured ‘I thought she’d come herself’, it was almost as though he hoped Reed would come, so he could see his erstwhile lover one more time. Franz told Helen to give Reed a message, that he found Vita. After he told her he was ready, Helen shot him.
Franz recognised that Helen was not an assassin; him calmly speaking to her, telling her he was ready, probably made things easier for her. There was also a certain dark promise when he said he expected she would meet Vita one day. Vita was old enough to have had even fragile memories of her father bleeding out on the floor and her mother’s odd conduct that fateful night. She would have realised that her mother, rather than desperately search for her, left her. Helen gave a rattled Reed Franz’s message.
Reed’s relationships with two men, one a cover, the other real, mirrored Helen’s season one relationships with Wallace and Jason. But, unlike Helen, we have no indication as yet that Reed fell in love with Franz. By all accounts, Reed was coldly professional then, and she was coldly professional now. Franz needed to die because he knew her secret. With Kestrel coming after Black Doves, holding Sam by a string, messing up Helen’s life, perhaps the cold, calculating Elizabeth Reed was exactly who the group needed to survive the coming days.
Rating: A-
Strays
🏠Reed hid a recording on the wall in the house she shared with Franz. The night that Peter slashed Franz’s throat and Reed shot Peter, she ripped the recording out and destroyed the tape.
🏠There was a lady typing up the minutes of the Black Doves meeting in Berlin.
🏠Matteo, when asked by Sam why someone would want Aldo dead. ‘Some people bring light in the world. Some people bring darkness.’
🏠The narrow streets in that Italian town that was Sam’s refuge were used quite effectively in illustrating his melancholy.
Episode Title: The Opportunity to Become Savage
Episode Writers: Joe Barton
Episode Director: Julian Farino
Release Date: November 5, 2026