Black Doves season two premieres with Keira Knightley's spy wife juggling a new prime minister husband

Four reviews published on 5 November 2026 greet the second season of Black Doves, the Netflix spy thriller created by Joe Barton. Keira Knightley plays Helen Webb, a politician's wife who moonlights as a deep-cover assassin, and Ben Whishaw plays her friend and fellow hitman Sam. Reviewers broadly agree that the new run is more audacious than the first, although several admit its plotting rarely survives close scrutiny.

A premiere set around a power shift

The season opens in Paris, where Helen's husband Wallace (Andrew Buchan) is about to take office as UK prime minister, and the couple attend a gala dinner at a peace conference. Helen slips away from the evening to carry out a side mission involving a Russian oligarch and his wife, according to the Financial Times. Vulture reports that both of them are miserable at the dinner, and that Wallace reads the tension as infidelity rather than the selling of state secrets. There she meets Laila (Ambika Mod), a fellow assassin who is far less troubled by their line of work and seems to enjoy it. The Financial Times notes that Helen has more freedom than someone under MI5 watch should, but adds that the show works best if viewers do not examine those details too closely.

What season one left behind

Season one ended with Helen and Sam solving the murder of Helen's lover Jason, which Vulture describes as the accidental result of a crime lord's son killing the Chinese ambassador. The Guardian describes the same storyline as Helen tracing the murder of a civil servant she had been seeing back to a plot involving the CIA and the Chinese ambassador. Vulture also notes that the pair had taken down the London representatives of an international crime syndicate by the close of that run. Their handler Reed had told Helen that Wallace was likely to be rewarded for being untainted by scandal, a promise that the new season quickly complicates.

A conspiracy and a handler gone missing

Reed (Sarah Lancashire), the icy handler at the centre of the series, goes missing at the start of the new season, leaving Helen exposed and unmoored, according to the Independent. The Financial Times says Reed's disappearance sets off a conspiracy involving a rival mercenary spy ring and hints at the possible end of the Black Doves. Sam, who is growing weary of killing for money, is drawn into a cat-and-mouse game with his old friend Helen, and the Financial Times says neither of them knows whom they are fighting. The Guardian adds that the young assassin duo Eleanor and Williams, played by Gabrielle Creevy and Ella Lily Hyland, give the story a cartoonish, irreverent edge.

Reviewers split on plausibility

The Guardian calls the show so relentlessly preposterous that it is practically nihilistic, arguing that its body count makes life look cheap and that trying to follow the storylines quickly feels pointless. The Independent takes a warmer view, calling Knightley's performance the strongest work she has produced in years and praising Whishaw's Sam as a lovable hitman. The Financial Times says the characters lift the series above standard spy fare, which is hardly in short supply right now. All three reviewers single out the cast as the main reason to keep watching, and the Guardian says Knightley is perfect as a middle-class woman whose social performance is a way of life. The Guardian also describes a deliberately incongruous blend of Tarantino-style camp, Richard Curtis sentiment, chilly espionage and hectic farce.