Black Doves – Episode 4 “Go Bang Time” Recap & Review

Go Bang Time

Episode 4 of Black Doves begins with Sam and the others showing up dressed in Christmas gear and taking out Hector and his goons. Hector gets the jump on Sam though, and taunts him when they end up alone together. Apparently there are a lot of people after Kai-ming, and he warns that Sam shouldn’t have come back. And just like that, Hector walks away.

Eleanor and Williams bring in Kai-ming and Sam decides to keep her safe somewhere off the beaten track.

Wallace meets the Prime Minister and secret service to feed back what happened with the Chinese last episode. Stephen Yarrick has obviously been killed, and this brings in the US Chief, Mitch. Wallace mentions Cole Atwood and his ties with the CIA, but Mitch plays hardball. In fact, he does so right up news breaking of Yarrick’s body being found in a skip.

Helen rings ‘Repair Shop’ that night, who points out that they’re a “secretary” and part of something bigger. They remain quiet when Helen asks about her family, and she’s soon too busy with Wallace to carry on, who returns home sobbing following Stephen’s death.

In the morning, Sam shows up at Michael’s place but he’s not exactly happy to see him. When he heads back to the safehouse, Lenny is there and she’s also not happy, given the mess that Sam has left everywhere.

Reed and Helen meet while this is going on, where the former brings up the footage of Cole Atwood. An “interested party” want Helen to mediate by throwing a “bucket of ice” at Cole Atwood. Helen has a contact inside the embassy called Vanessa, and through her, Helen should be able to get inside, get close to Cole Atwood and tell him to betray his country in exchange for a boatload of money.

Before she does, Helen meets Sam and the others. She has history with the two assassins, especially as one of them was inside Jason’s apartment (Williams) whom she scuffled with. After some “pleasantries”, Kai-ming wakes up.

Turns out that Kai-ming and Cole got spooked when they found her dead father in her flat. Kai-ming fled to a warehouse in South London to hide out, and she went willingly. That is, until Hector and the others realized who she was and refused to let her leave. They asked about Trent, a guy she knew that gets heroin.

Kai-ming doesn’t have a direct connection to Jason, who apparently revealed that he’s Maggie’s partner. This rattles Helen, as she realizes that she may not have known everything about her lover. Through little dreamy flashbacks here, we also learn that Helen revealed the truth to him that she’s a black dove, so he knows it all. However, she feels lost.

En-route to the Embassy, Helen speaks to Sam and points out that through all these lies, Helen has lost sight of who she is, and what she believes in.

For now, Sam and Helen drive over the Embassy. Helen gets her way in with Vanessa, just as Sam makes his call to distract her, which is enough to get Helen a way over to see Cole. Sam doesn’t do a particularly great job of convincing Vanessa while she’s in her office, while Helen ends up beating a security guard in the elevator before scrambling to meet Cole Atwood with Reed’s envelope.

It doesn’t take long for the building alarm to go off when the security guard’s body is found in the elevator. With Vanessa on the move, Helen is forced into handing over the details for Atwood to get out. He does just that, and leaves the Embassy without anyone realizing as they high-tail it away.

On the road, Cole brings up that the real powerhouses here are actually a criminal conglomerate known as the Clarks. They’re a family that have taken over the underbelly of London without anyone noticing, and now they’re spreading to the States and beyond.

All of this though leads back to London, and, unfortunately, that means Kai-ming and the assassins are in trouble. Kai-ming’s dealer, Trent, is just a trust fund baby but he’s also the weak link in the Clark family. Alex Clark, his mum, actually works as the head of the London operation. The Chinese Ambassador’s death put a stop to all of the investigative work but Cole deduces that the Clarks know what happened and they’re trying to scrub the evidence clean.

Unfortunately, Helen walks right into a trap as she finds himself in the midst of Chinese agents, who are also working with Reed. These are the “highest bidders” she mentioned before. Sam and Helen realize they’re being played and hurry off.

Interwoven around this, at the office, Dani speaks to Wallace after a drink and brings up that Helen has secrets. She’s being unfaithful to him but she doesn’t elaborate further. At least not yet.

The Episode Review

So it seems like Helen and Sam are both being played here and Reed is, unfortunately, working with the Chinese. For her, the Doves are always going to work with the highest bidder and we have had hints of this through the show that sometimes this line of work involves betraying your own country.

However, this also means betraying Helen, and quite how she’s going to take this going forward is anyone’s guess. There’s a lot here that we don’t know, including the full connection between all of our players, along with how the drama involving Kai-ming and the Clarks is escalating into a potential war between the UK and the US.

Either way, this little twist is a good one and it definitely ups the stakes over what could be taking place now. Quite who will come out of this in one piece remains to be seen, but it’s definitely ramped up the tension.