BLACK DOVES
Created by Joe Barton
Netflix
PRIME TARGET
Created by Steve Thompson
AppleTV+
MEET “HELEN,” aka Helen Webb née Dawson, aka “Daisy.” Oh, what a tangled web she’s woven in Black Doves, and only her gay bestie, Sam Young, can come to her rescue. Helen (a knife-wielding Kiera Knightley) is wife to the UK’s secretary of state for defense and a devoted mother of twins. But, being a double agent, she left one thing out when she married Wallace Webb: she’s also a multilingual, multinational spy whose handler, known only as “Reed,” disrupts her lavish Christmas party to be the bearer of bad news. Helen’s secret lover has been assassinated on the banks of the Thames, and two others have been fatally caught in the crossfire. Having a hitman stored in your contacts cannot be underestimated.
Enter Sam, played by the openly gay actor Ben Whishaw, who’s no stranger to the espionage genre, as he played “Q,” the gadget-geek and MI-5 expert, to Daniel Craig’s Agent 007. Sam rushes back to London to clean up Helen’s mess, though Sam is something of a hot mess himself, what with his disgruntled ex-boyfriend Michael (now a single father) and the gay couple that urges him, over drinks and cocaine, to reconnect with Michael after seven years in self-exile. As a queer spin on the buddy-cop genre, Sam drops what he’s doing—in this case, a beautiful stranger he just picked up in a hotel bar—to rescue Helen from social opprobrium. Duty calls, including a shootout that leaves the friends splattered with blood.
Michael (played by Omari Douglas) reluctantly lets Sam back into his life, because he only learned of his boyfriend’s double life when a team of snipers arrived at their flat and unleashed a hailstorm of bullets. That thrilling flashback, with Sam serving as Michael’s human shield, is an ultra-violent version of the fire-escape scene at the heart of West Side Story—Sam and Michael are also an interracial couple—but replaces serenades with assault rifles. In this case, Helen arrives just in time to shepherd the men to safety and make it all go away.
Before we get to Prime Target, it’s worth remembering that the spy thriller has a gay prehistory as old as the genre itself. All of the tropey ingredients are there: double identities, the dilemma of whom you can trust, and the existential panic of being outed. The tradition dates back to the first detective novel, Caleb Williams (1794), by the anarchist philosopher William Godwin, the husband of Mary Wollstonecraft, who died soon after giving birth to Mary Shelley, who invented a new genre with Franken-stein, the science fiction novel. For the 1790s, Caleb Williams was about as radical as the Age of Revolution would allow, and it’s as queer as it is anti-monarchical. Caleb is a lowly manservant and the only one who knows that his master, Squire Falkland, is guilty of killing a fellow landowner and hiding the evidence in a closet. “Here then I stood detected in the fact of that intercourse which had been so severely forbidden,” laments Caleb. Within literary studies, Americanists argue that Edgar Allan Poe was there first with his short story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), but “The Philosophy of Composition,” written five years later, disproves this claim. Here Poe credits Godwin’s Caleb Williams with dramatizing a “hero [in]a web of difficulties.”
Ed Brooks (played by Leo Woodall) is the titular egghead in Prime Target, which is much stuffier and more sluggish than Black Doves. It does not take place in London, which is better suited to high-speed car chases, but inside the tweedy cloisters of Cambridge. Ed, like Sam, has a sexy sidekick, Taylah, played by Quintessa Swindell, who told Queerty: “I love how Leo’s character is represented because it’s … like a byproduct of who he naturally is and doesn’t need to be discussed.” Perhaps as gay men are increasingly mainstreamed on TV, they need a babe to balance things out. For years, Taylah has been spying on Ed’s professor, who had stolen Ed’s research into prime numbers and has subsequently wound up dead in a carwash. In the series pilot, quite unexpectedly, Ed beds a flirty bartender named Adam (Fra Fee) only to brush him off the morning after. “I’ve got family coming,” to which Adam says: “Lemme guess. They don’t know you’re gay.” “I’m not anything,” he replies, and then asks: “Can you go?” Dining in Baghdad, Taylah finds it equally hard to connect with Ed and tells him that his remoteness is, well, sub-prime. “All of this death and chaos around you and, somehow, you still just focus on the math.”
Ed is neurodivergent, apparently on the autism spectrum. As Prime Target unfolds, Ed risks his life (and Taylah’s) to protect Adam, even if Adam and Ed have all the onscreen chemistry of tap water. More cerebral than Black Doves, the leitmotif of Prime Target lies in its mathematical moniker. A prime number is exceptional because it has exactly two positive divisors: one and the number itself. Loners like Ed rarely make for compelling TV; he’s more akin to the number one, which is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do, as the old song goes. After another argument with Taylah over whether life is simply “pure mathematics,” he huffs off, telling her not to follow him. Given the character’s roboticism—a departure from the hotblooded roots of the genre—audiences may ultimately un-follow Ed and the series altogether.
But when Adam gets Ed to look him in the eyes, usually in bed, Ed’s monomania is met not by his boyfriend’s rejection but by romance. Without spoiling both series, Black Doves ends with a sacrificial act, on Sam’s part, to ensure Helen’s safety, while Prime Target will shock you inasmuch as Adam’s closeness to Ed may or may not be a Judas kiss. Perhaps Poe’s generalization is still true: all men conceal a letter, or, in the year 2025, their Internet history.
Colin Carman, PhD, a longtime G&LR contributor, is an assistant professor of English and LGBTQ studies at Colorado Mesa University.
