"Black Doves": A very important seedy-looking guy, a deep cover spy, Santa Claus, and a gay hitman. With six bonus butts

 

Netflix thinks that I'm going to "love!" the spy series Black Doves, and I'm too occupied with breakfast to scroll down, so let's have a look.  It will be a reprieve from endless Christmas romcoms, anyhow.

Scene 1: No such luck.  Santa Claus stumbles through a bar, singing "The guys of the NYPD Choir were singing 'Galway Bay'".  Huh?  Heavily intoxicated, he stumbles out into the street, and...um...out of the show. 

A seedy looking guy (Andrew Koji) scopes out the bar -- The Coal House, a famous pub on the Strand in London -- and tries  to call Maggie.  She's out, so he calls a black-haired woman to complain that he's in trouble.  

Left: Andrew Koji's butt

The black haried woman patches him through to Philip. (Thomas Coombes). 

Seedy Looking Guy asks: "Did you talk to anyone?"  Philip says no; then he's strangled to death.  The black-haired woman is stabbed.  

Seedy Looking Guy calls someone else and starts to tell them "I..." -- probably "love you," before he is shot.  Way to kill off all of the introduced characters!  Now who's the focus, Santa Claus?

Scene 2: Rome.  A new seedy-looking guy sits at a bar, smoking. Mrs. Reed calls.  He ignores her, but she keeps calling until he answers. He says "Ok, I understand."  I don't.

Scene 3: Maybe London.  An old lady with a dog...wait, not a focus character. A nuclear family Mom gets her sons and daughter ready for the Christmas pageant. There's a son and a daughter running up the stairs while squealing in delight and another son in the back yard, but when they appear again, there's only two.  Big continuity error, guys, but they turn out to be just props to demonstrate her nuclear family-ness.  

Then she goes into the study, where her husband (Andrew Buchan),the Minister of Defense, is negotiating with the Saudis and worried about the death of the Chinese ambassador.  The coroner says it was a drug overdose, but you never know. I'm not sure what the Saudis have to do with it.

Scene 4: A swanky party.  Mom greets some people, announces that this party is her light when things seem dark outside.  Then an Elderly Woman pulls her aside and announces that Jason Davies, a Justice Department official whom she was having an affair with, was murdered. 

She flashes back to kissing Jason and playing with his lips -- it's the Seedy Looking Guy from the first scene -- then assures the elderly woman that she wasn't working an angle. It was a real romance.  

"Maggie Jones, who worked in a shop,  and tabloid reporter Phillip Bray were also murdered."  What about the black haired woman?  She can't be Maggie, since Seedy Looking Guy told her "I can't reach Maggie."  

Elderly Woman wants to know if he said anything during their last meeting that might have gotten him murdered, or if he was trying to find out Mom's true identity as a Black Dove.  

Back story: Mom -- finally named Helen -- has been doing deep cover for ten years, courting and marrying the Minister of Defense and feeding them government secrets.  She's in too deep to back out now, and besides, the Minister is on the road to Downing Street! 

Elderly Woman tells her to keep quiet, don't call attention to herself, and especially don't investigate your boyfriend's murder.

Scene 5: The Elderly Woman approaches the Second Seedy-Looking Guy, now named Sam (Ben Whishaw)

He's retired; he hasn't had a hitman assignment for seven years; but the Elderly Woman insists: find out if someone is planning to murder Helen due to her association with Seedy-Looking Guy, and if so, kill them.  

Later, Sam is drinking in a bar when a guy approaches him.  They chat, and Sam invites him up to his hotel room.  Say what?  

Cut to Helen disobeying orders and going to the Seedy-Looking Guy's apartment.  She snoops around, cuddles with his coat, destroys a bug, tries to open a secret panel....

Wait -- what about the guy Sam invited to his room?

Screwing after the break

Gemstones Episode 1.8: Kelvin's testicles, Jesse's butt, and ancient Philistine penises. WIth testicular bonus

Previous: Episode 1.7, continued: Bisexual fish, Thai brothers, and Scotty with a broken heart.

In the last episode, Scotty kidnapped Gideon and Jesse, forced them to open the church vault, and stole the Easter offering money, incidentally confessing that he had been in love with Gideon.  Judy and BJ had a breakup scene, but Kelvin and Keefe barely appeared.  In Episode 1.8,, their romance is centric. 

Title: "But the righteous will see their fall." Proverbs 26:19: "When the wicked are multiplied, transgression increases; But the righteous will see their fall"

An Old Man's Dick:  It's still Easter evening.  After dropping off Judy at her house, Baby Billy asks Tiffany "Who wants to suck an old man's dick?" She goes down on him while they are driving down dark country roads near the estate.  Suddenly Scotty, driving away with the money he stole, runs a stop sign and crashes into their car!   They are unharmed, but Scotty is near death (Tiffany finishes the job by accidentally shooting him).  Then they steal the money.  An interesting call-back here: earlier Scotty implies that he forced Gideon into oral sex, and he dies while interrupting consensual oral sex, an ironic punishment of the sort you would see in 1950s horror comics. 

Top five young ministers:  Gideon admits to being Scotty's partner in the offering-theft plan, and is rejected by Eli and Amber.  But he doesn't mention his part in the blackmail plan!  We cut to Jesse telling his siblings that they are in the clear. But how do they know he won't tell later, and implicate them in the assault?   Worried that he'll be arrested, Kelvin is having anxiety attacks and "sharp shit pains in my stomach" (hemorrhoids?).   Even if he wasn't convicted, the scandal would destroy his career.   "I was in the Top Five Young Ministers to watch last year -- I got a reputation -- a following."  Wait -- if he's so famous, why is his whole plot arc about proving his worth?

Denim brings lunch:  We cut to scenes where Baby Billy and Tiffany leave town with the offering money, Eli worries that the whole enterprise is corrupt, and Jesse apologizes to Gideon for pushing him away and starting the whole mess. Eli admits, for the only time in the series, that the church's finances are not entirely above-board.

 Next, Judy tries to mend her relationship with BJ by bringing him lunch at the optometrist office.  Whoops, his coworker Denim already picked up lunch.  "So you're having sex with BJ?"  No, she's a lesbian -- she has a wife.  This does not convince Judy, who calls her: "One of those benevolent lesbians, out to meet a hot guy, make friends with him, so you can sample-suck some clean dick."  BJ's nonchalance about LGBT people, plus Judy's sort-of nonchalance, will become important later.

He refuses to take Judy back, so she storms into the parking lot and starts destroying cars, finally getting arrested.

Hemorrhoids and Testicular Tumors: Keefe is swimming while Kelvin tries not to look at the body that is giving him so many unwelcome desires.   He wants to know how he can rid the world of darkness, when he's surrounded by it: his mother died, Eli was assaulted, the church was robbed. Not to mention Jesse committing assault and probably vehicular homicide.  He concludes that God is punishing the family for "not being who we say we are."  

Left: Kelvin's testicles. 

But Kelvin had nothing to do with those things. He was in the car with his siblings when they ran over the blackmailers, but he didn't assault anyone.  At most he failed to tell anyone.  How does "not being who we say we are" apply to him?  Unless he is talking about being gay.

"Don't you think God is being a little harsh?" Keefe asks.  We all wear masks; we hide things even from ourselves.  

Kelvin laugh/cries and says "I think we're getting off easy...when the Philistines stole the Ark of the Covenant, God punished them with hemorhhoids and testicle tumors."  

He's referring to an obscure story in 1 Samuel 4-5, where the Philistine thieves were punished with opalim. The King James Bible translates the Hebrew word as "emeroids" (now "hemorrhoids") and the NIV as "tumors."  An article in Biblical Archaeology Review points out the importance of penises in Philistine art, and suggests "flaccid penises."   No one mentions testicles; apparently Kelvin invented it, to correspond to the glimpse of Keefe's testicle that began his recognition of his homoerotic desire.

Next: "You should go, Keefe."  Keefe doesn't understand: "You want me to make a store run?"  Kelvin becomes angrier and angrier: "Go.  Leave.  Get out. I am no longer fit to lead you!" 

Kelvin scratches his butt as he says this.  Apparently he has hemorrhoids, and thinks that God is punishing him -- an ironic punishment for having anal sex? Will testicular tumors come next? 

Keefe disagrees: "There's no one more worthy than you."

 "Get the fuck out of here! Now! Do I need to call security, motherfucker?"  This is shockingly aggressive. Besides, if Keefe has been living there for several months, you have to give him 30 days notice.

Keefe wades away, holding his swimsuit like he held his shirt during the mushroom head scene.  The intimacy he enjoyed that night has been revoked.  Kelvin falls into the pool and screams and cries.

Why does Kelvin send Keefe away?  If he's no longer qualified to be a spiritual leader due to the assault of the blackmailers, they could certainly continue to live together.  It must have something to do with the "hemorrhoids and testicular tumors," the intimacy they shared, or even homoerotic desire itself.  Kelvin believes that it is evil, demonic, that Keefe is a serpent who tempted him.  I don't care much for this association between LGBT identities and sin, but the show has been careful to establish that it's in Kelvin's head, not a general theme, structurally or in-universe.  

Testicular bonus after the break. Caution: explicit.

Daryl Sabara: Juni grows up, fights cannibals, bikers, and Satanists, and shows his dick, but I'm still depressed

Spy K*ds (2001) stars gay actor Antonio Banderas (left) and Carla Gugino as a husband and wife spy team.  Well, actually, their son and daughter, Juni and Carmen (Daryl Sabara, Alexa Vega), who get swept up in an age-appropriate diabolical plot involving tv host Fegan Floop (Alan Cummings, who is bisexual in real life).   

Although everyone is ostensibly heterosexual, some reviews call the film a queer classic due to the extremely hot Dad -- and Mom, apparently, which led to the "queer awakening" of an entire generation of lesbians; the shy, bullied, gay-coded Juni; the kick-ass Carmen; and the gay-coded villain who turns out to be not all that villainous.

The Banderas dick is just to draw your attention.  This profile features the shy, bullied, gay-coded Daryl Sabara.

There were 3 sequels:

The Island of Lost Dreams (2002) strands Juni and Carmen on a Jules Verne/Dr. Moreau "mysterious island," where they run afoul of a mad scientist creating animal hybrids.  Carmen gets a boyfriend, but Juni remains gay-coded.

I didn't see Game Over (2003) where Juni must venture into a video game to save his sister, but the queer coding ends with him meeting The Girl.  He also meets two guys, video game teammates Ryan Pinkston and Bobby Edner.

Well, it was nice while it lasted.

The 2011 All the Time in the World minimized Juni and Carmen in favor of a new sibling team.  The brother is played by Mason Cook, who would go on to Speechless.

During the Spy franchise, Daryl Sabara appeared in the usual one-shot tv spots: Will and Grace, Fatherhood, House, American Dragon: Jake Long, and so on.

He has a starring role in the animated lion-drama Father of the Pride (2004-05) as Hunter, a shy, anxiety-ridden Lord of the Rings nerd. That is, basically Juni as a lion.  In one episode, his grandfather Sarmoti thinks that he is gay, or as the fan wiki says, "homosexual; but this is absolutely not true."  Rather homophobic, aren't you, fan wiki?

Then things start to go downhill.  In a 2006 episode of Criminal Minds,  Daryl plays a teenager who charges men to watch him do bondage videos.  So he has an OnlyFans site?  The agents convince him that what he is doing constitutes prostitution, and will put him in danger from internet predators.  It is all presented as extremely sleazy, and one can't help but conclude that being gay is always seedy and sordid.  

Normal Adolescent Behavior (2007) is an anti-hookup cautionary tale,with no gay content: three girls and three guys in a friendship group pair off randomly.  Daryl appears as Nathan, who crushes on the mother of one of the girls. Ugh.

Raviv Ullman, formerly Phil of the Future, plays one of the guys in the friendship group.

Next Daryl played Tim Scottson in 7 episodes of Weeds (2005-12), about suburban marijuana growers. He shot his stepmother Nancy Botwin because he assumed that she was responsible for his father's death, but she recovered and hired him as her assistant.

Worst. Prom. Ever. (2011) has Daryl planning the perfect prom for his girlfriend, but when her two friends tag along, things go crazy, with a car crash, armed thugs, Satanists, and an amorous lady biker.

In The Green Inferno (2013), some student activists go to the Peruvian jungle for ecological stuff, and are captured by a cannibal tribe.  

A cannibal tribe?  I thought the "spear-throwing savages" trope went out with Johnny Quest. But at least the guy dragging Daryl toward the cooking pot has nice abs and a basket.

Daryl gets a girlfriend and displays his dick before being eaten.

More Daryl dick after the break