And like many a siege, it’s the tedium that gets to you, as the episodic plotting of the series does it no favours. The stronger first night at least spends some time getting all the leads assembled in one place, while the second amounts to a protracted waiting game, spiced up with the thrill of prisoner visitation negotiations, and baby-crazy harpies. Action sequences feature hard tonal swings, as the mostly bloodless fights between soldiers occasionally become gruesome affairs.
But the real drama should be in finding out who these women are, what they want, and what they’ll do to achieve it. Sadly, The Dovekeepers is written and shot with sub-harlequin romance levels of nuance, every secret tryst ending on a shot of an eavesdropping third party, every sudden character turn telegraphed by a dramatic zoom designed solely to telegraph a sudden character turn. It’s astonishing that a production of this size would end THREE consecutive act breaks on near-identical scenes of the villains staring at a green screen backdrop and saying “we’ll get those wascally Hebrews,” but The Dovekeepers is so rigidly structured that you could set your Julian calendar to it.
One wonders if exceptionally talented actors could have elevated such uninspired material, but that’ll have to remain a question for the ages. The Dovekeepers is populated with flat, and flat-out bad performances, with Pablo’s Shirah being particularly misjudged. “She was a woman unafraid, a shining star before the eyes of God!” she says of Yael at one point (the context of the compliment being, oh, let’s just say questionable), with Pablo’s read making an expression of admiration sound like the ramblings of a crazy person. With accent work that doesn’t even try to hide how out of place much of the cast is, sudden attempts at Hebrew prayer or language become stunningly jarring. There is not a single performance here that feels real, with Neil’s game hamming enlivening things the way only someone with something to lose can.
The men in the cast serve their one-note roles as antagonists or lust objects, the latter slabs of kosher beef having an ab for every day of creation (on the seventh day, The Lord sculpted pecs). The Dovekeepers doesn’t skimp on the good, old-fashioned laying: there’s laying in bathhouses, laying in valleys, laying on grain bags, on mud beds, in alleys! The ultimately tame staging of these scenes, compared to other female gaze-oriented contemporaries, wouldn’t be so bad if they seemed like they were contributing to the drama. But The Dovekeepers approaches its vision of “love” with the same grade school complexity it brings to matters of faith (your lovey-dovey’s married? Don’t sweat it, his wife’s a barren shrew!).
As with historical assessment of the real Siege of Masada, the end of The Dovekeepers will likely split audiences. As with just about everything else, there’s a Red Sea of miscalculated execution keeping The Dovekeepers from its romantically tragic intent. “Faith is in here! It’s what you show on the outside that keeps you alive,” Neil’s Flavius bellows at one point, his every word written as a signpost on what not to believe. Unfortunately, this miniseries makes it a hard statement to disagree with, as what The Dovekeepers has to show will barely keep your attention, let alone make this story come to life.
