The Five Spot: It Is Wild To Hear Paddington's Voice Come Out Of A Drug-Snorting Assassin

ALSO: I can't get the Kia commercial song out of my head

The Five Spot is a weekly Friday roundup where I rank and riff on my five favorite things from the week. Most of the entries will be about film and TV, but there might also be ones about weird local news or sandwiches I ate or anything else, really. The whole thing is an exclusive for paid subscribers, so if you want to read the top four entries, you can do that by upgrading…

Off we go.

FIVE: Apologies to Ben Whishaw

I am currently working my way through Black Doves, the Christmas-set spy thriller that Netflix dropped this month. It’s a wild ride so far. Everyone is either a spy or an assassin and there’s a new twist every 15 minutes that reveals an additional layer that often includes additional spies and assassins. It’s also surprisingly fun, with flashes of dark humor and witty dialogue and sometimes flashbacks where a pregnant Keira Knightley shows up to murder one assassin to save another assassin. The whole thing is six episodes long and I’m through three — I have to rush through so many shows for my job that it’s sometimes nice to go slow and savor one — and I would definitely recommend it if you’re looking for a show about assassins and spies shooting at each other during the holidays.

There is one part of it that’s weird for me, though. One of the assassins is played by Ben Whishaw. His character is kind of a mess, a guy with secrets and enemies and an affinity for champagne and sometimes ketamine by accident. He’s a disaster and he’s sweet and he’s blasted a few people in the head with a shotgun. Really just everything you could ask for out of a character on a show like this. The problem is that Ben Whishaw also does the voice of Paddington in that series of adorable movies and every now and then a little twang of Paddington slips through when he’s talking about murder and it turns my entire brain inside out.

I respect that this could be a Me Problem. Sometimes these kinds of things are. It’s not really Ben Whishaw’s problem. If anything, it’s a testament to how talented he is that he’s able to portray both a sweet fuzzy bear and a bloodthirsty sociopath and excel in both roles. But it is a little jarring, sometimes, to have a little whisper of his voice remind you that he’s Paddington a few moments before he says things like this.

There are, as far as I can tell, only two ways for me to resolve this situation going forward. One is for me to grow up and get over it and move on. The other is for someone to make a video where all of this character’s lines are dropped over video from the Paddington movies so it looks like my sweet floppy-hatted boy is in a tailspin and on a mission for revenge because someone stole his marmalade.

The second seems like a much more reasonable alternative. Let’s shoot for that one first:

FOUR: Despite what every TV show would have you believe, in real life, England is running out of spies