Killing Eve, series 2 review: a gorgeous bauble of a thriller that needs to be appreciated on its own terms
Killing Eve (BBC One) is a soufflé that seemed, on paper, as though that it should have arrived flat and stayed that way. Twirling onto our screens last year, here was a BBC thriller tweaked and heightened so as to appeal to the American prestige TV market. A caper built around the chemistry between an obscure Liverpool actress playing a glamorous Russian assassin (Jodie Comer) and, as her flustered MI6 nemesis, a biggish name from past-its-sell-by-date medical drama Grey’s Anatomy (Sandra Oh). And despite being written by comedy wunderkind Phoebe Waller-Bridge as she was coming off Fleabag year one, the setting was a post-James Bond fantasyland where even the blood spatters were chic and the graphic design made you sit up and gasp. With so much left-field deliciousness stacked, wobbling, in the air, how could it not all come crashing down?
Well it didn’t. It soared. So now we’re getting Killing Eve series two. “We”, incidentally refers to UK audiences, as the BBC America hit has already finished its second run in the United States, Australia, Ireland etc. The delay this time around is apparently so that this lurid, sometimes delightful, often very messy season can be dropped at once on the iPlayer (had it arrived any sooner it would have lapped the US, which, by dint of BBC America’s deal with AMC, has first-run rights).
In a way it doesn’t matter if it’s any good. Killing Eve the pop phenomenon has thoroughly eclipsed Killing Eve itself. Comer, who, as the lethal Villanelle, can flash a killer gaze like nobody else while wrapped in a fluttering pink gown, is a star and burgeoning fashion icon.
Oh, as the likeable but not always competent MI6 agent Eve Polastrai, is now a regular in glossy magazines. As is Fiona Shaw, who portrays her Kafka-esque boss Carolyn Martens. You can bask in Killing Eve’s fabulousness – it has already launched a thousand fashion spreads, the soundtrack is obviously retro and fantastic – without ever venturing near the show.
Still, for those on tenterhooks since season one concluded with the obsessive Eve tracking down Villanelle to her Paris apparent (gorgeous, obviously) and stabbed her in what looked suspiciously like a crime of passion, the returning series is quick to furnish answers. Villanelle lives, just about, and has soon inveigled her way into a hospital emergency ward and befriended a maimed kid in the adjoining bed.
Eve, for her part, flees back to London to resume her dull-but-adequate life with dull-but-adequate husband Niko (Owen McDonnell). But Eve cannot get Villanelle out of her head and with the feeling mutual – Villanelle is soon London-bound with Eve on her mind – the game is once more afoot.
Waller-Bridge passed on penning the second season to instead give us more Fleabag. Replacing her is actress and writer Emerald Fennell (Patsy Mount in Call the Midwife). She initially does well maintaining her predecessor’s whiplash tone, whereby chilling pivots to quirky and then back again. Yet as the season inevitably outgrows the cat and mouse premise that sustained series one and Eve and Villanelle became more intimately acquainted, a slight flakiness start to intrude.
Because Killing Eve is all about the spark between its leads, Fennell must come up with contrivance after contrivance to keep them orbiting one another. Eventually this grows exhausting – just as irritating is the show’s ambivalence as to whether the connection between the two is romantic or merely a dangerous fascination. When Oh recently denied Eve and Villanelle could ever have a relationship, there were inevitable claims Killing Eve was stooping to “queer baiting”. It is certainly keen to suggest a physical attraction on both sides – we know from series one that Villanelle is bisexual –without ever committing to it.
These complexities are teased out against slightly hackneyed B-plots about a new lady assassin on the block named Ghost and a weirdo dotcom millionaire (Henry Lloyd-Hughes). There is also domestic strife between Eve and dopey Niko. Villanelle, meanwhile, finds escaping her past, specifically her connections to the criminal cabal known as “The Twelve”, isn’t as straightforward as disposing of a corpse.
Season two ends on a cliff-hanger every bit as taut and bloody as one with which its predecessor concluded. It does however come slightly out of the blue. And, if executed with incredible verve, the nail-biter leaves rather a lot for for next year’s show-runner Suzanne Heathcote to pick up (Fennell, like Waller-Bridge before her, is leaving the building).
Killing Eve ultimately remains best appreciated on its own idiosyncratic terms. That is, as a romp with the hokey crackle of an old-school thriller, the absurdity of a comic strip and the kitsch factor of a Nineties rom-com. Expect genuine substance or a story that stands up to anything beyond the most cursory of scrutiny and disappointment is inevitable. The show really only works as a gorgeous bauble. Appreciate it on those terms and you’ll come away tickled as pink as one of Villanelle’s terrifying gowns.
