Welcome back to Killing Eve, source of TV’s most beautiful
love story. In its third episode back, the show dials up the strength of its
core relationship while simultaneously reminding us of how utterly
dysfunctional it is. In a nutshell, the things that make this show the creepy,
compelling delight that it is.
It’s something of a relief to see Villanelle and Eve back to
circling each other. After two episodes where Villanelle was very much out of
commission and Eve was trying to grapple with her own emotions about her
fascination with a killer, the two are both offered very good reasons why their
relationship is harming them. And by the end of the episode, they’ve both
decided to completely ignore this sound reasoning and refocus on each other.
There will undoubtedly come a point when the people who are
depending on Eve and Villanelle for their skills and abilities will get very
tired of putting up with their obsession with each other. Both Konstantin and
Carolyn benefit from Eve and Villanelle doing work for them, but they’re also
racing against time until one or the other of them does something destructive
and reckless to get to the other. Carolyn has now completely lost her advantage
over Konstantin, and Konstantin has put all his faith in someone who he knows
will risk arrest time and again just to inch closer to Eve.
Konstantin ends the episode in the greatest position of
advantage. He’s the only member of the central quartet to have spent any real
amount of time with every other part of it, and he knows Villanelle well enough
to have the best chance of controlling her. And while it’s easy to question his
motivations for saying it, the point he makes to Eve about being loved by
Villanelle is a very sound one. There is no one who has survived Villanelle’s
love, except for him, and that seems to be an accident as much as anything
else. But Eve wouldn’t be Eve if she could let go of Villanelle. And Konstantin
may have misjudged the situation himself—does he realize that Eve is possibly a
better match for Villanelle than either of those other women were? He’s already
gambling that he can manage Villanelle’s obsession. Can he manage Eve’s?
Eve clearly can’t manage anything about the situation. For
every bare minimum effort she makes to save her relationship with Niko, she
makes an equally obvious choice to stretch the distance between them. How much
longer can the two of them maintain the status quo that there’s a relationship
worth saving there? And she’s burned right through the one bond she had with
someone who knew what’s going on with her. Kenny, for all that he’s often used
for comic relief, was her only connection who could understand the weirdness of
what she’s going through, who didn’t have the moral ambiguity and utterly
opaque motivations of Carolyn. He’s now trapped between the two poles of power
in his life, trusting either that his mother will do what’s best for him (which
she makes very clear is not a terribly high priority for her) or that Eve is
someone who cares about what happens to him. What’s he supposed to do? And
also, what was he doing in that locker room that he didn’t want Eve to hear?
(Seriously, was it a sex thing or a gastrointestinal distress thing or…Kenny is
very mysterious).
As the episode closes, the power dynamics have shifted quite
a bit from what they were. Eve has proved to her new colleagues that she’s
essentially psychic when it comes to Villanelle, Villanelle herself has
abandoned the stifling oversight of her previous employers, and Carolyn is clearly
doing some reordering of her own work, given the betrayal she faced from Eve
and Konstantin. Most important of all, Gemma the teacher has made a slightly manipulative
new best friend.
After two episodes that were a little unsteady in terms of
plotting and execution, the show seems very much back on its twisted path,
sinister lipstick and all.
Stray observations
- “I’ll just masturbate onto this omelet then, I guess.”
- “Imagine dying…on that carpet?”
- “You sound like
Raymond, who I love, and miss very much.” - Pour one out for Kenny’s pathetic “Do you think he’s coming
back?” in regard to Konstantin. - So, Eve and Villanelle just had door sex, right?
- But like…where did Villanelle special order that lipstick? “Hi,
I’d like a novelty lipstick with a knife hidden in it. No, it’s not for murder, really.” - Does anyone want to take bets on when we’ll finally see the
Ghost? - Potential hobbies for Carolyn: jigsaw puzzles, book club, baking,
ultimate Frisbee, origami?