The cat-and-mouse premise of Killing Eve was so enticing and yet so limited that it was tough to see how the show would continue after the eventual meeting of MI6 agent Eve Polastri (Sandra Oh) and Russian assassin Villanelle (Jodie Comer) in the first season. The spy thriller spent most of its second season struggling with that idea, trying to maintain Villanelle’s dangerous edge while placing her and Eve in something resembling a romantic relationship, and even having them team up to take down an even deadlier threat.
The result was uneven, often entertaining but often also a bit lost, and the Season 2 finale seemed to put an end to the pair’s intimate dynamic when Villanelle shot Eve and left her for dead. The third season, under new head writer Suzanne Heathcote, follows through with the schism, mostly keeping the two characters apart in the five episodes available for review. Not only are Eve and Villanelle not a team (either professionally or personally), but they are also not really adversaries, instead pursuing separate agendas that will surely coincide by the end of the season.
While the second season began less than a minute after the first, several months have passed between the end of the second season and the beginning of the third. Eve, of course, has survived her gunshot wounds and has also left the world of espionage behind, living in a small apartment and working in the kitchen of a Korean restaurant. Villanelle, still under the impression that Eve is dead, is also trying to move on, and she’s introduced in the first episode at her own wedding reception, having just gotten married to a woman who clearly has no idea what kind of person she’s involved with.
Villanelle quickly tosses her would-be wife aside and returns to the assassin life, working again for the shadowy, ill-defined organization known as the Twelve, which remains the show’s least-successful element. Although Villanelle’s former handler Konstantin (Kim Bodnia) is still hanging around, this season she’s being overseen by Dasha (Harriet Walter), a former Olympic gymnast who was one of Villanelle’s early trainers. Villanelle is as impulsive as ever, but she tells Dasha she’ll only return to the Twelve if she can be promoted to “keeper,” a management position above even the level of Konstantin and Dasha.
Villanelle’s insistence on becoming a mid-level functionary is just one sign of the season’s difficulty in finding a coherent focus, and Eve is similarly adrift, eventually getting back into spy work not with MI6 but with an investigative-reporting website called the Bitter Pill, where her former colleague Kenny (Sean Delaney) has been working. It’s smart for Heathcote not to attempt to return to the status quo, but there isn’t the same sense of urgency to the story as there was in the first season when Eve was tracking Villanelle, or even in the second season when the two of them were tracking a new assassin.
Instead, Eve is attempting to figure out who was responsible for a key death in the first episode, while Villanelle is just doing whatever she feels like. She’s terrible at management, of course (“Just so you know, I’m kind of a big deal in this industry,” she tells her first underling), but there’s no reason to hope that she succeeds at it. When she meets up with Konstantin, she asks him to help her find the family she’d previously been told abandoned her, and the effort to give her a humanizing back story results in the weakest episode of these first five.
What works best about this season is what worked best about the previous season, as the show divorced itself from the need to be a somewhat-grounded espionage drama. Killing Eve is best when it’s outlandish and stylized, as when Villanelle dresses as a kids’ party clown on a job in the second episode, or when she casually snatches the baby of one of her victims and just as casually discards it, leading to a hilarious scene of background panic as Villanelle and Dasha obliviously talk about the logistics of an upcoming plan. This season leans into the idea of both Konstantin and Eve’s former MI6 boss Carolyn Martens (Fiona Shaw) as central characters nearly as important as the main duo, and that allows for a wider focus while also occasionally sidelining the title character.
Like Villanelle’s family drama, Eve’s relationship with her husband Niko (Owen McDonnell) mostly just weighs the show down, although the creators’ solution to the problem this season is frustrating and cheap. The dialogue is still sharp and funny, the visuals are still lavish and creative, and the performances from Oh and Comer are still fascinating (Comer especially gets plenty of chances to show off). Fans of the show will find plenty to enjoy in these episodes, even if Heathcote hasn’t quite figured out a way to make the story as fresh and exciting as it was in the beginning.
Starring Sandra Oh, Jodie Comer, Fiona Shaw, Kim Bodnia, Harriet Walter, Danny Sapani, Gemma Whelan and Steve Pemberton, the third season of Killing Eve debuts Sunday at 9 p.m. ET/PT on AMC and BBC America.