Killing Eve Series Two

Villian Hell

Killing Eve Series Two
BBC - Eight Episodes

Well this is an impressive follow up to last year’s pretty great TV show Killing Eve. In fact, I’ll even say that I enjoyed it much more than the first series. Although, it does have its problems....

For instance, the story is a little played out and once you have the basic premise explored in Series One, where the two main protagonists - secret service woman Eve (played by the great Sandra Oh) and crack international psychopath assassin Villanelle (played equally brilliantly by wide eyed Jodie Comer) - are clearly obsessed with each other and wanting to make some kind of, presumably intimate, connection - it gets a little flat. So the story takes on a lot of extra distractions to compensate, by way of new characters and ideas, to keep the suspense of that particular ‘relationship’ in play while trying to not draw attention to that padding in some places. However, the writers and performers (yeah... and everyone else) are all pretty successful holding the interest in both the characters and the shady, John Le Carre like shadow world in which they operate.

As the first series, the writers give a nice mix following both Eve’s domestic life grounding and then contrasting it with the almost surreal world inhabited by her nemesis/hero. There are also a few surprises which show up over the eight episodes comprising this second series including at least one character you might not have been expecting to see again in this one (yeah, don’t worry, this is a spoiler free review so I’m not intending to elaborate on that). There are also some, admittedly drama fulfilling, new characters brought into the mix but they are the best kinds of distractions when it comes to bringing in new things to fill the episodes with... that is to say, they are entertaining ones.

My favourite thing about this one is that it takes it’s time (at least two, possibly three episodes) to deal with all the fall out from the last 5 minutes of the final episode of series one before it gets all the main characters back to, at least some kind, of status quo. And the writers are still having fun with the dialogue in this, with some witty exchanges between various characters along the way.

And, getting back to those characters, some of them do have their interesting quirks which, as the first series, make this a pleasurable and pretty fast paced watch. The real problem with them, though, is that you can figure out just what purpose they are serving within the drama and so, yeah, a lot of what you are watching becomes fairly predictable for a lot of the time. It’s not totally the writers’ fault though because, clearly, when you’re weaving a story where treachery, deceit and the business of keeping your secrets close to your chest are the common currency in which this shadow world operates, you are bound to be expecting things to not be quite as they seem in the first place. So, yeah, alarm bells may begin to ring on this one from very early on but, frankly, this is still quite skillfully done with the audience at least still having to play guessing games about the intentions of some of the characters when everyone seemed to be fully revealed by the end of the last series.

So, for instance, Eve’s boss Carolyn, played by Fiona Shaw, is still one of those people where you are never really sure whose side she is on and whether the manipulations which are, to be fair, part and parcel of her job, are being played out for the right reasons or whether she may, indeed, be a member of the mysterious, ‘The Twelve’ which we keep hearing about (I expect we’ll get to that by the end of Series Three... they can’t keep circling these things forever). There’s also a nice cameo by Zoe Wannamaker as her boss in one episode.

Now, while I remind you that I loved this series and thought it was even better than the first one, I would have to say my biggest disappointment in Series Two was the last few minutes of the last episode. I don’t want to say here what happens but it’s both very predictable and also seems like it’s insulting the intelligence of the viewers, bearing in mind some of the things we’ve seen in the previous episodes. The ending feels kind of fake and only like it’s there to have a resting point. In fact, in some ways it felt like the end of Avengers - Infinity War (reviewed by me here) where you knew that things would not be left as they were and that’s very much the case here. Without giving too much away, we’ve seen miraculous recoveries and resurrections throughout the story so this one feels like it’s definitely not what it seems and there may even have been some collusion deliberately held back from the audience here to try and give some dramatic tension and to also allow a ‘stunning reveal’ next series. And I’m pretty sure there will be a ‘next series’ if you’ve already seen this one and know what I’m talking about here. I just hope they don’t deal with the fall out as clumsily and nonsensically as Marvel did with Avengers - Endgame (reviewed by me here) and that they treat certain characters more like they did at the start of this series.

Other than that though, Killing Eve Series Two is a pure delight to watch and, if some character deaths within Eve and her husbands non-work life and the introduction of a new female assassin, not to mention another psychopath character (which the new assassin definitely isn’t), seem somewhat obvious and lazy, well... at least they add to a lively and interesting series of entertainments and this thing certainly had me gripped right from the start, for sure. There are some nice dramatic set pieces and at least one wonderful, breakneck paced method of execution involving a lorry which is nicely staged and is as much about Eve’s reaction to what she just saw across the street from her as it is about anything else. People who loved the first show should eat this one up and I can only hope the third series will be with us sometime soon. This is one of the more high quality shows the BBC has been involved with.