Eve and Villanelle are both still breathing when Killing Eve returns for Season 2… but they’re not exactly out of danger, are they?
Sunday’s premiere doesn’t waste any time, picking up right after the chaotic end of Season 1. (“30 seconds later,” to be exact, according to a cheeky title card.) Eve rushes out of Villanelle’s apartment, bloody knife in hand, and dodges a team of assassins disguised as French police who kill Villanelle’s old French neighbor. Eve walks the streets of Paris in a daze, mumbling to herself, “I think I might’ve killed her”… and interrupting a marriage proposal in the process. She treats herself to an overflowing bag of candy before ditching the bloody knife in a bathroom trashcan. A woman notices her sitting at a bar looking jittery and tells her, “I know exactly what you’re feeling.” The woman thinks she’s a drug addict, and Eve laughs right in her face. It’s so much worse than that!
Villanelle, meanwhile, is hiding from those assassins while clutching her bleeding abdomen, pouring vodka on it to clean out the wound. She tries to catch a cab and fails, until she decides to just jump out in front of one to make sure it stops. The nervous cabbie dumps her at the entrance of a hospital, passed out, and she wakes up in bed, where a doctor tells her the wound missed her major organs, so she should be fine. He also says he’s obliged to notify the police, but Villanelle gives him a sob story about how her abusive husband is a police detective, so he agrees to keep it a secret. Then her eyes light up when she sees a jar of lollipops nearby… and stickers! Oh, Villanelle, never change.
Eve arrives home to London and tries to immerse herself in her old life, cooking dinner for Niko while bopping along to the radio. But the kitchen knife reminds her of what she did to Villanelle — and when she tells Niko the roast chicken’s almost done, he points out that it’s still sitting in the fridge. Later, she sits shivering in a cold bath, ignoring call after call from Carolyn. When Niko asks her if she’s in trouble, she bursts into tears: “I don’t know.”
Villanelle is having a much better time in the hospital, actually: She befriends the kid in the next bed over, Gabriel, who’s in pretty bad shape after a car crash that killed his parents and left him with broken bones and skin grafts. When she tells him her “girlfriend” (!) stabbed her, he’s confused: “Women don’t stab.” “It surprised me, too,” she replies. “She did it to show me how much she cared about me… Sometimes when you love someone, you will do crazy things.” (Sure, who among us hasn’t stabbed a loved one from time to time?) She also has him steal her a doctor’s coat and ID so she can swipe some medical supplies; when she tries to swipe cash from an unattended purse, too, a grieving wife stops her, asking for an update on her ailing husband. Even though he looks like death warmed over, Villanelle assures his wife he’s making a remarkable recovery… and then snatches the lady’s wallet while they hug.
Eve can’t avoid Carolyn forever, so she meets her in a park and confesses she went to Paris to find Villanelle — but lies that she never found her. (“What’s her flat like?” Carolyn asks. “Chic as s—t,” Eve answers.) Carolyn believes Villanelle is still out there, and when Eve reminds her that she fired her, Carolyn smiles: “Lucky for you, circumstances have changed.” She brings Eve to a morgue where the coroner offers them a beer and shows them the body of tech tycoon Alistair Peel, who died of supposed natural causes a few months ago. Remember Nadia, Villanelle’s former lover who she killed in that Russian prison? Before she died, Nadia left a note with Alistair Peel’s name on it… addressed to Eve. Hmmm.
Villanelle is ready to check herself out of the hospital, and borrows a pair of comic-book pajamas from Gabriel to escape in. He invites her to look underneath his bandages, and she doesn’t mince words: “It’s really bad. You look like a pizza.” He whimpers that he’s a monster, and just wants to be normal, but Villanelle disagrees: “Normal is boring.” He’s still distraught, though, and wishes he had died in that car wreck. Villanelle understands… and so she nonchalantly snaps his neck, killing him instantly. (RIP, Season 2’s first casualty.)
So Villanelle is still as dangerous as ever — which is what Carolyn warns Eve about: “If she’s alive, you need to find her… before she finds you.” Back at home, Eve breaks down to Niko, who just asks her to be honest with him. (Spoiler alert: She isn’t.) And in France, Villanelle spots a British family walking into a gas station and sneaks into their car trunk, hitching a ride back to the UK. As she lies silently in the dark, she thinks of Eve… and Eve, lying awake in bed, thinks of Villanelle. They’ll be in the same country again soon enough…
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