Killing Eve season 3 premiere review: New paths for everyone

Killing Eve returns for its highly anticipated third season, and its premiere sets almost everyone off on their own separate journeys.

Given the events of the Killing Eve season 2 finale, it makes sense that things would look fairly different when the show returned for season 3. (Spoiler alert: They do.) The series has now twice gone to the narrative well of having one of its two leads try to kill the other, and though the tension-filled obsession the women share makes for great TV, Killing Eve is going to have to think out of the box this season.

Which, thankfully, it does.

“Slowly Slowly Catchy Monkey” apparently isn’t just the title of this episode, or  Dasha’s career advice to Villanelle. It’s the theme for season 3 as a whole. Throughout the premiere, Eve, Villanelle and pretty much everyone else exist in separate narrative spaces and their stories only vaguely intersect some of the time. Each character seems to be on their own journey at the moment, and where it’s all going remains to be seen.

The shocking twist in the premiere’s final moments points toward a general direction for the season as a whole, or at least a connected throughline for its very disjointed parts. But, since anything concerning the identity or motive of the mysterious organization known as The Twelve has always been nebulous, its’s unclear whether or not Killing Eve has ever really had any hard and fast idea about who they are or what they want. Perhaps it’s time to finally fix that mistake.

When season 3 begins, Villanelle is getting married in Brazil, to a very rich woman who has the lifestyle to which she apparently aspires. The arrival of her former mentor Dasha – an ex-Russian gymnast played by the always fabulous Dame Harriet Walter – sparks not just a fight but a recalculation of where her life is going. Turns out the Twelve would like to have Villanelle and her creative (violent) problem solving back, and that’s why Dasha’s come to see her. But Villanelle, to her credit, wants a promotion to management, if she’s going to say yes.

Walter and Jodie Comer are absolutely wonderful together, a pair of completely violent sociopaths who absolutely understand and even begrudgingly like one another. That doesn’t stop them from attacking each other repeatedly, however. Clearly, this is a relationship that will provide much fodder for this season – and with good reason. For all that Villanelle is the electric heart of Killing Eve, there’s still much about her character that we don’t know.

Elsewhere, Eve is in virtual hiding in New Malden. (The show smartly skips past the particulars of how, contented to drop random lines about her time in hospital in Italy.) She’s alive, for a given value of the word, but not living for very much. She suffers through long days in a restaurant kitchen and drinks too much alone at night. She’s very deliberately avoiding thinking about Villanelle, the Twelve or anything from her old live, and when Kenny comes to visit, she rejects his updates on the secret investigation he’s still running into the shadowy organization.

Elsewhere, Carolyn’s busy losing her job, thanks to the general terrible hash she made of running a secret ops team last season. Fiona Shaw remains as compelling as ever, and there’s something appealing about the idea that we might finally learn something real about this character, who’s essentially been a mystery to us since the season began.

But, for the most part, the events of this episode take place in worlds that feel rather far apart from one another. Until the very end.

The tragic death – really, murder, let’s be clear – of Kenny is shocking. The character was the sort of B-lister you think is generally bulletproof in shows like this – kindhearted, unassuming and not particularly important to the major pieces of the story. He’s the tech support, the comic relief and, occasionally, the audience stand-in, there to let Eve know when she’s going too far out of line. Clearly, his murder is meant as a plot device as much as a mystery to be solved, a twist that pushes Eve out of the solitary prison she’s built for herself and put her back on the proverbial board. (And gives his mother Carolyn an entirely new emotional arc that we’ve seen her play before.)

Yet, you can’t help but feel as though we never really knew Kenny as well as we ought to have, which robs this death of some of its emotional impact for us, the audience. Perhaps in the weeks ahead, the story of his death will prove kinder to him than the one of his life. (Or at least something that Killing Eve will focus on more directly.)

Killing Eve continues next Sunday on BBC America.