So many of TV’s most prolific killers are stony-faced ciphers, immune to the fits and pleasures of human existence. Dexter’s fraught blankness is the whole point of the character early on; Jack Bauer has never known a moment of relaxed joy. But Villanelle, the glam assassin at the center of “Killing Eve,” is nothing but reactions. She sighs and grins and flinches; she rips into fast food; she screams at children.
It’s freeing, really. Take Barry on “Barry,” for the most relevant comparison. Bill Hader’s fantastic performance relies on the character keeping everything in, clenching his jaw until you can hear his teeth shift. Proximity to violence requires a divorced stoicism. Walter White becomes Heisenberg not just through meth-cooking but through rigidity. Everyone on “The Walking Dead” is in a scowling contest, and the prize for winning is more scowls.
This emotionality is one among many reasons “Killing Eve,” which begins its second season Sunday on BBC America, feels so fresh. Jodie Comer gives Villanelle a liveliness that almost feels like a sport. “Is it hard being bad?” a child hostage asks her in Season 1.
“Not if you practice,” she replies brightly. She must have practiced a lot. She is great at being bad.
And in most storytelling, that would be offset by a more grounded counterpart. Think of the florid sensuality of Hannibal Lecter versus the quiet gray of Will Graham on “Hannibal.” But “Killing Eve” doesn’t just have an expressive mouse, it has an expressive cat, too.
Sandra Oh’s Eve Polastri, a middle manager MI5 officer who becomes an expert assassin-tracker on this case, is just as reactive. When she panics, her eyebrows move into another time zone. When she’s relieved, her shoulders drop like she’s a discarded marionette.
Season 2 picks up seconds after Season 1’s finale, just after Eve and Villanelle have finally had their quiet moment together — a moment that ended when Eve stabbed Villanelle right in the gut. (“Sometimes when you love someone, you will do crazy things,” Villanelle explains.) Despite the serious wound, she escaped, and the season sets the two free again, free to chase and be chased for another eight episodes.
Eve isn’t sure what happened, and she’s afraid she’s a murderer. She tries to keep it together, tries to quiet this fear, and sits at an airport bar in a daze. A fellow traveler misunderstands the source of Eve’s paralysis, and Oh’s face moves from terror to comprehension to release. She starts giggling and then moves into full-on laughter, and not just the sad, exhausted laughter that happens when you hear a bad joke on a terrible day. It’s humanizing laughter, baptizing her back into the world of the living.
Everything that was good about Season 1 is still good in the first two episodes of Season 2, the only ones made available to critics. Emerald Fennell has taken over for Phoebe Waller-Bridge as showrunner and head writer, and luckily the dialogue hasn’t lost any of its verve. Oh and Comer burn just as brightly, and we get even more of Fiona Shaw’s Carolyn, Eve’s secretive boss.
It’s not all acerbic jokes and violent impalings, though, and that’s where the trouble lurks. Any time a show winds its way into “and there’s a secret cabal!” territory, things get a little iffy, as shows like “Alias” or “Chuck” or “Scandal” demonstrate. “Killing Eve” has “The Twelve,” a group we know almost nothing about, except that it dispatches assassins and has ties to various governments. The Twelve’s presence loomed over Season 1, but now it seems likely it’ll take front and center — I’m girding myself for double-agent and triple-agent secret infiltration stories that are rarely as interesting as two characters just telling the truth and seeing where that takes them.
The other hiccup comes in Episode 2, where a still-wounded (literally; she’s still oozing from her stab wound) Villanelle somehow becomes the world’s unluckiest grifter, even though we know she’s an elite criminal. It’s an invention of a problem, not a natural consequence or inevitable path, and it’s the kind of plot point that frightens me — partly thanks to one character’s always creepy doll obsession but mostly because it’s the kind of move a show makes when it doesn’t know what to do with itself.
“Killing Eve” is not other shows, and this isn’t a death knell by any stretch. But Eve and Villanelle — and also everyone alive, sorry — are their most interesting when they’re the most themselves. It’s not the deception that’s intriguing; it’s the honesty.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.