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Killing Eve, season 2 episode 1 review: Villanelle is back and can even make a pair of comic book pyjamas look stylish

Jodie Comer returns as Villanelle in Killing Eve - BBC
Jodie Comer returns as Villanelle in Killing Eve - BBC

Killing Eve (BBC One) carried all before it at the recent Baftas. Oddly, no one making acceptance speeches from the stage saw fit to mention, in her absence, Sandra Oh. Yes, Jodie Comer pipped her to best actress as the assassin Villanelle, and gets to act out in funny accents and hot outfits. But Eve Polastri, the spooked spook, is the show’s other twin peak.

Comer resumed the fun and games with glee at the start of the second series. Even as she recovered from a stab wound to the midriff, she hurled herself at a moving taxi, reluctantly shoved her feet into plastic Crocs, told an industrial quantity of tall tales, mercifully broke a kid’s neck and fetched up in a car boot bound for London. “Normal is boring,” she insisted petulantly. “I’m not normal.” And she sure isn’t.

But it’s Oh who earths Killing Eve. She is the one character who has any sort of home life. “What do people do at home?” asked Carolyn (Fiona Shaw). We care about Eve, hunched terrified in the bath, or madly chopping a mountain of vegetables. She failed as a killer at the end of the last series. The tension in the new one is located in our hope that she won’t be killed.

The task of exploring that story falls to Emerald Fennell, who has taken over scriptwriting duties from Phoebe Waller-Bridge and proves attuned to the show’s polished dissonance. One of the joys of Killing Eve is its nonchalant assault on social norms.

A young Parisian couple had their romantic moment ruined by Eve’s confession to attempted murder. In which other show would anyone chomp on burgers in a morgue? (Barbara Flynn made for a marvellously brusque mortician.)

So the return of Killing Eve is wonderfully welcome. It’s as deft and ironic as ever and looks ravishing – how soon before there’s a run in the high street on Villanelle’s borrowed pyjamas? But in the mean time the dark co-dependency of the two leads remains unfathomable. Villanelle has taken to calling Eve her girlfriend. “I know her better than she knows herself,” she said wistfully. Well, maybe. And yet I yearn for a little more insight into Villanelle’s psychopathy, and Eve’s obsession with her. Or is that being greedy?