Killing Eve Season 2 Episode 4 Review: Desperate Times

This Killing Eve review contains spoilers. 

Killing Even Season 2 Episode 4

Killing Eve is flipping the script once again. In tonight’s episode, instead of sex workers being nameless, faceless victims like they are in so many other cop shows, Villanelle is an anonymous killer, putting an awful man on display to be shamed. That’s in Amsterdam where Villanelle and Konstantin put out their shingle for the freelance assassin business. Back in London, Eve tracks down the ghost, Carolyn tries to keep her team on track, and Niko misses the Eve he used to know.

This is a rough episode for Niko and Eve’s relationship and the Hugo of it all is killing me. Good for Niko for speaking up about their strange dynamic, and trying to bring back the kind woman he loves. What is it about Hugo that allows Eve to be honest for the first time? She finally admits that she likes both watching and being watched by Villanelle, and then almost kisses this twerp. Ugh. Eve, if you’re gonna leave Niko, at least leave him for Villanelle.

There’s so much to unpack in the way Eve brought the Ghost in. I love that she was casually speaking Korean to her mother on the approach. Eve Polastri has always been a little off, a little weird, so much so that I honestly thought her bizarre behavior was just Eve being Eve, another bit of her strange, crackling exterior. Was this merely a stalling tactic, or was she hoping to get inside the Ghost’s head? Was she hoping to learn something about her, to know whether she was the kind of person who would turn in the money or keep it? I feel like I’m going to be thinking back on this scene for a long time.

While the Ghost has been caught (we think) there’s still so much left. We don’t know who planned this and to what end. We know that The Twelve are highly interested in her and they’ve been known to break people out of prison or MI6 control in the past, so it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that they might try to get her out of Eve and Carolyn’s grasp.

read more: Everything to Know About Killing Eve Season 3

I want to shout out the way that Killing Eve casually sprinkles tangible expressions of Hugo’s privilege throughout the script, usually wryly observed by Jess. When he declares that his friend works in a helpful, well-connected department, she deadpans, “of course he does.” When she needs some information, she tells him to work his Oxford connection that he “never talks about.” In other cop or political shows, connections are either seen as helpful or neutral, simply a fact of the trade. But with Jess, who we know is a top notch mind, a hard worker who was highly sought, never able to dip into those kinds of contacts, and Carolyn so far working connections accrued over a long career, several of whom were romantic at one point, it adroitly paints a stark portrait of how hard it is for women, especially women of color, to get ahead in this business.

On the other end of the spectrum, the show is still able to show us an aspirational version of the world, in the form of the female big boss we meet at the beginning of the episode. She’s a bit of a disheveled nutty professor type, in the way that women are so rarely allowed to be. I love that she has frizzy hair, fun socks, her feet on her desk, and eats crisps in a completely inelegant way. Even better: she has a mal administrative assistant.

Meanwhile in Amsterdam, Villanelle doesn’t handle it well when she doesn’t get the attention she wants, validating that Carolyn made the right call by hiding that postcard from Villanelle to Eve. Instead, Carolyn sends Jess, an experienced agent. Eve stays home with heightened security. I still can’t believe Jess survived the episode, though I’m glad I didn’t have to watch Villanelle stab a pregnant woman in the womb. Villanelle is scary-sloppy on drugs and nearly kills a girl in line for the bathroom. Luckily, Konstantin stops her, but she acts like a tantrumming little girl. As far as we know, she’s never been this careless before. These two are somehow equally bade for one another.

Other notes:

Shout out to Eve being a Rose Tyler fan!

This tech bro thinks “nations” and secret services and intelligence are all over. Wow. Vom. At least the woman who greeted them in the office had a great bomber jacket.

“It’s one thing being murdered, but the indignity of being found bleaching your mustache”

LOVE Villanelle’s pajama-like green long silk coat and the pink asymmetrical blazer with floral pants.

Eve muses that the Ghost is a nurse and then catches her own sexism before correcting herself to say she could be a doctor. What a great, realistic moment.  

The foreign language cover of Angel of the Morning is a great end to this episode.