[Warning: The following contains spoilers for the Season 3 premiere of Killing Eve, “Slowly Slowly Catchy Monkey.” Read at your own risk!]
At the risk of showing my age by making a stale reference to the late ’90s… oh my god, they killed Kenny (Sean Delaney)! Someone threw my poor sweet Kenny from the roof of his office building in the final minutes of the Killing Eve Season 3 premiere to halt his secret investigation into the Twelve — and presumably drag Eve (Sandra Oh) out of her sweatpants and back into MI6 — and although this isn’t the first time the BBC America series has killed off someone close to our heroine to make a point, it is the first time a death has truly mattered since Villanelle (Jodie Comer) stabbed Bill (David Haig) to death in the middle of my worst nightmare early in Season 1.
But let’s back up to the beginning, back to when Kenny was still alive and checking on Eve after she drunk texted him pictures of toilet paper.
We all knew Eve was going to survive the gunshot wound to the back at the end of Season 2 — the show is called Killing Eve, but no one would ever kill off Sandra Oh and get away with it (not even Shonda Rhimes would be so bold), so we can presume she’ll always be OK. But this is no longer the Eve we’re used to. She’s left Carolyn (Fiona Shaw) and the intelligence community behind, choosing instead the monotonous work of a restaurant kitchen, likely because it requires little thought or physical movement. She’s eating (and drinking) her feelings while going through the motions. Basically: She survived, but she’s no longer alive, if you know what I mean.
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Villanelle, meanwhile, is still full of life. Believing that Eve is dead, she is living it up in other parts of Europe. That is, of course, until her former Russian mentor, Dasha (Harriet Walter), crashes her wedding (honestly, it’s not even worth getting into) and recruits her back into the Twelve. There’s some haggling over her demands and arguments about whose kills are better or more memorable, but the important thing to know is, by the end of the episode, Villanelle is once again in the assassin game.
Although the two women at the heart of the show are currently in different parts of Europe, it’s probably only a matter of time before they come face-to-face once more, especially since Kenny’s contrived demise is almost certainly going to thrust Eve back into Carolyn’s orbit and thus back into MI6 and on the trail of the Twelve. At the very least, it will jump-start her life, and that’s good for us, because this version of Eve is not the Eve we know and love.
Killing Eve airs Sundays at 9/8c on BBC America.
Sandra Oh, Killing Eve