‘Killing Eve’ Season 2 Episode 4 Recap: “Desperate Times”

In an epic Marvel crossover event, this episode might be best summarized with: Don’t make Villanelle heartbroken—you won’t like her when she’s heartbroken. And then her eyes would triple in size and she’d almost murder a rude goth teen in a club bathroom…

But really, the title of Killing Eve Season 2, Episode 4 brings it all together just as aptly: “Desperate Times.” These ladies ain’t doing so good! Given that Killing Eve is going to run for at least three seasons, they’ve got to keep this little game of spy-and-mouse going, and keeping Eve and Villanelle apart through the halfway point of Season 2 has brought each of the women to some interesting crossroads. Eve has a million other things distracting her from her obsession with Villanelle, and that’s frustrating to her; Villanelle has nothing else in her life distracting her from her obsession with Eve…and that’s frustrating to her.

As a result, Villanelle is dabbling in illicit substances and going off the emotional rails, while Eve is gaslighting her husband, creating new obsessions, and nearly making out with smarmy recent college graduates. It’s a recipe for disaster, but keeping these two apart also means there’s room for to explore this world a little beyond our favorite two lust-birds. The episode opens with Carolyn looking more prim than ever as she sits impatiently (you know this by her eyes, nothing else) in a waiting room. As it turns out, she’s there to see her Carolyn, Helen.

One of my very favorite things about Killing Eve is that the show feels no need to flesh out powerful MI6 positions with men. Everybody who’s anybody is a woman, and they’re all completely unique people with internal lives that jump off the screen. Because there’s not just one kind of woman who’s good at her job and rises to power: Eve is a mess, but boy does she know female assassins; Carolyn uses her no-nonsense stylings to keep assassin-obsessed messes working in their strengths; and Helen, apparently, dabbles somewhere in between.

Played by the fantastic, immediately three-dimensional Zoë Wanamaker, Helen starts out calm (save for the frantically stuffing Pringles in her mouth), saying, “Bit of a cockup this, isn’t it really, Carolyn?” I’ve rarely relatd to a television character more than when she put the Pringles in trashcan to keep from eating them, then immediately took them out again the moment things got stressful. The conversation escalates because Carolyn lost her Russian asset, Konstantin, and apparently something happened with a mysterious operation in Lebanon last month. “You know what they say—one cockup is an accident, two cockups starts to look like carelessness,” Helen says, while Carolyn adds in, “Or a threesome.”

Carolyn seems unfazed—even by Helen yelling, ahem “If I wanted to get screwed until my asshole bled, I’d go down to the Torture Garden on a Friday night and ask for the Full Shitting English!”—simply telling her boss that everything with Operation Mandalay is going perfectly to plan…

…to which I write in my notes, “OMG CAROLYN.”

But things are moving forward over at the MI6 offices. Upon receiving her instruction to go all-in on The Ghost, Eve has developed a new lil’ obsession. It’s really never just halfway for this lady, although she seems to be keeping it in her pants with The Ghost. The difference is in the similarities. Eve is (was???) obsessed with Villanelle because of her flair, her beauty, her need to be noticed. But in The Ghost—someone who uses the world’s tendency to look past her to her advantage, who seems to have an assassin’s version of empathy for those she hurts—Eve has found a target she understands.

When Jess and Hugo come in the office, Eve is spread all over the floor with notes and files. “Is Gwyneth Paltrow’s head in a box here, somewhere?” Hugo asks. She says they’re supposed to be finding The Ghost, so they need to find her. Hugo asks what about Villanelle. “What about her?” Eve mutters back.

Woooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooow.

Eve tells her team (Sandra Oh, somehow infusing standard detective procedural jargon with passion) that it’s not just Alistair Peele who died; people connected to him have been dying for the last year in ways that appear natural, so no one noticed. Ten months ago, Peele’s CEO who was a diabetic died from a reaction to insulin, and his ex-girlfriend who had a shellfish allergy, went into anaphylactic shock. And the very first person we saw The Ghost kill onscreen by poisoning his coffee in his office was apparently Peele’s godson.

Eve is fascinated by this naturalistic approach to killing, but that happy high that comes to her when trailing a murderer soon wains when she and Jess pay a visit to Aaron Peele, Alistair’s son. The spies complain about his hipster office full of teenagers beanbag chairs, and when Aaron arrives, he complains about them being there at all. When they start asking questions about the sale of his corporation, he taps around on his iPad and a lawyer arrives, answering each of their questions with, “Mr. Peele respectfully declines to answer the question.” When Eve and Jess finally decide to leave, Eve reminds him that people connected to his father are being murdered, and he respectfully tells her that the work they do—”intelligence, secret services, all of it”—is over. “How can it go on when companies like this one own more information than the Pentagon and MI6 combined?”

I’ll tell ya why, Aaron. Spy shows featuring assassins so fashionable it makes you want to cry!

This is the point in the recap where we talk about how incredible Villanelle/Jodie Comer looked all episode. It’s good to have our girl back, huh? I mean, she is not doing so well mentally, but she is looking f-i-n-e. The episode first introduces Villanelle leaning on a bridge in Amsterdam, wearing wide-leg floral pants, a hip t-shirt, and a cascading berry blazer. When she looks that good, who could really blame her for being unimpressed with the Rijksmuseum when Konstantin takes her there to…show her how much fun freelancing can be???

Villanelle literally screams out that she’s bored, until she finds a painting that you could say, uh, inspires her. It’s “The Corpses of the De Witt Brothers” by Jan de Baen, and it features two men strung up by their angles and gutted.

It gets her so hot and bothered, she puts on one of the best outfits she’s worn during the entire series: a voluminous dark pink ball gown skirt, paired with a flowing light pink button-up blouse tied up at the waist, and just the most amazing gigantic gold earrings. A young woman approaches Villanelle asking if she can take her photo for her Instagram, to which Villanelle primly replies, “No, of course not.”

After instructing that girl to get a real job, Villanelle does hers, observing a young family having a happy Amsterdam stroll. And after tripping the absolute shit out of an innocent woman in order to prove to Konstantin she hasn’t gone soft just because of her attachment to a certain MI6 agent (who she just sent a “don’t forget about me!” postcard to that was intercepted by Carolyn”), Villanelle dons a bubblegum pink dirndl, pops on a fuzzy cartoon pig mask, and sets about her assignment. Apparently the father from that little family stroll is her target, and he’s into “barnyard animals.” After being a predatory asshole to a few of the other women in the Red Light District, he spots a—dare I say it?—sexy pig, and follows her into her storefront….

Where she strips him down (he likes), binds his ankles and hands (he likes), strings him up like a butcher (he doesn’t love), and opens the curtain to the street (really doesn’t love). Then, as his wife approaches the window looking surprisingly calm, and a bunch of tourists say they’ve heard about this kind of show before, Villanelle guts the man and leaves him hanging there.

When Carolyn hears about the killing, she sends Jess to investigate it. This is displeasing to Eve who tries to throw Jess under the bus, saying it could be dangerous because she’s pregnant, and displeasing to Villanelle, who’s staked out across the street from the crime scene to wait for Eve to arrive, only to find Jess instead. It’s bound to have some negative effects on Villanelle’s mental state, so we should feel relieved that there’s now a security agent stationed at Eve and Nico’s house…

But the confrontation it causes between them is not exactly a comforting one. Apparently Eve just didn’t mention to Nico at all that they’d be having a live-in security guard, and she tries to tell him that everyone on the team has to have one. He asks if it’s because of Villanelle, and Eve snaps back, “No, it may surprise you, but my job isn’t all about her … I have a rough enough time at work, coming home to this is not fun.” And, y’know, if Nico were the type of man who just couldn’t get behind his wife having a dangerous job, I would find him as annoying as Eve does. But that’s not what’s going on here! Eve is not only willfully endangering Nico’s life by playing cat-and-mouse with Villanelle, she’s lying to him (and herself, it seems) about it.

And Nico responds a lot more calmly to being condescended to than I would have here. “None of this is normal,” he tells Eve, “and having a wife who tries to gaslight me into thinking it is isn’t normal either, and it’s not kind.”

“Yeah, well, maybe I’m not kind,” Eve responds. Yikes. This is where things really start to go downhill for everyone involved. Eve’s team find out there’s been another Ghost murder, and the autopsy reports come back that she died via a nerve agent that was on her fingertips and upper lip from the cream the woman was using to bleach her mustaches. “Wow, that is smart.” Eve says in awe. “And thoughtful. She wanted it to be painless, what kind of assassin is that?” She also notes that the Ghost seems to have an understanding of drugs, and knows how to make her kills look accidental because of it.

Eve asks Kenny to run a search on former nurses or doctors, non-white, over 35 that have had any kind of trouble in the last few years, and potentially worked in the buildings of the last two victims. Hugo looks…impressed, and that’s when I get nervous.

As Eve notes when they head to a chicken joint to get dinner while waiting for Kenny to scan…every woman in the medical profession in London, all Hugo seems to think about is sex. “What else is there?” he coos. Eve takes a bite of her chicken, and in this instance, I wouldn’t really blame Hugo if he was thinking about sex then, given the way she responds to it. Eve asks what they put in it the chicken, and Hugo leans in real close and suggest crack, maybe orphans.

Hugo rightly notes that Eve seems a little tweaked by the Ghost lead when they step outside to smoke, saying it’s not a bad thing, but digging for more information on what’s up between her and Villanelle. And something seems to click here for Eve, like Hugo is the kind of person she can actually feel comfortable being honest about all this with—he’s not kind either. “What is it?” he asks “Do you like watching her, or do you like being watched?”

“Both,” Eve drawls, as Hugo starts leaning in toward her. Thank Carolyn on high that’s when Kenny texts,  breaking them from their trashy spell. He found The Ghost.

But Villanelle is dealing with some ghosts of her own in Amsterdam. The whole time we’ve known her, she’s taken maybe a few sips of champagne, but when a man calls out to her on the street saying he’s got the good stuff, suddenly she’s in an underground club, slipping pills in her mouth. The thought that Eve has lost interest in her has driven her over the edge, and for now it’s just endangering Villanelle and anyone who tries to cut her in the bathroom line, but I get the feeling that danger will soon explode outward. Just before the woman she chokes for cutting her in line completely loses consciousness, and Konstantin busts in, throws Villanelle over his shoulder, and takes her back to the hotel. I mourn for the green satin duster she vomits all over.

At this point, I’ve kind of forgotten Kenny identified The Ghost, especially once we see Eve walking and talking to her mother on the phone in Korean, which is really fun. At first I assumed she was at Nico’s school when she walks into a parking lot during morning drop off, and asks a woman if it’s her pound note she just found on the ground. The woman says it’s not, and Eve starts fumbling around asking if its immoral to keep it. “Are you okay,” the woman asks. “Yeah, just waiting,” Eve replies, suddenly getting serious.

A red laser point is suddenly on this unassuming-seeming woman’s head and Eve asks her, “Do you want us to shoot you in front of your kids?” It is an electrifying scene, as is the final bit with Villanelle looking at herself in the hotel mirror after he bender, and Eve looking at herself in the two-way glass while she waits to interrogate The Ghost. I don’t know quite what their desperation to be reconnected means for the future—but I don’t think they do either.

Jodi Walker writes about TV for Entertainment Weekly, Vulture, Texas Monthly, and in her pop culture newsletter These Are The Best Things. She vacillates between New York, North Carolina, and every TJ Maxx in between.

Stream Killing Eve Season 2 Episode 4 ("Desperate Times") on BBC America