‘Killing Eve’ Season 2 Episode 6 Recap: “I Hope You Like Missionary!”

It’s Killing Eve Season 2, Episode 6, and Eve hopes that Niko’s sexy teacher friend likes missionary-style sex (not really though), whereas I hope that you like being constantly on the edge of your seat as to what’s going happen next when three of the most badass women on TV team up to take down a smarmy, smug, bespectacled, quarter-zip-ass-wearing bully.

Seeing the camera pan around from Eve to Villanelle to Carolyn as they size up just who’s in charge of this surely untenable situation is just delicious. (For the record, the answer is that everyone is in charge except Eve). We’ve known that this team-up was coming—it kind of had to if we want to keep seeing Eve and Villanelle interact without one of them, y’know, dying in the very near future. But sustaining the tension that comes with Eve and Villanelle being at odds was paramount to making the switch to Eve and Villanelle being at evens. Merging their paths into one while keeping their plays for dominance alive and completely unwell, it seems, was an excellent way to do that.

Not to mention: Villanelle in a millennial pink wig, swanning around her giant new industrial loft, alternating between four different accents in under one minute.

The plot of this episode moves at the speed of light, and all the while, we’re trying to figure out if Villanelle crying about being so bored by not being able to feel anything in her pink wig is for the benefit of the character she’s playing, if she’s doing it to make herself sympathetic to Eve, or if this could perhaps be a true cry for help from a true psychopath. We are talking layers, people!

Let’s dig in. The episode opens in about the last fashion I would have expected: with Niko coming in from the pouring rain and aggressively putting Eve up against the wall, just like Villanelle told him to.

The dissolution of Eve and Niko’s marriage was another inevitable thing that finally seemed to take hold this episode, but I cannot say “one last 50 Shades of Gray fantasy roll in the hay” was how I saw it going down. Nor Eve, it seems. After she responds very, uh, strongly to Niko’s angry display, she rolls downstairs the next morning in an extra good mood. But Niko does not feel the same way. He can’t stop thinking about the fact that he tried to talk to Eve about what happened when she got back from Paris, and his wife still lied to him. “You wouldn’t have understood,” she tells him, but he says that because of her, they’ll never know, and walks out of the house, seemingly for good.  

Later, Eve meets Carolyn at a hookah lounge because Carolyn can’t stand breakfast: “It’s just constant eggs, but why? Who decided?” Hard same on that hot Carolyn take.

Carolyn is recovering from her own Morning After, wherein an “old friend” from Nairobi walked downstairs naked to discover her other “old friend” Konstantin pouring orange juice. Luckily, Carolyn seems to have never experienced an awkward moment in her life (unlike her poor son Kenny, who walks in, does the uncomfortablekid.gif lookaround, and walks right back out). She hands Eve an air pod and tells her to watch a video of Aaron Peele exposing a journalist for secretly filming him—a journalist who later wound up dead from an “accident” that showed no foul play—in a way that suggests Aaron Peele has ways of spying on everyone, everywhere, all the time.

If they’re going to catch him for all these murders and whatever “weapon” he’s selling, they’re going to need to get close to him. Eve says it can’t be her because he already knows her, so…

Eve tells Villanelle about her absolutely-no-murder-involved assignment to get close to Amber Peele (Aaron doesn’t really “do” people), and that’s when Villanelle offers up her whirlwind of artifice. Should she be a “gap year tragedy who fell in love with her coke dealer” she asks with a perfect British accent. A “suncream heiress who from Sydney” she asks in a perfect Australian accent. “Oh I know,” she says in her own Russian: “She’s just arrived from New York after one too many nights on the wrong side of the bridge, and she has a really, really, really annoying accent.”

This last one is said as a clear nod to American Eve, but Villanelle’s New York accent is notably imperfect, bad I don’t know what to make of it. Even more confusing, it doesn’t sound like English Jodie Comer doing a flawed accent, it sounds like Russian Villanelle not being quite able to nail this American character…like Eve is permanent kryptonite.

But “Billie,” the addict socialite from New York is the character they decide to send to Amber’s AA meeting, complete with an “Insta-hottie” social media history made by Hugo. In a powwow pulsing with energy, Carolyn tells Eve and Villanelle that this operation is “strictly Moscow Rules … we have to act under the assumption that Aaron will be watching and recording everything, so no breaking, ever.”

So naturally, Eve listens from a café across the street while Villanelle parrots back words that Eve has just said to her in regard to her prying questions about “too nice” Niko: “You will never understand how much harder it is to be nice and normal and decent than it is to be like you.”

Villanelle reminds Eve that she’s not the only one who strays outside the lines of “nice and normal.” In the AA meeting, Billie tells the group that she wishes she was a better person because she “hurt someone in Paris” recently; her husband left because it was too much, her best friends was killed and it was her fault; now she has no one left. The AA leader informs Billie that self-pity won’t get her very far, and Eve is fuming when Villanelle meets her in the café: “If you ever use me and my life again, this is over.” Villanelle teases for a little while, but then her face goes cold: “Don’t speak to me like that Eve—I like you but I don’t like you that much.”

I guess the honeymoon is over, huh?

When Villanelle returns to AA the next day, it’s under Eve’s instruction to “be honest”…while she plays a character…as an assassin hired by MI6. It’s a confusing concept, and all the more when Villanelle offers up this testimonial: “Most of the time, most days, I feel nothing. I don’t feel anything; it’s so boring. I wake up and I think, Again, really? I have to do this again? … I try to find ways of making myself feel something, but it doesn’t make any difference, no matter what I do, I don’t feel anything. I hurt myself, it doesn’t hurt; I buy what I want, I don’t’ want it; I do what I like, I don’t like it. I’m just…so bored.”

We’ve heard Villanelle say time and time again how bored she is, just about anytime that she isn’t actively murdering, so it certainly seems like these words—these tears, this cry for help—could be hers. But it’s also the perfect thing to say to draw Amber to Billie, and after the meeting, they sit outside smoking and bonding. But the handler that we’ve already seen pull Amber away from Billie once interrupts to remind Amber that the “terms of [her] agreement” state that she can “form no associations with anyone in these rooms.”

That’s not great for their operation, so Villanelle handles things the same way she usually does. She uses a sob story as an excuse to hug the handler while Amber is away from her, and then while making direct eye contact with Eve in the café across the street, throws the woman in front of a bus.

It is awful! And insane! And somehow a little gorgeous? So, all in all, very Villanelle.

And speaking of “very Villanelle,” Eve shows up at Niko’s co-worker Gemma’s house while Niko is there, excuses herself to the bathroom, and immediately starts doing little things to destroy Gemma’s cloying twinkle-light-covered décor. When Gemma comes upstairs, she finds Eve rifling through her bra drawer and calls for Niko while Eve accuses her of very much wanting to “get in the middle” of their problems, no matter what she says. Niko tells Eve that Gemma is his friend: “You remember friends, don’t you?”

But as Eve leaves in a huff, and Gemma goes to cry over her broken music box, I can’t help but notice Nico’s face look a little nostalgic for the chaos the Eve tends to ignite.

Finally, Billie has endeared herself to Amber enough to be invited to “family sups” which sounds like a warm affair, but is, in fact, Amber and Aaron dining together at their cold, modern home. There are inside jokes and games between the siblings, but everything carries the air that these two are close with each other because it’s all they have. Billie doesn’t fit into that, and Aaron wants to make sure she knows it, openly mocking her for not having a job and questioning the two degrees he saw that she had from investigating her online.

But, again, this is Billie he’s picking on. It’s Villanelle who has to resist showing her hand that she almost certainly knows exactly what kind of trash Aaron is talking about her in Greek to his sister. But while she excuses herself from the table, Eve is yammering on in her microscopic earpiece about staying calm and how Aaron doesn’t like people to stand up to him. “Maybe he does like it,” Konstantin suggests about the time Villanelle returns to the table, shoves the ear piece in a cookie and eats it.

Finally, when Billie asks a clarifying question about the storytelling game they’re playing after dinner and Aaron begins attacking her intelligence in the smuggest of ways, calling his sister dimwitted in the process, and snapping at her to “shut up, the grownups are talking” when she tried to defend Billie, Villanelle has had enough. “Oh I get it, you’re a bully,” she says to Aaron, looking at the book he’s thrown in her lap to suggest she do some reading up on a topic he thinks she doesn’t understand. “My dad taught me there’s only one way to communicate with a bully.”

And what was his advice?” Aaron responds snidely.

If that’s how “I Hope You Like Missionary!” ended, I would have thought: That’s it, perfect episode. When it ended with one small final scene that suggests Villanelle is maybe going to…murder two party girls and turn them into a cone of gyro meat, I thought: That’s it perfect episode—TO BE CONTINUED, GIVE ME MORE, GIVE ME MORE, I CAN’T WAIT.

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 6 ("I Hope You Like Missionary!") on BBC America