‘Killing Eve’s Showrunner Explains Why Villanelle Crashed and Burned as a Mentor

Killing Eve Season 3 Episode 2 “Management Sucks” shows Villanelle (Jodie Comer) in a whole new light: as a mentor. As part of her return to service for the Twelve, she has insisted that she not only gets to live in a seriously amazing apartment — great water pressure and everything — but that she be promoted to Keeper. Dasha (Harriet Walter) then arranges for Villanelle to mentor a new assassin on a mission. What Villanelle learns is that maybe she’s not quite cut out for management.

While Eve (Sandra Oh) still struggles to grapple with her grief over Kenny’s death, Villanelle gets to jet off to the fabulous Cote d’Azur. There she finds her new mentee, a 19-year-old named Felix (Stefan Iancu). Within moments of meeting the young man, Villanelle figures out that he’s extremely green. She tells him to follow her every cue. Her masterplan? Dressing as buoyantly colorful clowns at the mark’s child’s birthday party. The look gives Villanelle a chance to play with comedy, while also serving Killing Eve fans yet another dazzling over-the-top look.

Eve orders Felix to follow the mark and murder him in the house. However, the kill goes immediately wrong. Rather than sticking the plan, Felix gets caught up in an almost comically bad one-on-one fight with the target. When Villanelle finally checks up on her new protege, she makes the choice to shoot their victim in the head and then kill Felix. She gasps the title of the episode: “Management sucks.”

When Decider spoke with Killing Eve Season 3 showrunner Suzanne Heathcote, she explained that the episode was meant to illustrate one of Villanelle’s weaknesses.

“I think she wants the power that goes with management, but lacks the people skills,” Heathcote said. “As we’ve seen in previous seasons, she’s not great working with other people. She doesn’t have the patience involved in watching someone less experienced than her do a lesser job than she would. That’s her big conflict: she knows what she wants. She wants the responsibility and the power, but actually in practice, it’s not something that’s really attainable to her.”

Killing Eve Season 3 Episode 2 also shows us more of the dynamic between Villanelle and her new handler Dasha. As we saw in the Killing Eve Season 3 premiere, Dasha was a former Soviet gymnast whose kills have inspired Villanelle. Heathcote told Decider that Dasha was a character she wanted to introduce to Killing Eve from the very beginning of her tenure on the show.

“I really wanted to see Villanelle in a female-female dynamic with a handler. We’ve just seen, the past two seasons, Constantine, who she has a special relationship with, but was always able to kind of manipulate as a handler. And then obviously she had a very difficult relationship with Raymond,” Heathcote said. “I wanted to see her with someone who she begrudgingly has respect for and I felt that had to be someone who’s kind of really helped build her, and who was as good as her in her own day.”

Killing Eve Season 3 Episode 1 ended with Villanelle copying Dasha’s first kill by leaving her victim covered in spice to mimic the gymnastic chalk Dasha buried her first kill with. It was a visually fascinating choice and it reflects the creative kills Killing Eve is known for. Heathcote shared with Decider that she gave all the writers on her staff the homework assignment of coming up with five creative kills early on in the season.

“If anything made us really laugh or really gasp, you knew you were kind of onto something. But it’s also, it’s finding them in the right tone of the show. We came up with a couple of things that we thought were really cool, and then as we were fleshing them out, they just felt too James Bond. We were like, ‘Oh, we could do this glass-bottom boat!’ and all this stuff. It’s just too slick to flash,” she said. “The joy of Killing Eve is that there’s a grit to it.”

Heathcote laughed. “I don’t want anyone to ever look at my Google searches, because they will be terrified of me.”

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