Killing Eve season 3: A jaw-dropping moment to seduce you back

This seductive, thrilling TV show doesn’t believe in doing things by halves. By episode’s end, you’ll be shouting “ohmigod”, with some expletives thrown in.

Holy crap.

Killing Eve’s return will leave your jaw dropped firmly on the floor. You’ll gasp and shout “ohmigod”, maybe with an expletive or two added in there for dramatic effect. Because it is very dramatic.

The final moment of the first episode of season 3, on ABC iview today, is shocking in a show already renowned for its twists and turns.

Obviously, we’re not about to spill the goods. We’re not monsters. We’re not Villanelle.

Killing Eve has never been content with contentedness.

It knows it has to earn your attention and devotion, and some audiences may have strayed in the second season after a near-perfect debut the previous year, so this latest curve ball may feel like a cheap ploy to win back viewers – but it works. It makes you yearn for more.

Starring Sandra Oh and Jodie Comer as an intelligence agent and a sociopathic assassin engaged in a dangerous and sexually charged cat-and-mouse game, Killing Eve was a sensation in 2018, one of the most talked about new shows that year.

Killing Eve returns to cast its seductive spell (Laura Radford/BBC America via AP)

Adapted from books by Luke Jennings by the very clever Phoebe Waller-Bridge, it introduced a new dynamic rarely seen on screen before.

Here were two female lead characters, both complex, sticky, flawed and extremely compelling to watch – and then they have this bizarre, hard-to-categorise connection, one that has morphed from a straightforward hunt to a push-and-pull bond in which you’re never sure who’s the cat and who’s the mouse.

Through it all, the one consistent is obsession – running both ways between Eve (Oh) and Villanelle (Comer), a pair of natural enemies whose sizzling chemistry threaten to burn everything and everyone around them.

Villanelle is an extraordinary character, a childlike yet ruthless killer whose propensity for luxury and theatrics makes her so unbelievably watchable – Comer’s prodigious talent for crafting Villanelle’s various disguises is part of the charm, and the young British actor got an Emmy for her work, outshining her better-known counterpart, Oh.

It’s that irresistible mix of vulnerability, cunning and sociopathy that renders Villanelle worthy of empathy – even though she commits horrific acts, like killing a kid. Or maybe it’s an uncomfortable commentary on the audience if we can find something redeeming, or appealing, in a killer like her.

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The third season picks up some time after the last encounter between Eve and Villanelle among some ruins in Rome, the impressive backdrop symbolic of their relationship – startling, alluring and destroyed.

The culmination of an operation gone awry, one in which Villanelle pushed Eve to new levels she didn’t know she was capable of (but obviously was), it ends in a lovers’ tiff – Villanelle shoots Eve, leaving her for dead, seemingly fulfilling the promise of the series title.

But Eve isn’t dead – clearly, since here we are at the start of a third season.

What that moment was, as Villanelle herself says in the second scene, is a terrible, bruising break-up.

Eve survived and is now a shell, muddling through the mundanities of life – buying five bottles of wine and endless packets of instant noodles at the grocers, getting drunk by herself in her sad, dingy studio apartment.

She’s now out of the spy game, preferring to wordlessly fold dumplings in the kitchen of a Korean restaurant.

But she will be drawn back in, and that cliffhanger episode one ending will make sure of it. As will we, the audience.

Eve is not destined to be a dumpling wrapper Picture: Laura Radford/BBCA

Only the first episode of season 3 was made available for review, and from that small taste, it’s not clear if the show will be able to course correct for some of its errors the previous season, though it will face some similar challenges.

The series spent too long keeping the antagonists-cum-protagonists apart, unable to capitalise on Killing Eve’s best asset, that playful energy between Comer and Oh.

How the third season will contrive to bring them back together without overplaying their hand, and without thickening the plot armour around Eve, will be key to its success.

In keeping with the show’s tradition, there’s now a different writer for this series, Fear the Walking Dead scribe Suzanne Heathcote – the first was written by Waller-Bridge and the second by Emerald Fennell.

There’s the great addition of Harriet Walter to the cast as a new handler for Villanelle, though Walter’s Russian accent denies us of what she excels at which is being haughty with a clipped British accent.

And the wonderful Fiona Shaw’s opaque master spy, Carolyn Martens, has a new foe this season: bureaucracy. Meanwhile, Kenny has started working for an investigative journalism site and Konstantine is busying himself buying 99p fridge magnets with which to taunt his daughter.

Killing Eve may have floundered in its sophomore year, but there’s great hope this seductive thriller with a wicked sense of humour can find its form again.

Killing Eve season 3 is streaming on ABC iview now, with new episodes available on Mondays at noon AEST

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