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'Killing Eve' season 2 premiere shows Eve trying to go back to her old life, but will Villanelle let her?

Kicking off a mere 30 seconds right after the final moments of season 1, we see Eve thrilled and befuddled in equal parts, as she realizes what she has done.

This article contains spoilers for 'Killing Eve' season 2, episode 1 'Do You Know How to Dispose of a Body?'

'Killing Eve' just made a killer comeback with its second season that premiered this Sunday, April 7. And while our titular MI6 agent Eve Polastri (Sandra Oh) might not have been killed by her target cum obsession, Villanelle (Jodie Comer) she still has a whole lot of other problems to deal with. Number one among those problems is going back to her normal life and habituating herself with the plainness of it all. 

Kicking off a mere 30 seconds right after the final moments of season 1, we see Eve thrilled and befuddled in equal parts, as she realizes what she has done. She was assigned to head a task force to hunt down the serial assassin, Villanelle, but as their cat-and-mouse chase went on, both the hunter (Eve) and the target, get increasingly obsessed and interested in each other, and their sexually charged game culminates with Eve stabbing Villanelle in the guts, after which, the latter jumps off the room's balcony and disappears.

The catch here is that, despite being a detective, Eve is not your signature brooding spy with machoism brimming out of her. She's a simple woman with odd comic timing, who is married to another simple-minded man, Niko Polastri (Owen McDonnell.) But as the hunt and chase went on, Eve evolved, and so did her obsession with Villanelle - something that eventually managed to cause a strain in her marriage. So for her to go back to that same life - a peaceful one with her husband, where she doesn't have to worry about Villanelle's next move - will be a leap just as gigantic as the one she took when she was signed on to the case. 

When the second season kicks off, we see Eve arriving at her and Niko's home in London and returning to her old routine - cooking dinner for him and jamming to the radio, etc. But while Niko isn't openly chiding her for her intrigue in Villanelle - who she assumes is dead now - there's no denying that Eve misses the thrill of the chase. So much that every little thing reminds her of Villanelle and becomes a painful reminder that her feelings for the serial killing psychopath might be way beyond the boundaries of a spy. 

In one scene where Eve is preparing dinner, she stares at the kitchen knife and is overcome with the realization of what she did to Eve. Despite being a spy, Eve is not a killing machine and for her to have presumably killed the actual killing machine (Villanelle), is what disbalances her sanity. In the same scene, the very next moment, she tells Niko dinner is almost done, but he points out that the chicken is still sitting in the fridge. These little absent minded gestures of her lead us to believe that even though she is out of the game, she won't really be able to get over her encounter with Villanelle; not in the foreseeable future at least.

The biggest example of this arrives when she is sitting shivering in the bathtub, ignoring calls from her boss Carolyn Martens (Fiona Shaw) repeatedly and when Niko finally confronts her asking if she is in trouble, all she can answer is "I don't know." And that is becoming her biggest hindrance in going back to her normal life before Villanelle arrived and turned her world upside down.  Eve is trying to adapt to circumstances and act like things are normal, but Villanelle's memories won't let her be at peace. 

This is quite ironic because Villanelle was the one who was stabbed and as the first episode depicts, she survived the fall and finds herself a hospital, and then goes galavanting about the pretty Parisian streets. Here, Eve is the one bearing the brunt of her own conscience, which almost makes us think that maybe this is all a part of Villanelle's elaborate plan of actually killing Eve.

'Killing Eve' season 2 returns with episode 2, 'Nice and Neat,' on April 14, at 8/7c, only on BBC America.