'Killing Eve' Season 3 Episode 2 Review: Carolyn's grief mirrors Eve and Villanelle's denial
Spoilers for 'Killing Eve' Season 3 Episode 2
Grief manifests in several ways; from shock to denial, despair, rage, and an eventual void — there's no particular order to grieving or so reveals Carolyn Martens' (Fiona Shaw) arc in the second episode of 'Killing Eve' Season 3. But Carolyn, of course, isn't the only one grieving; while she plunges herself into work — which she claims is not just ann active attempt to distract herself from crumbling after her son's death, surprisingly for both Eve Polastri (Sandra Oh) and Villanelle (Jodie Corner), grief is currently a heavy sense of denial, the heavy aftermath of which looks foreboding should they come face to face again.
And knowing there's no way they are not going to find their way back to each other is what raises the teasing anticipation of what next.
When we meet Eve, she is drunk at Kenny's funeral. A 'smug', middle-aged man keeps annoying her, trying to act too smart and snarky about her drunkenness, but Eve's mission is to avoid Carolyn at all costs.
At this point, it is known that she was the one who found Kenny, but they don't know she still has his phone from the day she saw him fall to his death. Oh is no stranger to essaying a complex character turning the pages of even more complicated emotions, so fumbling and stumbling, she spits venom at Konstantin (Kim Bodnia) for trying to pretend he cares and tells off Carolyn to leave her alone when the grieving mother approaches her at the wake.
It's remarkable how well Carolyn holds herself together, being a gracious host amid such harrowing circumstances and asking her daughter to change the music to something more delightful. One would almost think it wasn't her son's funeral — or that the last words she told Kenny were how she doesn't see the need to apologize to him for Rome. Shaw is excellent in her disposition of the role, as usual, but due nod should go to the script too for chronicling the unfortunate development with such taste.
It is however only when Eve asserts she is not up for pretending that Kenny killed himself, do we see the first streams of an eventual dam about to break.
It shows the next day when Carolyn walks into work and her shirt is unbuttoned the wrong way. She resumes the way she would on any normal day but the grief seeps out in bits and pieces when a coworker suggests it might be too soon, or when she is alone in her car with her sandwich, listening to music. It is more helplessness than grief at this point as Carolyn can't pursue the case the way she would with regular homicides.
So she goes out of her character and seeks out Eve's help desperately, and even for a brief second, acts with kind compassion towards the girl who was last dating Kenny.
Her only respite in this grave loss is an equally heartbroken Eve, whose grief settles into a dilemma — best expressed by the cinematography imbibed in the scene where she enters through a door and there's a mirror right next to it. Eve and her reflection are a synced-parallel, but like most mirror images, work the opposite ways, and it is at that moment she realizes that if she were to find out the truth about Kenny's death, she has to join forces with Carolyn once again, and also consider that behind all of this is Villanelle.
The reason, of course, being the paprika display we saw in the previous episode.
Eve coming out of her evident denial sees her end up at Kenny's workplace — the annoying man from the funeral having turned out to be his boss. They both know Kenny was looking into The 12 but don't share that explicitly, so Eve heads to Carolyn's house proposing a joint, off the record investigation into Kenny's death and that is exactly where all the mayhem and madness happens.
Well, not yet, but Konstantin gifts Carolyn's daughter a refrigerator magnet earlier in the episode which turns out to be a microphone. So when he finally pays Villanelle a surprise visit at the end of the episode and tells her he never stopped working for The 12, it piques the anticipation about how both Villanelle and The 12 are going to handle Eve's advances.
To add to that, Villanelle just got what she had always wanted — a grand house, her job with The 12 back with a promotion where she handles subordinates, and enough support from Dasha to make her forget Eve ever existed. For the most part of this episode, as she goes about complaining how managing new assassins sucks, scaring kids dressed as a party clown at their own birthdays, and insisting how she took care of Eve, Villanelle is relentless in her denial that she did not check if Eve was really dead after she had fired that bullet.
And as Konstantin reminds her of the same, there's a look of panicked glee that floods her face — eyes glistening, lips quivering as she reels in the duality of finding out the love of her life is still not dead. But there's no denying that to save themselves, The 12 will once again task her with taking Eve down, and that is what makes their imminent reunion so formidable.
'Killing Eve' Season 3 airs on Sundays at 9 pm only on BBC America.