And in most storytelling, that would be offset by a more grounded counterpart. Think of the florid sensuality of Hannibal Lecter versus the quiet gray of Will Graham on “Hannibal.” But “Killing Eve” doesn’t just have an expressive mouse, it has an expressive cat, too.

Sandra Oh’s Eve Polastri, a middle manager MI5 officer who becomes an expert assassin-tracker on this case, is just as reactive. When she panics, her eyebrows move into another time zone. When she’s relieved, her shoulders drop like she’s a discarded marionette.

Season 2 picks up seconds after Season 1’s finale, just after Eve and Villanelle have finally had their quiet moment together — a moment that ended when Eve stabbed Villanelle right in the gut. (“Sometimes when you love someone, you will do crazy things,” Villanelle explains.) Despite the serious wound, she escaped, and the season sets the two free again, free to chase and be chased for another eight episodes.

Eve isn’t sure what happened, and she’s afraid she’s a murderer. She tries to keep it together, tries to quiet this fear, and sits at an airport bar in a daze. A fellow traveler misunderstands the source of Eve’s paralysis, and Oh’s face moves from terror to comprehension to release. She starts giggling and then moves into full-on laughter, and not just the sad, exhausted laughter that happens when you hear a bad joke on a terrible day. It’s humanizing laughter, baptizing her back into the world of the living.

Everything that was good about Season 1 is still good in the first two episodes of Season 2, the only ones made available to critics. Emerald Fennell has taken over for Phoebe Waller-Bridge as showrunner and head writer, and luckily the dialogue hasn’t lost any of its verve. Oh and Comer burn just as brightly, and we get even more of Fiona Shaw’s Carolyn, Eve’s secretive boss.