Warning: contains mild plot spoilers about Series 3

In today’s challenging real world, we may feel surges of warmth, community and kindness. In the dramatic world of Killing Eve, love is lethal. Thank goodness. As the series’ third season returns, it seems more of an alternative universe than ever, and more welcome for that. Still filled with intrigue, it continues to spin out the warped relationship between Villanelle, the merciless assassin, and Eve, the emotionally conflicted, conscience-stricken spy. Amidst its espionage and murder, the irresistible new season explores the deepening mystery of Eve’s personality. Who is she, really?

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Last season set up this one perfectly. Villanelle manipulated Eve into doing something previously unthinkable: she took an axe and murdered a man threatening Villanelle’s life. When Villanelle later told Eve “You’re mine” – a line with multiple meanings, declared in the exotic setting of a Roman ruin ­– Eve rejected her. Naturally, Villanelle shot her, leaving her for dead.

But the show isn’t called Eve the Spying Ghost. As the season starts, she is back in London, no longer attached to MI6, and an emotional wreck. Once a whirlwind, she now schlumps around in dirty old clothes, works in a restaurant kitchen, drinks too much and lives alone in a hovel of a flat. Her only friend is Kenny (Sean Delaney), who was once her MI6 colleague and now works for a muckraking website.

Sandra Oh has always vividly captured the tension within Eve, who has a conscience but is drawn to darkness and murder. Oh adds even more layers here as we see how much Eve is punishing herself. Among other reasons: her husband, Niko (Owen McDonnell), is in hospital suffering from PTSD because Villanelle attacked him last season. And as she grapples with her love-hate for Villanelle, she carries around the knowledge that she has taken a life too. The series may, in fact, have metaphorically killed Eve, at least the old non-murdering version. Or did she always have that potential lurking inside? It seems that Eve herself would like to know.

As for Villanelle? Once a psychopath, always a psychopath. Jodie Comer defines the acidic character as sharply as ever, capturing her glee in her job and her lightning-fast mood changes. Give her a side-eye and you’re dead. We catch up with her in Moscow, at her own wedding reception, after she has married a woman in whom she seems wildly uninterested. She believes Eve is dead, which may only prove how blind love is. Didn’t she check?

Harriet Walter, with a full-blown Russian accent, is an exuberant, fun addition to this season’s cast as Dasha, Villanelle’s old mentor, who creates a few villainous distractions of her own. Improbably, the independent Villanelle wants to become a keeper of other agents, moving up the ranks, and Dasha tries to whip her into shape.

This season’s showrunner, Suzanne Heathcote, takes over smoothly from last season’s Emerald Fennell, who in turn took over as head writer from Phoebe Waller-Bridge. She maintains the show’s glamorous look, which now includes Villanelle’s new, sumptuous mansion in Spain. Heathcote has also ramped up the wit. The season is full of funny set pieces, including one in which Villanelle supervises a killer-in-training, both of them dressed in full clown makeup. She looks stylish even then, with a blue tulle ruff around her neck and a tiny plaid hat askew on her bright red wig. When things go wrong she offers a droll, “Management sucks.”

Heathcote and the other writers seem to have an endless supply of clever ways for Villanelle to eliminate her targets, whether in a tiny grocery store in Andalucia or a spacious garden in France. One of the series’ shrewd devices is to make sure we’re not attached to the victims in those scenes, so the deaths are as cold-blooded and unreal to us as they are to her. She never leaves witnesses, and although her fingerprints must be everywhere, she gets away with it all, which is unlikely but also part of the show’s escapist fantasy. Be prepared, though. That distance doesn’t apply to the demise of characters we admire or care about.

The season’s first instalment ends with a shocking death that Eve inevitably decides to investigate on her own. To find the truth she needs the help of her former boss, Carolyn, played by Fiona Shaw with icy sharpness. This season we see Carolyn’s frosty relationship with her daughter, Geraldine (Gemma Whelan). The fact that we didn’t even know she had a daughter may be a narrative lapse, but it certainly suits her character.

Villanelle’s story also explores the mother-daughter theme. Having been abandoned by her parents to be raised in an orphanage, she finally decides to track down her family. It’s easy to guess that might go badly, but the colorful details along the way are unexpected, including a country fair in a remote Russian village and a singalong to Crocodile Rock. The plot has to stretch to bring back Konstantin, Villanelle’s one-time handler, but Kim Bodnia as the gruff and ruthless teddy bear is so engaging and sly he makes it worthwhile.

It says a lot about the strength of the series, from writers to actors and editors, that the season starts off and stays so dynamic even though Eve and Villanelle do not meet face to face until the third installment. As always with these two, there will be blood.

With its globe-trotting intrigue, Killing Eve at times feels like a James Bond film without any heroes, and it’s just as far from everyday life. “Have you cleaned your hands?” one of Villanelle’s beautiful new lovers asks when she finds her tuning a valuable piano. Oh, yes, hand-washing. The line lands differently than it might have a month or so ago, but it’s a rare jolt of reality from this wonderfully entertaining season.

★★★★★

Killing Eve premieres on 12 April on BBC America and AMC in the US and on BBC iPlayer on 13 April in the UK.

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