The compromise struck by Killing Eve’s new showrunner, the actor and writer Emerald Fennell, was to repeat the story but flip the characters. They’ve always existed in opposition to each other anyway, with Villanelle seeming to embody all the wanton, impulsive parts of Eve that she’s learned to suppress over the years. From one of the earliest scenes of Season 2, in which Eve callously snatched a marshmallow out of the grasp of a small child, it was clear that the show was suggesting Villanelle was rubbing off on Eve, making her colder, selfish, and more in thrall to her own desires. Turned on by Villanelle, she sought out emotionless sexual gratification—from her junior co-worker (played by Edward Bluemel), and from her husband, Niko (Owen McDonnell), appalling him and wrecking her marriage in the process. Standing on a tube platform, she even fantasized about pushing a stranger onto the tracks.

Eve’s pivot toward darkness was supposed to add complexity to her character. In reality, though, Oh has never had less to work with. Eve’s escalating psychosexual fixation on Villanelle robbed Oh’s character of all the things that made her interesting—her professional capabilities, her emotional intelligence, her heightened awareness of trouble, even her capacity for joy. In the final episodes of Season 2, Eve seemed either totally flat or hopelessly needy. She stalked Villanelle with calls and voicemails while Villanelle was on assignment for MI6, investigating a ruthless tech baron with a psychopathic streak of his own. Frantic to get back to Villanelle, Eve left a colleague to bleed out alone, even as he begged her not to. And she let herself be easily manipulated—by Villanelle, who conspired to have Eve “rescue” her by murdering a man with an axe, and by her former boss Carolyn (Fiona Shaw), who used Eve’s attachment to Villanelle to organize an off-the-books assassination of her own.

Season 2 drained Eve to the extent that, in the final episode, all she could do was limply follow Villanelle through a series of tunnels beneath Rome, peppering her with questions like a truculent toddler. (“Where are we?” “Where are we going?” “Do you know the way out of here?”) Villanelle, by contrast, became more vibrant, more complex, and—in one of the show’s most off-note decisions—more human. If Eve was absorbing Villanelle, as I wrote in my review of the first two episodes, Villanelle was softening, or at least pretending to. In a group therapy meeting, while in the guise of an addict, she acknowledged her inability to feel things, and the perpetual emptiness and boredom that spur her to kill. But in Amsterdam, just a few episodes earlier, she’d sought solace in pills and broken down in tears after Eve failed to show up—a moment of vulnerability that felt jarringly out of character, just as it belied the idea that she feels nothing.