Killing Eve recap: Season 3, episode 3: Meetings Have Biscuits

Ah, Andalusia: where the hills are green, the architecture is historic, and the heirloom pianos are ever so slightly out of tune. This is where we meet Villanelle in this week's episode of Killing Eve, carrying out a new assassination under the pretense of tuning a woman's piano. A very intriguing question is whether Villanelle actually knows how to tune a piano, or is just pretending to. My guess is that she does because it's just the sort of random skill set an easily-bored murderous sociopath would have: peculiar, precise, and necessitating a whole cadre of very tiny, very sharp instruments. One of these sails neatly across the room and into the head of Villanelle's target. That's when, somewhere in the house, a baby starts crying.

The baby is being held by an older woman who takes one look at Villanelle and starts trembling and babbling in terror, begging her not to kill the baby, or her, but especially not the baby. (Note: This happens even before she spots the bloody little tuning thingy in Villanelle's hand, such is the power of Jodie Comer's patented assassin crazyface.) Villanelle is amused, and intrigued: “You really like that baby, huh? It’s not even yours!”

Villanelle kills the nanny, of course. But, and this is where things start to get kind of weird, she takes the baby, for basically the same reason that Jack Skellington kidnaps Santa Claus in The Nightmare Before Christmas: she doesn't get it, but clearly people like it, and she wants to dice it up into little pieces and put it under a microscope to figure out why. Figuratively! Obviously. Spoiler alert, the baby stays in one piece. Dasha tells Villanelle to get it together — she's already in trouble after killing her charge, the fact that he beclowned himself (get it? Ha, ha!) on his first assignment notwithstanding — and taking a baby doesn't make her look less insane. And then, Dasha throws it away.

I mean, the baby. She throws the whole entire baby away.

Of course, you can only leave a live human baby in a trash can for so long (in this case, about 30 seconds) before someone notices, which happens in an artfully-blurred background shot while Dasha and Villanelle finish their lunch. Villanelle has a new assignment, in a new city: London.

Meanwhile, Carolyn is taking meetings with her investigative team in a new and exciting way: naked. In her bathtub.

“If Mo can manage, you can,” she tells the horrified Eve.

“I haven’t looked up in ten minutes,” Mo says. (Weird flex, but… okay, honestly, I have a hard time believing that someone as pragmatic and calculating as Carolyn would do this. It's a weird moment, characterwise.)

The purpose of the meeting (which does not include biscuits, to Jamie's great dismay) is to divvy responsibility for investigating Kenny's murder. Eve and the Bitter Pill crew start with the thumb drive, which turns out to contain information about a bank account in Geneva with the encrypted code name PANDA. That would be a reference to Fat Panda, a.k.a. the Twelve operative who got a very unhappy ending (pun intended) back in season 1. That account went dormant after Frank Haleton's death, but has since become active again, its funds depleted.

While Eve bullies Mo into tracking the owner of the Geneva account, Konstantin is already meeting with him: his name is Charles Kruger, and he looks like an alternate-universe Mister Rogers (if Mister Rogers had been kicked out of the neighborhood due to rampant public drunkenness and an unfortunate puppet-fondling incident, and spent the ensuing years in a state of unwashed dishevelment.) Kruger might be in charge of the account, but he's not the one who took the money. He's broke, drunk, and desperate. The men part ways.

At the same time, Villanelle arrives in London and heads straight to a perfumery.

"I want to smell powerful," she announces, handing the proprietor a wad of cash. "I want to make people gag with it."

By "people," of course, she means Eve — the woman for whom she still, in spite of everything, has extremely complicated feelings. (In lieu of a therapist, Villanelle works through her issues in one of those recording booths where you can create an audio message that goes inside a stuffed bear:

“I should have shot you in the head.”

Delete. Re-record.

“I should have shot you in the head and watched you die.”

Delete. Re-record. Long pause.

"...I can’t stop thinking about you.”

And then, Eve and Villanelle are reunited, again, after one of them tried (and nearly succeeded!) at killing the other, again, and yet isn't this the moment we've been waiting for? Eve is on a bus, fresh from discovering that Niko checked himself out of the sanitorium and left for Poland without so much as a word when Villanelle comes striding down the aisle.

Eve goes berserk.

"I'm not here for you!" Villanelle shouts, as the two tussle and slap at each other until they wind up the way they always do: horizontal. Villanelle pins her nemesis (shades here of the bathtub encounter from season 1) and commands, "Smell me, Eve!" but Eve doesn't smell her: she kisses her. And then she headbutts her. And then it's over, as quickly as it began, and the only sign of the moment they shared is the bruise starting to purple on each woman's forehead.

Back at the Bitter Pill offices, Eve doesn't want to talk about it. Then she realizes: she has to. If Villanelle isn't here for her, then who is the target? Who needs to be warned? Eve's eyes go wide: "Carolyn."

But Carolyn isn't answering her phone. After orchestrating a meetup with an old beau with Geneva connections, she learned that Charles Kruger (also an old beau, naturally) was the man behind the PANDA account, and she and Mo have picked him up for interrogation. By the time Carolyn sees Eve's text message — DNGR! VILNL AFTER U — Villanelle is already standing outside her car with a gun. She aims. She fires.

And Kruger, who was the real target all along, won't be talking to anyone now… or ever again.

With yet another botched mission (or a successful one, depending on your perspective) on the books, it's time for everyone to go home. Carolyn endures a hug from her daughter. Villanelle surprises Konstantin, and then surprises him again with an announcement: she wants to find her birth family. (Sidenote: I, too, find this surprising, but perhaps necessary as the will-they-or-won't-they tension between Killing Eve's two main characters can only travel the same territory so many times before it starts getting boring.) And Eve finds her apartment empty — except for the stuffed bear in her bed that tells her, in Villanelle's voice, "Admit it, Eve. You wish I was here."

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