Killing Eve Review: Management Sucks (Season 3 Episode 2)

Killing Eve Season 3 Episode 2, “Management Sucks,” is a slow-paced but thorough investigation of the way grief manifests for different types of people.

It begins at Kenny’s wake, where Eve’s grief is straightforward and painful to watch. She’s drinking heavily and furiously lashing out at anyone who knew Kenny, especially the people who worked with him and failed to protect him from danger.

Carolyn’s grief is subtler, but over the course of the episode, her typically brusque demeanor gives way to genuine expressions of bereavement. She’s not just sad — she’s lost, and clearly not used to the sense of helplessness that engulfs her after her son’s death.

Without work to keep her occupied or the means to launch her own investigation, she is directionless and immobilized. 

It’s a side of Carolyn we’re never seen before, and one that it seems Season 3 of Killing Eve is devoted to exploring. 

Until now, Carolyn has been held in almost mythic esteem by the surrounding characters and the audience alike; but there is nothing as humanizing as loss, or as confounding as grief. Kenny’s death helps topple Carolyn off her pedestal. She is neither as untouchable nor as unflappable as she once seemed. 

Elsewhere, Villanelle’s actions and feelings are attributable to a different kind of mourning. Despite her insistence that she’s happier with Eve dead, she’s also clearly unable to stop thinking about her.

Felix: When you love somebody and they don’t love you back, it’s worse than… I don’t know what it’s worse than, but it’s really–

Villanelle: Shit.

Felix. Yeah. Shit.

Unfinished business between Eve and Villanelle has suspended them both in a kind of emotional purgatory; they can’t put it behind them, and they can’t seem to find satisfaction in anything they try to distract themselves with.

MI6 has lost its appeal for Eve, just as assassinations are no longer the novelty they once were for Villanelle. 

Eve’s misery is obvious, written plainly on her face in every scene. Villanelle’s is subtler, but becomes apparent whenever Eve is mentioned. Her smile sharpens and her expression turns feral, but her eyes betray a sense of confusion, a preoccupation with the woman who used and betrayed her and yet somehow still looms large in her thoughts.

Villanelle is grieving, in her own way. Not just for Eve, but also for the inexplicable magnetism between them. For a moment, something — or rather, someone — broke through the numbness of her existence. Now that someone is gone, and with it any sense of newness or excitement.

When Konstantin appears at the end of the episode to inform Villanelle that is Eve is alive, she’s the most animated we’ve seen her in a while. Her face lights up with an intriguing combination of disbelief, fury, and elation as if her sense of purpose has been resurrected. 

The challenge of building a show around an impossible union between two people is that eventually, the narrative will end up circling the drain. There are limits to how long a relationship can remain compelling without consummation or resolution, and what felt thrilling and new at the beginning will eventually feel commonplace.

But while the story is limited in scope, there are also infinite ways to tell it — and with the decision to hire a new showrunner each season, Killing Eve has embraced an experimental form of storytelling in which voice, tone, and genre all change with every new chapter.

Season 1 was a cat-and-mouse game, while Season 2 unfurled like a tale of gothic horror.

Season 3, thus far, has the bones of a slow-burning noir detective story, with Eve as a self-destructive private investigator and Villanelle as the unforgettable femme fatale.

What did you think of this episode of Killing Eve? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

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Killing Eve airs Sunday at 9/8c on AMC and BBC America.

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