‘Killing Eve’ Season 2 Episode 7 Recap: “Wide Awake”

One of the best things about Killing Eve—the thing that makes it a completely unique television-watching experience—is that it never lets your forget that Villanelle is a psychopath. Her condition is unrelenting. Showrunner Emerald Fennell might lull us into a false sense of security sometimes, but it’s only so that it hurts worse when she snaps a tween’s neck, o pushes a complete stranger into traffic, or intimates that she’s going to kill a busty art teacher, puts enough riveting scenes after it to make me completely forget about it, and then ends the episode with a slow zoom-out on said busty art teacher, suffocated and wrapped up in caution tape.

Villanelle will never change; to hope that she will would be fallacy. We can only embrace the devil in a blue dress (or bronze crushed velvet Description crêpe, as it were) she’s proven herself to be time and time again. She doesn’t love Eve, she can’t. She won’t start a real relationship with Eve, or change for her; there’s a very real chance she’ll kill Eve one of these days, or get herself killed trying. Because for as playful as Killing Eve is, as lightly as it treats violence, as much as it relishes indulgence in fashion and food and non-penetrative sex—this one part is very straight forward. They will not let up here: Villanelle is a psychopath. And now she has a friend…

Let’s give it up for Aaron Peel, coming out of nowhere to be an actually interesting character! Eve and Villanelle spent all of one episode being successful business partners, and now Eve has become a clingy mess while Villanelle’s eyes are already wandering to potential other allegiances. Don’t get me wrong, there’s still lust there. But I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the show has gone to such length to remind us of just who Villanelle is and what she’s capable of in the last episode before what guarantees to be a banger (yeah, I said it!) of a finale.

Let’s put our fanciest PJs on, our tiniest earpieces in, and tuck ourselves in, shall we?

Because it all starts out rather domestically this episode. Eve shows up at Villanelle’s flat while she’s making breakfast after just receiving an invitation from Aaron Peel to lunch, exactly like they’d hoped. The Faraday conference is happening in Rome, and Eve needs Villanelle to be on the inside to figure out what Peele’s weapon is and who he’s selling it to. But first, she needs to quiz her girlfriend on her psychological state because her own is clearly cracking. Eve asks Villanelle if she meant what she said in the AA meeting while undercover as Billie about not wanting anything or liking anything. Villanelle shrugs and says she doesn’t know…

But Eve won’t let up: “You don’t feel anything?” she asks Villanelle, almost as if she’s forgotten the time in Season 1 when Villanelle told her that telling a psychopath they’re a psychopath makes them angry, or more recently when she told Eve to check herself before she wrecks herself with the careless way that she’s begun speaking to Villanelle—who is, as a reminder, a psychopath.

“I feel things when I’m with you,” Villanelle coos in response…

Riiiiiight as the two women from the final scene in last week’s episode (you know, the one that kind of indicated Villanelle was going to murder them and turn them into a cone of gyro meat) come sliding out of her bedroom and shyly thank her for the sex. “You’re welcome!” Villanelle replies earnestly. And then to Eve: “Don’t be jealous. You know I’m not with them when I’m with them.”

Aaron Peel is whole other story, however. I don’t know what to make of this weirdo, and it doesn’t seem that Villanelle does either. He apparently liked that Billie decked him with a book and invites her to lunch where he’s rented out the entire restaurant and ordered her the best thing on the menu. She tells him that’s a little presumptuous; he tells her to eat the pasta, and then watches her while she eats every bite. He asks her if she befriended his sister on purpose: “I know what women do for rich men.” He might not want to know what Villanelle does to rich men—but he also might be starting to catch on. She tells him of her love for money: “I like buying things. I like owning them. I like looking at them … things make me feel something.” Aaron tells Billie to come to Rome with him, and then another plate of pasta arrives and he tells her to eat it. It’s unlikely that Aaron feels anything, but if there’s one thing that simulates it for him, it seems to be control.

Something that Eve could use a little more of, as she’s spiraling out, not being able to control her obsession with Villanelle, while also no longer having anything to anchor her back home. She leaves Villanelle multiple voicemails while she’s on her date with Aaron “just checking in,” which Villanelle chuckles at when she listens to.

Eve tries to act the diligent employee at Carolyn’s house, assuring her boss that she has a handle on Villanelle and can totally oversee her in Rome without Konstantin’s help. But Carolyn thinks she’ll at least need a bag man, so she tells her to take Hugo along. She reiterates that getting the information they need in Rome is crucial: “She mustn’t kill Aaron. I hate to be strict, but she really musn’t kill anyone.” And that, uh, is maybe going to be a toughie.

Because in the next scene, we see Nico and Gemma bringing some of his things to a storage unit, and it seems a little odd to be in a scene that doesn’t center on Eve or Villanelle, and then suddenly, just as Gemma is offering to “do more” for Nico…

Villanelle is there, who both of these people have met, although she was in disguise that time at the school and Gemma is dangerously daft. And just as she’s starting to remember, Villanelle pulls a knife out of her (amazing tartan trouser) pocket and holds it to Nico’s stomach. He remains calm and asks her what she wants.

“I want the recipe for your Shepard’s pie.”

Eve likes it, so she wants his recipe. But, y’know, she does also wants to kill them because, well, psychopath. After she gets the recipe—the key is the Worcestershire!—she pushes them both onto a couch and asks Nico if he loves a trembling Gemma. No. And does he love Eve? Of course, she’s his wife. “So close,” Villanelle sighs: “I was so close to letting the both of you go—should have chose Gemma.” Nicoe begs Villanelle not to hurt Gemma, but she tells him that Eve would never forgive her if she hurt him. And apparently she’s got to hurt someone so…

We don’t get to see what happens next, but when Konstantin shows up at Villanelle’s flat, he begins removing the various weapons from her luggage she’s packing for Rome. “How did that get in there?” she asks innocently as he pulls out a roll or razor wire. But killing is not an option on this mission, so she has to have a safe word. “How do I even get ‘gentleman’ into a sentence,” the woman who was fully prepared to murder someone with razor wire huffs. Kosntantin also gives her a pack of birth control pills, one of which is actually a tiny microphone so that Eve and Hugo can monitor what’s happening when she arrives at Aaron’s palazzo.

But when Villanelle does arrive at Aaron’s (amazing, luxurious, opulent) palazzo, she doesn’t receive any of her luggage. He’s bought her all new things to wear, complete with luscious jackets and lingerie even though he’s already promised he won’t touch her. But for Aaron, it’s not about the touching. As she roams around her room taking it all in, he leans back in a chair in his room, watching her on three different monitors like a real fuckin’ creep.

Something tells me Eve won’t handle not being able to keep tabs on Villanelle very well, and that something is the little visit she pays to Martin, the MI6 psychopath expert, under the guise of getting advice on what to do if the high stress environment of getting information out of a psychopath control freak starts weighing on her own psychopath asset. Martin, being a psychopath expert and all that, quickly picks up that Eve might actually be asking for advice on what to do if she’s freaking out in a high stakes situation. At first Eve tries to deny it, but then Martin asks her:

“How much of the day do you spend thinking about her?”
“Most of it.”
“Are you two in a relationship?”
“Define relationship.”
“Are you having sex?”
“No.”
“How are things at home?”
“My husband left me.”
“Are you behaving differently? Doing things you normally wouldn’t?”
“Yes.”
“Do you feel unsafe?”
“[Laughs] H’yeah.”
“How else do you feel right now?”

It is a dense scene between Sandra Oh and Adeel Akhtar who is so good as Martin, and in under a minute, serves as an excellent reminder that Eve may be coming unhinged, and she may be taking on some of Villanelle’s characteristics, but she is no psychopath. She feels, and she wants, and she knows the difference between a truth and a lie.

Martin tells Eve that he advised Carolyn not to keep Eve on this assignment because she was too attached. And earlier, Kenny told Eve not to go to Rome because of something he’s learned on his new MI6 project, but Carolyn interrupted them, acting typically suspicious, before Kenny could compete his warning. But if you can believe this, Eve still goes to Rome, accompanied by Hugo, and immediately puts herself in harm’s way, risking going to the restaurant where Billie and Aaron are having lunch so that she can slip Villanelle a second microphone in a dinner roll since she never got the one in her luggage. After some light finger fondling on the bread hand-off, Aaron returns to the table from his call and tells Billie that they have to leave because he has business to attend to—but there’s an ice cream shop on the way, and he wants to watch her eat some crème. Great.

Surprisingly, Villanelle seems mostly fine and definitely intrigued by Aaron’s creepiest qualities, being something of a creep herself, after all. While he watches from his secret cameras, not quite able to tell what she’s doing, Villanelle eats the roll in her purse, and slips the microphone into her clothes, laying down on her couch to sing a few verses of Blondie’s “One Way Or Another” to Eve over the mic. When she emerges for dinner with Aaron’s associates, he demands that she take off the belt she’s wearing because it’s ruining her outfit. He tells her that she’ll be bored stiff at the dinner, and she say that she’ll be fine. “No you won’t,” Aaron instructs. “Okay, I’ll be bored,” Villanelle shrugs.

“Sounds like you’ve got competition,” Hugo mocks Eve as they listen to the feed of Villanelle and Aaron. “They’re both coldblooded psychopaths.”

At dinner, all the dirt comes out. The men Aaron is meeting with are Russians who want to bid on the weapon, but they want assurance that it’s as good as Aaron says it is. So Aaron gives a detailed description of what one of the men has done for the last 24 hours which includes texting his mom to say I love you, telling his wife he’d be working late, having sex with his boyfriend twice in between watching Gossip Girl episodes as a hotel, being self-conscious about his penis size which Aaron assures him is “average, if a little on the thin side,” and dreaming about whales.

How he knows that last bit is unclear, but it’s enough to convince the Russians to make a bid, and to tell Eve that the weapon he’s selling is unbounded surveillance. Afterward, Aaron tells Billie that he tried to run a similar kind of check on her. “Do you know what I found? A shadow,” he tells her. “You’re the only person in the world I know nothing about, nothing real. A void.”

“That’s me,” Villanelle responds, and Aaron says that’s him too. Two voids, sitting side-by-side on a fancy couch, facing straight forward. Villanelle asks Aaron if he ever gets lonely and he tells her never: “I’m with people all the time.” And more, he knows everything about them. “You don’t want to talk to them?” Villanelle asks. “Touch them, sleep with them?”

“God no,” Aaron responds. “Do you?”

“All the time,” she tells him. Because not all voids are the same kind of empty.

Back in their hotel room, Hugo asks Eve if they should call Carolyn, and she tells him Villanelle will be fine. “I’m not worried for her, I’m worried for us,” he says. “They’ve gotten a bit cozy, you have to admit.” That is absolutely not something Eve is willing to admit, and she tells Hugo to go to bed while she continues to listen with the earpiece in his room. And lo and behold, after Aaron and Villanelle have silently parted ways, Villanelle gets into bed and starts talking: “Are you having fun in Rome? You should let go once in a while. I can help you.”

Eve turns around and looks at Hugo in the bed, walks over, takes her pants off, mounts him, and tells him not to talk. She’s got listening to do.

In the morning, both women wake up smiling, as does Hugo, but when he sees Eve take the earpiece out, he pouts, “Thanks for the threesome,” before storming for the room.

It’s all really enough to make you forget that the last time we saw Nico, Villanelle had him at knifepoint in a storage unit. That is, until we see him once more, waking up from unconsciousness in that same storage unit, horror passing over his face as he spots Gemma with a plastic bag taped over her head, suffocated to death by a psychopath who just had consensual phone sex with his wife.

Well, at least he doesn’t know about that last bit…

Jodi Walker writes about TV for Entertainment Weekly, Vulture, Texas Monthly, and in her pop culture newsletter These Are The Best Things. She vacillates between New York, North Carolina, and every TJ Maxx in between.

Stream Killing Eve Season 2 Episode 7 ("Wide Awake") on BBC America