This entertaining episode underscores the problem with this hit series: it's a victim of its own success. The need to keep the viewer off-balance, provide a minimum weekly requirement of jolts of pleasure, at the risk (more than just risk, near-certainty) of destroying credibility and ruining the storytelling function, is obvious.
To take a broad-brush Hitchcockian analysis of what's wrong: the espionage thriller genre is built around suspense, and there's intrinsic suspense in following the adventures of our beloved pair of mismatched heroines. But in this episode, it's all about surprise, not suspense. Jodie's quirkiness is so over the top that she has to keep topping herself, and much of the black humor is just silly -as with the "putting a baby" in jeopardy trope. And the most groan-inducing element here is injecting her teddy bear fetish in the foreground, and running it into the ground. Sure, a talking teddy bear is a clever gimmick, but its resolution at the end of the segment is pure cornball. And Jodie's fashion sense had my mind straying - does she get to keep (or merely steal) the best of her outfits after the series has ended?
You don't need to study Marshall McLuhan to know a key difference between TV and movies as media, even now when streaming (and money-grubbing institutions like Netflix) have tried to blur the lines between the two. I grew up in the '50s and '60s overdosing on television while nurturing a life as a film buff that took over by the '70s, a decade when I attended an average of 400 films in theaters per year. You can get away with a lot in a movie because it has a freedom not possible in TV (other than those wonderful anthology series that were so prevalent but have long since disappeared from the medium), because of the "they have to come back next week" requirement. So Jodie and Sandra are not to be killed so frivolously as the rest of the cast. There's no suspense or surprise as to that simple fact. No "bye-bye Janet Leigh" like in "Psycho".
So as much as I was momentarily titillated by the periodic gimmicks here, almost inevitable whenever Jodie shows up on screen, in between, "Killing Eve" gets dull and even sour as we watch miserable characters feeling miserable, enacted by extremely talented actors who are having a field day thanks to the liberating notion of black humor, in which the term "overacting" has no meaning.
