Villanelle in season one enjoyed her job and her life. The show was about punishing Villanelle starting from Season 2, and it got worse with each new season, to the point where she had a nervous breakdown, tried to change and find religion, until they finally just had her shot in the finale, the most boring way to end her story and the show. The problem with Killing Eve after the first season is that not only did the showrunners who succeeded Waller-Bridge not know what the hell to do with Villanelle, but they also had that British puritanical streak that everyone has to suffer and be punished for enjoying life. Waller-Bridge's ability to find joy in her characters' lives is actually a rare turn from the puritanism of many British storytellers who feel the need to punish their characters, especially the women. Fleabag did terrible things and took responsibility, but she was never miserable about it. This is what made her show Fleabag a career-defining breakthrough – her heroine found joy in sex and living no matter how dysfunctional, messy, and hurtful relationships got. Showrunner Phoebe Waller-Bridge is a British writer who finds joy and comedy in the messiest situations.
It also gave Sandra Oh a breakthrough role that allowed her full range of emotional complexity and jittery comedy, launching her career into a new trajectory. Eve, the government agent tracking her discovers Eve to be her shadow self, the opposite of her repressed, rule-bound life. She killed without remorse and wore crazy, fabulous clothes. Villanelle ( Jodie Comer in her breakthrough career-making role) is a fantasy figure who has come to represent the kind of freedom that many women crave but is impossible in real life, a woman who has fun with her life. The latter seemed to be mutual, but the women's mutual attraction wasn't necessarily sexual as emotional. It broke the mold for its gleeful subversiveness: it was about a hitwoman who enjoyed killing people without apology, and the repressed intelligence agent hunting her who develops a fascination for her that walked the line between envy and lust.
The first season of Killing Eve is still its best. That's the Villanelle that I wrote, that Phoebe turned into a screen character, and that Jodie ran with so gloriously." "When Phoebe Waller-Bridge and I first discussed Villanelle's character five years ago," he wrote in the Guardian, "We agreed that she was defined by what Phoebe called her "glory": her subversiveness, her savage power, her insistence on lovely things. Even Luke Jennings, the original creator of the Villanelle novels said, as politely as possible, that it sucked.