A Continent of Clutter:Killing Eve (Series #2).

"No matter what I do, I don't feel anything" - Villanelle.

You're not the only one. After over five hours of the second season of Killing Eve I'd reached the point where there was nothing that could shock me, nothing that could excite me, and nothing that could even particularly interest me. It's sad to say but Killing Eve jumped the shark pretty early on in this series and I doubt I'll be hanging around to watch the already recommissioned third series.

Pity. I'd thoroughly enjoyed the first season which I'd described as "dark" but "never cold". Season #2 didn't veer away from the path of darkness, that's for sure, but it lacked warmth, it lacked emotional depth, and, most of all, it lacked a credible plot. It failed to grip. At times it felt like a series of set pieces that had been sandboxed by a team of advertising executives blowing smoke up each other's arses after a heavy lunch and a few lines of bugle whilst up against a tight deadline

Scenes and episodes appeared to be in competition with each other in an attempt to shock and awe us into submission and what story there was, always (as my friend Michelle says) "silly" to begin with, was left almost threadbare as a succession of special guests lined up to have their moment on this most lauded of shows. What is this? The fucking Muppets?

It started promisingly enough. Kicking off just thirty seconds after the events that brought the first season to a close, it's not long before we hear the familiar strains of Cigarettes After Sex and we're in Paris (Gare du Nord, the Eiffel Tower - a couple of quick signifiers), Villanelle is in hospital and Eve is mistaken for a junkie before slicing up a huge batch of carrots to the sound of Kim Wilde and then lying in a cold bath, ignoring her phone.

I'm still no clearer who 'the Twelve' are (and that will remain the case until the bitter end) but there's a brutal mercy killing that completely blindsided me, a reasonably funny scene of Villanelle being horrified at having to wear Crocs, and another set in the Barbican which is strangely comforting amidst all the horror - and horror is what this is all about.

It seems like a constant attempt to raise the bar of grossness, and that comedy, and not only does everything else suffer as a consequence but sometimes the comedy, though never the gross out, doesn't pass muster. Exhumed corpses and empty eyeball sockets can't really fail to look disturbing but a basesball cap with LOL emblazoned on the front of it, while surely an attempt to remark on the bizarre assassination of Kim Jong-un's half brother Kim Jong-nam by a woman with the same 'legend' on her top, in Kuala Lumpur airport in February 2017, sadly comes across about as amusingly as, well, a baseball cap with LOL emblazoned on the front of it.

As the action shifts from Calais to Amsterdam, from Rome to Richmond upon Thames, and from, bizarrely, Basildon to (unbelievable this one) the Forest of Dean we get to see Zoe Wanamaker (a perfectly decent actress who nevertheless has turned up for the celebrity guestfest) eating Pringles out of a bin and talking about Torture Garden, we get references to Eric Carle's The Very Hungry Caterpillar, we get to see people beaten to death in car washes, and we get intimations of Zero Dark Thirty style 'enhanced interrogation' techniques in a portacabin.

But to what avail? The shopworn storyline gets looser and more ludicrous the further we get into it. Which isn't how it should be. The macabre and surreal set pieces flow thick and fast and some of them, to be fair, work quite well, at least as standalone spectacles. Julian Barratt, of all the guests, fares best. He lives in a creepy house full of dolls and calls his hot water bottle 'hotty botty'. Villanelle runs into him buying milk, Marmite, and Pot Noodles in a supermarket in Essex. Julian's character, also called Julian of course, is almost as dark as Villanelle.

The scenes in Amsterdam's red light district were noteworthy too. Inventive even. I've certainly never seen an attractive woman in a pig mask getting it on with handcuffs to A Windmill in Old Amsterdam before, that's for sure, and I can assure it's not for lack of trying. That the ensuing carnage looks like something from Hermann Nitsch and the Vienna Actionists is hardly necessary and nor is the half-arsed attempt to make some kind of observation about the ubiquity of Instagram. It comes across like one of those nobs who accuse you of spending your entire holiday on Facebook just because you've uploaded a few photos.

While attempts at social observation are kept thankfully low, Killing Eve just isn't realistic enough for them to work (there's a nod to the current vogue for lobbing milkshakes at fascists but that's about it), there are plenty of knowing references to the art world. One scene looks like one of Dorothea Tanning's doors and corridors paintings and there's a shot of Villanelle's new handler (the unfortunate Raymond, Adrian Scarborough plays him as a provincial nightclub bouncer in a leather jacket) which riffs on Van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait!

As Villanelle, Jodie Comer gets, as ever, to wear some great outfits. From the sexy to the utterly ludicrous, at one point she looks like Klaus Nomi in a kimono and other pluses include the music (Goldfrapp, Jane Weaver, Blondie, Terry Jacks, Juice Newton, Roxette (!), Fabienne Del Sol (who I used to work with), and, as ever, Unloved) and I'd have to concede some lines of the script bear repeating. Favourites of mine included "you look like someone's stuck a moustache on some fudge", "my brother used to jam his hamsters in an old loo roll", and "why do rich people talk like children?".

But as we swing back and forth between AA meetings and fencing practice, and as we see Villanelle stare down a human statue outside Tate Modern before she's donning retro student fashion to parade around Oxford like a Sicilian cat in mourning or something out of Brideshead Revisited, I realise I'm still totally unsure what any of the main character's motivations are and that I was not only frustrated, but actually bored, by the constant deluge of shock tactics and craved some genuine tension.

It pleased me that Holborn was pronounced correctly, I enjoyed it when Villanelle stuck it to bullies (more so in a world where the bullies have more control than they've had for decades) and all the actors put in great performances. The new ones take a while to gel in but eventually sinister Aaron Peel (Henry Lloyd-Hughes) starts to hold his own with Comer and Sandra Oh as Eve. Kim Bodnia (Konstantin), Fiona Shaw (Carolyn), and Kenny (Sean Delaney) all return from the first series with no discernible deterioration in the quality of their performance and Owen McDonnell as Eve's long suffering husband Niko is finally given something to get his teeth into.

But, as the series reaches its denouement, and a knife is held to somebody's head to demand a recipe for shepherd's pie, should I really be wondering what type of font it is they're using for the title sequence? It's one specially created for the show by graphic designer Matt Willey, apparently, but that's not the point. The point is this proves that even, after investing more time than it would take to listen to Wu-Tang Forever twice in its entirety, I'm still not hooked.

The constant fights between men and women start to look desperate, the regular referencing of apples (Eve, geddit?) leads nowhere but up its own arsehole, and, when in Rome, Aaron Peel starts spying on Villanelle it serves only to remind me of the critically maligned 1993 erotic thriller Sliver starring William Baldwin and Sharon Stone. When Peel buys expensive clothes for her and asks to watch her eat gelato before insisting she spit out the orange chocolate it's neither erotic nor thrilling.

It's possible that Phoebe Waller-Bridge's diminished role in the second season was responsible for the downfall in quality, though with guest writers of the calibre of the League of Gentlemen's Jeremy Dyson you'd hope not, but, to me, it seems more likely that Killing Eve has become a very early victim of its own success. In attempting to make the show grosser, funnier, and more violent the creators neglected to give us enough character development or plotline to keep us sufficiently engaged and, by the end, much like Villanelle herself, we felt nothing. A shame.