>>But she's a holdover from his original work twenty years ago. It's disturbing and gratuitous--the way she is built to be a villain. But he was supposedly trying to go for continuity, and he did already build her that way twenty years ago, right?
Absolutely not. She was a perfectly nice lady whom we first saw giving him a massage. While pregnant, which she was almost all the way through YEAR ONE. And said pregnancy, plus the blondness of Essen, is what made him wander, and blackmail made him stop, and he broke his wife's heart.
In YEAR ONE it was just sad and human. Here it becomes monstrous.