Killing Eve – Hello, Losers

By: Kelly Kearney

Take a deep breath fans because this one is going to hurt and leave a gaping rainbow sized hole in your hearts in an exhaustingly typical way. In the most anticipated hour of the series, Eve and Villanelle finally unite on Gunn’s Island and what follows is a glimpse of what their futures could look like outside of the world of The Twelve. Unfortunately, satisfying resolutions are hard to come by in the television landscape these days, least of all on any show that courts LGBT fans to critical acclaim only to lure them into a deadly trap their hearts refused to allow then to see coming. When it comes down to stories about horrible people (and everyone on this show certainly fits that bill), happy endings can be transformative and unique but requires a bit of bravery that this finale was sorely lacking. So, prepare yourselves and grab some tissues and let’s dive into the final swansong of “Killing Eve.”

A Bloody-Good Reunion

After the universe told Eve (Sandra Oh) to go to the person who understands her best (who also happens to be a skilled assassin who could take out The Twelve), she heads to Gunn’s (Marie-Sophie Ferdane) island where Villanelle (Jodie Comer) is running from her one-night stand who turned their fun hook-up into a U-Haul style kidnapping. In the middle of the chase Gunn spots Eve making her way through the woods and the machete wielding woman turns on a dime–taking off after the visitor. In a matter of seconds the woman catches up to Eve and the two wrestle for the weapon while Gunn announces, “You can’t have her [Villanelle]! She’s mine!” Eve, who has been taking martial arts lessons as we saw earlier in the season when she pinned Yusef in the park, is bringing those skills to fight for her life. Before Gunn can get the upper hand  Eve bludgeons her with a rock and takes off up a tree and out of sight. In the distance, hidden behind some brush, Villanelle watches on with a smile as Eve drops down out of tree and onto Gunn and starts raking her eyes out. There is no time to waste. Gunn is bloodied and blinded but not dead and still has her machete ready to finish these two before they escape. Luckily, Eve and Villanelle steal a motorboat and flip her the bird on their way off of her sapphic island.

While the two on again off again, but always lethal, duo escape the clutches of the Hélène’s (Camille Cottin) hired Gunn we see Carolyn (Fiona Shaw) land at Heathrow airport to a smirking Hugo (Edward Bluemel) who is acting like the cat who caught the Queen’s canary. She is a traitor to her country and bringing her in to face the music would earn him a gold star at MI-6. The average person facing treason charges would be nervous or at least show regret for being caught, but not the emotionless Carolyn who is more offended by Hugo’s abuse of the safe house’s tea cups than the threat of a lifetime in jail. In fact, after she orders Hugo to remove all of the recording devices from the room she heartlessly tells him his new girlfriend is a Russian honeypot spy and she doesn’t feel an ounce of guilt for breaking his heart because “emotions are a scourge upon ones liberties.” She traded her feelings for power and international espionage long ago, so his sad face doesn’t affect her in the least. Having been compromised by his girlfriend leads Hugo to ask what Carolyn would want to keep her mouth shut and all she asks for is another 24 hours of freedom so she can take out The Twelve.

Where we do see a bit of feeling leak out through the cracks of her steely personality is when Pam (Anjana Vasan) meets her with news that she killed Konstantin (Kim Bodnia) with a pizza cutter. Carolyn takes a pause as his end wasn’t something she wanted, but when Pam tells her his last words were to deliver a letter and tell her he always loved her Carolyn almost fails to swallow down her emotional response. Still, she didn’t get where she is by crying over the spilled blood of an ex-lover and baby daddy. We never learn what was said in the letter, but we can assume it was a confession about killing Kenny, her son, something she always knew but ignored to keep playing this deadly game.

Love Leaves Matching Scars

After escaping the island, Eve and Villanelle finally have a moment to talk, but all the latter wants to do is pout and poke at Eve’s soft spot for her. Eve doesn’t much like it when the blonde is angry with her, but over the course of the day that changes thanks to a rainstorm and two annoying heteros that drive the bi-killer wives crazier than they already are. Without a vehicle and the rains pouring, Eve and Villanelle run into a young hiking couple who invites them to stay in their cabin until the weather passes. They warm up in front of the fire, still tense with each other but getting a kick out of the couple questioning their relationship. It isn’t nearly as interesting as the two’s shared kidney story that brought them together, but when they show off their scars it must elicit a feeling in Villanelle about the wounds that she and Eve inflicted on each other. Love can be a painfully splintered experience, as Villanelle remembers when after a night of sharing a sleeping bag she wakes to lift Eve’s shirt–caressing the bullet hole she lodged in her soulmate’s back. At first Eve is weirded out by the woman’s hand tracing over her scar, but eventually she relents and lets the moment happen– filling the room with that familiar electricity that always bound them together. When they finally speak Villanelle whispers a plan to steal the couple’s RV and a smiling Eve agrees because the alternative is killing the annoying lovebirds, especially after they ruined mood with a tarot card reading predicting Eve’s death. They’re not sticking around to see how that card plays out.

On the road is the happiest we’ve seen these two – always dodging death and delivering it with bloodied fists of fury. It is nice to see them out of the closet of shame and feeding each other candy, bickering about French fry condiments and all the other road trip with your girlfriend types of banter. Martin said it best in the last episode when he spoke about the undeniable sanctity in being in the presence of your other half – the one who sees your soul. And after their night together, Villanelle’s eyes are wide open. Now she is over her bad mood and feeling pretty romantic as the two walk down a desolate road slapping backsides and smirking like they knew their journey was always leading up to this moment. When Villanelle leans into to kiss Eve on the cheek it ignites something in the women and Eve pauses with a smile that says it all. After four years dancing around each other, trying to get the other’s attention, Eve falls deeply into an all-consuming sensuous open mouthed and sticky sweet with smiles and longing looks kiss, which has been simmering on the backburner of this espionage show since the first time Villanelle tackled Eve in her bathtub. The only difference now is the obsession has been replaced with a passion that paints a portrait of two halves becoming one—a complete and utterly messy whole. We can assume the two consummate their coupling in the van when we see Villanelle dive in after Eve and we hear the tell-tale signs of lovers squealing in delight. The whole moment feels a bit like the happy ending the fans were begging for. But romance aside, these two are still horrible people and their slow burn romance doesn’t erase the violence they’ve unleashed on their intercontinental trek to dismantle The Twelve. So, given TV’s exhausting addiction to ripping happiness away from anyone who colors outside the lines of heteronormativity, it is no surprise the writer’s weaved a dreaded time bomb into the fabric of this resolution, and that clock ticks right up until the final seconds of the show.

Killing The Hope With Familiar Tropes

After charging Hélène’s phone an incoming text points to a meeting with The Twelve, sending Eve and Villanelle to the Barn Swallow pub in London located nearby the meeting place. There they run into Pam and Carolyn, who are equally as shocked to see the two enemies turned lovers alive and well. Villanelle gives Eve a moment to talk to Carolyn as Pam fills her in on Konstantin’s untimely pizza cutter end– to which she says a little regretful goodbye in Russian. The text means The Twelve are in Eve’s crosshairs and Carolyn, who is her usual condescending self, assumed as much because “one of the great unspoken truths of life is that people behave exactly as you expect them to.” She is no different; her apathetic and pragmatic mind only works in setting goals and burying them six feet under; loyalty and love never factor into her plans. So, when she gives Eve the nod to go head and take the group out, we shouldn’t be shocked she was plotting her own endgame the entire time. She tries roping Pam into her plans and (surprising nobody but her) the young mortician turns her down. Pam has a new outlook on life and realizes Konstantin was right – this world will only end in her death. Life is short and even shorter when you disappoint Carolyn, so Pam leaves her would-be mentor/destroyer alone and buried in her thoughts. Now the next part of this story is solely up to Carolyn and she has never turned away from a challenge.

Docked across from the Barn Swallow, Eve and Villanelle track The Twelve to a riverboat called the “Dixie Queen” where, ironically, it’s been rented for a gay wedding. Posing as the officiant, Villanelle orders Eve to distract the crowd and then kisses her like it’s their last goodbye. The two separate with Eve doing her best to marry off the two men and then diving into some electric slide dancing to meld in with the festivities. Villanelle, for her part, is doing a bit of dancing of her own when we see her asphyxiate the kitchen staff with a gas leak and then waltz into The Twelve’s hidden meeting room. The faceless group gets the bloody surprise ending the two women have been thirsting for since the pilot episode. It’s a shame that after four years of build-up we never see who these people are, just their blood splattering the walls and the camera’s lens as Villanelle’s greatest moment is sandwiched in-between scenes of Eve laughing and dancing. After her mission is done and every last member is dead, Villanelle watches her lover dance to the celebration of life showing the juxtaposition between the end and the beginning…the darkness and the light of this ying-yangy duo. Villanelle is the harbinger of death, a psychopath who couldn’t feel anything until she met this dancing queen who seems to feel everything right down to the cheesy beats of the wedding tunes. When Eve spots her blood-soaked partner in crime it’s a clue the job is done and the two head out onto the boat’s deck and embrace. The Twelve are gone (at least this crop of them are) and, even though Villanelle did the hard part herself, it was a two-person mission that could only be accomplished when they got over themselves and worked together. In any partnership there are roles each of us take on based on our particular skill set and for Villanelle killing is what she has always been good at; it is her masterpiece, her symphony and the reason she captured Eve’s heart in a vice grip. In a show that spent four seasons building a slow burn with a side of espionage, the flames were snuffed out by a sniper bullet sending the two lovers overboard and into the Thames. In her last moments Villanelle chooses to sacrifice herself so that Eve can live on, using her body as a human shield. Bullet after bullet zipping through the water riddles the blonde’s body and even pierces the chest of her love, although not fatally. Eve practically drowns in her agony as a halo of blood surrounds Villanelle, trying but failing to reach her lifeless body– their hands never quite meeting as the currents keep them apart.

The death of Eve played out like the famous Birth of Adam painting–two hands reaching across an ever-widening divide. Instead of breathing life into her it pulled the meaning of her existence further away and took with it, the future she has planned for herself. As Villanelle sinks to the bottom of the Thames, Eve emerges thrashing around, unleashing the primal screams of a heart ripped into two and all of it is thanks to a smirking Carolyn who told Eve who she was back at the Barn Swallow pub. Why the smart, over-achiever didn’t see her coming I will never know because Carolyn has always behaved exactly as expected. It’s the trusting her that seems so unexpectedly out of character for Eve, and that mistake cost her everything just as the tarot deck predicted. Sunk was the last breath of understanding as to who she became when Villanelle entered her life and the extinguished hope to explore it new ways. She lost everything on this mission to take down The Twelve (her career, her best friends, her husband and the only person who saw the darkness in her and embraced it) and all for what? So she can live the rest of her life floating through a sea of regret; fearing the next stray bullet is coming with her name on it? Perhaps this wasn’t a story about the destruction of Eve, the MI-6 agent who let a female assassin cut her heart out just so she could feel something, but it is of a of show that told its fans it was ok to be a frog who loves a scorpion only to strike them dead with its venomous stinger the second happiness was in reach.