A sour Killing Eve takes an ill-fated trip to the woods
The moral of the story is, no one should ever go camping with Villanelle.
TV Reviews killing eve
There’s a certain type of Killing Eve episode in which the only way to describe the overall tone is sour. The violence gets grimier than usual, the vision of humanity grimmer, the humor bleaker. “Don’t Get Eaten” is one of those episodes.
On the one hand, episodes like this one serve as an important reminder that the world these people inhabit is downright grotesque—no matter how gorgeous the clothes or the locations, these are people living immersed in murder and violence. And on the other hand, these episodes usually make for a queasy, disconcerting viewing experience. It’s like there’s a sliding scale for any Killing Eve episode between the near-bubblegum pleasures of its more “fun” episodes, and the ones where Villanelle, in hideous jean shorts, murders two people in a tent.
Those murders are the inevitable result of her efforts to join a church, a move foreshadowed both by Eve asking if people can really change, and also by the fact that this is Villanelle, come on. Her ongoing quest to be good, or whatever flimsy collection of characteristics she imagines will get herself there, comes to a crashing end because she doesn’t actually understand human dynamics. She assumes that splashing the pastor’s dark past in front of everyone on the camping trip will win them to her side, misunderstanding that their loyalty would be to him instead of her, and the concept that a group like this might be invested in helping people overcome their pasts, even though she herself has joined for that very reason. Her quest to be good is also going to be stymied considering her own desire to make excuses for herself—take, for instance, her explanation to May that because people started thinking she was evil, she believed them. It’s an oddly meta moment, because as a viewer you see a teary-eyed Jodie Comer pouring her heart out to May, and so you can understand, in that moment, why May is so tempted to believe her. So much of Villanelle’s success at fooling people, despite her very evidently monstrous nature, is that people are so ready to believe better of her. If she wasn’t beautiful, and stylish, and capable of working up a dramatic tear in the right moment, would this work over and over again?
It’s May’s depressing forgiveness of Villanelle that makes the sourness of this episode so distinct. There is never any reward for believing the best of Villanelle, or forgiving her, or forming any kind of connection to her. There’s only the brief and incorrect belief that she’s something she’s not, and then a range of how much that naïveté is going to cost you. If anything, the reason Eve has made it this long is that her fascination with Villanelle’s dark side means that she has no interest in Villanelle trying to redeem herself, and isn’t going to believe her when she tries.
And as usual, it’s her own desire to stick her hand into a fire that leads Eve into more trouble. There’s a point where this behavior becomes less a character trait and more a storytelling crutch. Instead of gathering intel, learning more about who Hélène is, Eve just goes barging in, and has her usual sexually charged yet violent interaction with a dangerous woman. The meandering investigations of the Twelve have suffered from this issue all along—sporadically, we’re given faces who may possibly connected to the Twelve, then Eve or someone else comes crashing in and kills them, and there’s no real forward movement on the overall concept. We’ve been hearing about this sinister group for multiple seasons now, and it’s still not entirely clear what the group even is. This season, another new face got introduced, and Yusuf spent all of one episode pointlessly telling Eve not to approach Hélène, but we as viewers know she’s just going to ignore him and do it anyway.
Meanwhile, Carolyn is stuck in the land of unsubtle plot developments, where she’s threatened with a dead rat (after defecting? Why not continue wooing her to keep her there?) and then explains in a moment of blunt exposition that actually she’s defected because she thinks the Russians will help solve the mystery of why her son was murdered. Her daughter doesn’t merit a mention, even though we spent all last season with her.
It’s all a little blah and sour, with the various leads stranded too far away from each other to provide the pop of interpersonal conflict this show usually thrives on. Carolyn and Villanelle are treading water in unfamiliar surroundings, and Eve is at least on a surface level moving forward…but completely alone, with employers the show hasn’t bothered to introduce, and a love interest who’s been given almost no characterization besides ~fitness~. As grimy as this world is under its surface level polish, at its best it’s still fully immersive, a warped vision of conflicts between the wealthy and powerful in Europe tucked inside the antagonistic love affair between its dual protagonists. When you spend too much of an episode getting distracted by thoughts like “come on, a large crowd of people can now identify Villanelle on sight and she’s murdered two people”, it gets a whole lot less immersive.
Stray observations
- Poor horny Barbara has to be told to stay in her own tent, and then gets abandoned during the trust exercise, but she does get her moment back when she tells off Villanelle…and survives the experience.
- Those jean shorts were a crime against Jodie Comer and also against the very concept of jean shorts. No, this is not a Jorts reference. I would never associate him with those terrible jorts.
- Speaking of fashion, we’re rapidly heading towards a place where Eve is going to end up the best-dressed person on the show without ever improving how she dresses.
- Is that going to be the end of Villanelle Jesus? That was brief.
- More proof that going camping is never a good idea, she said, nodding sagely from within her city apartment that she never leaves.
40 Comments
i guess the reviews here will be one episode behind? episode 1 and 2 aired together last week and today’s was episode 3.
Speaking of fashion, we’re rapidly heading towards a place where Eve is
going to end up the best-dressed person on the show without ever
improving how she dresses.hahaha noooooo. a lot of us are actually looking for the multi-colored jacket villanelle wears to bible camp. anyone?.
They air that way on AMC+. There was only one episode last week on cable AMC and episode 2 aired tonight.
I actually went out and bought the sweater she wore in Season Two after she lost all her clothes at the hospital. The sweater was supposed to look like it was something she found in a dumpster, but it was actually a nice, rather high-end item.
What where was it from??? Love it.
I actually found it used on Poshmark.Sorry I didn’t see your message sooner.
They just flushed all the ambiguity about whether Villanelle can grow beyond being a narcissistic psychopath.
And honestly the grinning psychopath routine has stopped being charming.
I really liked this show back in season 1. Obviously a lot of shows lose quality as they go on. But its still been a really sad decline for my point of view. If this was not the final season I would have packed it in and stopped watching. But even in this final season it seems we still have more wheels to spin, pointless new characters we don’t care about, more investigation into The 12 that we don’t care about and the one thing we do care about, Eve and Villanelle still spend most episodes apart.The worst thing is that I’m not sure how much I even care about Eve and Villanelle at this point, such is how far they’ve tried to stretch this show. This didn’t need more than 2 seasons, 3 at the very most. Losing Phoebe-Waller Bridge after season 1 was also a massive blow in hindsight.
the one thing we do care about, Eve and Villanelle still spend most episodes apartthe cast did a panel and jodie comer said that she and sandra oh filmed a lot together this season so if that’s anything to look forward to. i mean they have to. if this is the last season do some fan service, but only 5 episodes left and they’re still separated.
The worst thing is that I’m not sure how much I even care about Eve and Villanelle at this pointi’m starting to feel this way too. eve, atleast outwardly, does not care about villanelle at all so why should we care about their one-sided or non-existent relationship? i don’t know where their headed with villanelle’s existential crisis but this season isn’t really feeling like a final season.
I will say the show is doing me a favor I guess by making it clear there is nothing for me to be invested in other than the performances of Jodie Comer, Sandra Oh, and Fiona Shaw, since they are not even pretending anything else matters
The fact that Killing Eve is blessed with three supremely talented actors in Oh, Comer and Shaw drives me to slog through The Twelve and that pointless plot, but it’s not enough. Every so often you have to write a damn story and this season is nothing but a collage of scenes loosely connected to the next.
Three episodes in (for the AMC+ crowd) and the more I watch the less I care.
I feel the same way. I’m kinda struggling to remember what I found so fascinating about the Eve/Villanelle dynamic, which is such a bummer. At this point I can’t think of a way the show could wrap up and leave me satisfied, but it looks like I won’t care enough to be very disappointed.
I hate to be such a downer!! It’s just lost me.
The biggest issue is that these days people want a series that goes on and on. Even if the creator of the series plots out 2 or 3 seasons for the whole thing, the money people and networks want more than that. So when the last season is reached, there will be pressure to keep it going. For shows like NCIS or Law & Order, that’s easy enough to do. For other shows, not so much.
May forgiving Villanelle so quickly after nearly being murdered by her is not even trying to have characters that act like real people anymore. I don’t know what this show is doing right now, but it’s terrible.
It kinda feels like this season’s writers didn’t watch the last season finale.
‘…Villanelle, in hideous jean shorts, murders two people in a tent.’I have the weirdest boner…
When you spend too much of an episode getting distracted by thoughts like “come on, a large crowd of people can now identify Villanelle on sight and she’s murdered two people”, it gets a whole lot less immersive.They were also very loud murders, in a tent, surrounded by other tents.It was hard to stay immersed.
It doesn’t go unnoticed. #nospoiler
A psychopathic woman going around murdering people in tents, what is this Sleepaway Camp 3: Teenage Wasteland?
I thought Season 3 was OK to begin with, but they left themselves too much to do in the last 2 episodes, so it felt rushed. After 2 episodes of Season 4, I’m coming to the conclusion that this is a show which will keep me until the end only because its deterioration has been gradual enough for me not to give up on it. But if I’d watched Season 1 again before watching this – I’d probably be shocked by how far it has fallen.
Maybe, but I start to suspect that s1 was not all that much better, but was just fresher because we had not seen these actors in these roles before & there was more of a surprise factor to it
Maybe. Perhaps it was always style over substance as well.
Beg to differ. Season One also had the advantage of the humor and wit of Phoebe Waller-Bridge as the head writer and humor and wit has all but vanished from Killing Eve in subsequent seasons.
If your idea of being edgy is killing cats and dressing up in Jesus drag, maybe it’s a sign of flailing desperation, not inspiration.
I figured Villanelle would have to kill everyone in the camp because of how much noise her two victims made while she was killing them. But then noone reacted and she just casually walked away.I’ve gotten so used to the “main character charging head on into danger with zero regard to any form of intelligence” that I’m basically dead to it now. It’s such an overused trait in so many stories. Plot armor has become a real issue these days.
Killing Eve is becoming a case study in a series that clearly wasn’t prepared for the hit it became with season 1, and did not have a long term plan. Because this series has been spinning its wheels for a long time now, and oh my god I so do not give a damn about The 12.
It reminds me a lot of the show Revenge, which similarly tried to delve into a mysterious group that viewers did not give a shit about because the writers so clearly did not actually plan for what the group was or why it mattered.
JORTS SHOUT OUT
The plotline with The Twelve starts to remind me of GK Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, where the detective infiltrates the Anarchist Council, only to ultimately learn that the council is entirely composed of undercover detectives pointlessly at war with each other
That would be an ending I’d be mildly interested in seeing.
I’ve never heard of this but it sounds fucking hilarious. What’s this response to a comment from last year, you ask? Well, my friend, I’m finally watching this last season, and I forgot The Twelve even existed.
One of the wildest declines in my TV watching career. This show is an embarrassment.
BTW, it was Jael that (originally) killed with a tent peg in the quiz.
Then Jael Heber’s wife took a nail of the tent, and took an hammer in her hand, and went softly unto him, and smote the nail into his temples, and fastened it into the ground: for he was fast asleep and weary. So he died. -Judges 4:21Judges is so fucking wild.
Series one was very fun. But holy hell, I am bored of Villanelle and Eve’s whole dance at this point apart or together. Especially tired of Villanelle’s deal. We get it. We get her. There are no more hidden depths to this character, and she’s only fun when she’s playing off “real” people. But most people in this show aren’t acting like real people anymore, and not even in an artistic or purposeful way (Hannibal).
Also a crime, socks and sandals!
4 showrunners in 4 years was DEFINITELY the way to go…
This show ain’t no good.*Shoots tv*
Sad..no, infuriating.. what began as an amazing open horizon of brilliance devolve back to a base Villa craving, as only a psychopath can, to once again feel the transfixed infatuation of Eve’s dead doll’s eyes upon her, as Eve, for her part, pursues some vague notion of redemption thru immolation, befitting the soul of a self-absorbed, retrenched, mid-level, cog in the machine…all to a soundtrack which has become a hysterical self-parody of mummering female voices of unease.
Was the woman with the arse-on-her-arse tattoo meant to be someone we knew, from a previous season? Carolyn’s reaction was so shockingly… obvious… for such a stoic person and I feel like I’m missing something.
Hi. Coming to this a bit late.So wait, are they saying Carolyn just up and defected to Russia or are they saying Carolyn was originally Russian and defected to the UK? I kinda thought the latter, considering her ample Russian contacts, the rat, etc.I’ve binged the entire show up to this point in about a week. Season 2 is the worst one so far. What even happened with the Ghost? That just… totally disappeared.The best thing in season 3 was hearing people speak Catalan on an English-language show. I lived in Catalonia for some time.I hope by the end, this show embraces its increasing absurdity and reveals Niko as a mastermind behind everything.
Hi, coming in even later! Same. Exact. Questions.