Killing Eve delves into a supervillain origin story

How does a person become Carolyn Martens? Even though we’ve seen just as much of her messy personal life as anyone else on this show, she’s remained opaque, a steely mystery who occasionally lets either burning rage or sorrow burst through.

But the biggest mystery of Carolyn has long been how she can be so closed off around Eve, and then burst into boozy bonhomie with her old intelligence chums. And the big reveal of “Don’t Get Attached” is that she’s always been like that, to some extent. She’s been involved in intelligence gathering since her youth, no doubt thanks to her father getting her into it, and at least at first, the whole thing was one big boozy party. Sure, she was lying to everyone and planning to betray them, but the whole thing was all fun and games until Konstantin ruined things by getting her father killed.

That Carolyn and Konstantin have a history together has long been a given; they’re both old soldiers of a constantly shifting Cold War conflict. That he was responsible for the death of her father is a bit on the nose—with the revelation last week that Carolyn also met Villanelle as a child in an orphanage, it’s starting to feel like a very small world for these people. And Carolyn came up with the name for The 12? Was Konstantin also the commencement speaker at Eve’s college graduation?

It does provide some shading for the fact that this work has always been profoundly personal for Carolyn. She’s always had to find a way to continue the work even in the face of immense tragedy. And Konstantin has always had to balance his own personal affection for the people he works with against the certain knowledge that his bosses may have dark plans for them, which might explain the intensity of the hug he gives Villanelle knowing that moments later someone is going to make an attempt on her life.

This has seemed like a potential risk for Villanelle since she disobeyed orders to kill Carolyn, and then went above and beyond to help Carolyn gather intelligence. But it also serves as a direct response to Eve thinking she can even remotely hold her own against someone like Hélène. Sure, she has some capacity for brutality, which Hélène alludes to before the big reveal about who they’re waiting for. That doesn’t mean she has all the power and capability of The 12 behind her to enact violent revenge when someone annoys her. All season, Eve has assumed she could tangle with Hélène until she got what she wanted, but it’s always been clear the two of them are playing different games, and that Eve’s confidence was more than a little unwarranted. And the end result plays out in this episode—Eve plays her little game by kidnapping Hélène’s daughter but won’t actually harm her, and then Hélène tries to have a person she cares about murdered in front of her. These people aren’t meeting each other on the same level! Plus, Hélène has been living her violent, dangerous life for a while, and successfully maintains a happy, normal parenting relationship with her oblivious daughter. Did it not occur to Eve that there’s a reason Hélène is so fearless about people knowing she has a kid?

But whoever Hélène’s partners are, this episode does more legwork to make The 12 seem like an interesting organization than much of what’s come previously. And that has a lot to do with the show finally providing some human faces to go with it, as well as some suggestion of where it all began. A lot of radical organizations take weird turns from whatever their origin was, and the notion that a group of young people might take on some darker methods of profit after deep disillusionment is not that strange. It’s just a little frustrating that this information is coming through so long after the organization first came up on the show.

Stray observations

• While I do think the general concept of political radicals atrophying into something darker makes sense, I’m less convinced that a group considering calling itself “Anarchists with Attitude” could ever amount to much. And The Disrupters? Are they some kind of proto-tech gurus?
• People have died in a lot of gruesome and comical ways on this show but the incompetent and bizarre attempt to kill Johan with oars at the end of the dock might be the most ridiculous death (well, assumed death) the show has ever done. And he is, in that moment, dying with a complete misunderstanding of what is going on between the two people on the dock, or who they are, or what they’re arguing about.
• Is the assassin Konstantin trained before Villanelle going to turn out to be whoever jammed that guy’s toes up his nose?
• Fun fact: Young Konstantin was played by Adult Konstantin’s son, Louis Bodnia Andersen.
• Thank you to the show for finally clarifying how I should be styling “The 12.”