Killing Eve makes a visit to the motherland for Mother's Day, with violent results
TV Reviews killing eve
How do you explain someone like Villanelle? What would make
a person the way that she is? It’s the question that sits at the center of “Are
You From Pinner?” as Villanelle goes home to visit the family she hasn’t seen
since childhood.
It’s also the first episode in which Eve is entirely absent.
Instead, the show spends the whole episode in “Mother Russia,” for a sour,
tense story that leaves open the question of why Villanelle is the way she is.
Do we believe Villanelle that her mother is just like her, and that her
meanness and nastiness is what made Villanelle the way she is? Or do we believe
Tatiana, that Villanelle was a bad seed from the start, a strange, cruel child
who wouldn’t cry as a baby? The episode resists giving us a definitive answer to the question, offering only limited glimpses that Tatiana is not the woman
she’s pretending to be for her new family. Bor’ka’s self-harming
certainly indicates that he’s a child in peril in some way, but is what ails
him all the fault of his mother? The only real evidence we get is when he says
she told him he embarrassed his family in the cooking competition, but the show
plays coy in the moment itself. We see her sitting next to him, but what does
she actually say to him?
It’s one of a few moments over the course of Villanelle’s
visit home where there’s a suggestion of something lurking beneath the surface.
There’s the usual tension that exists in scenes with Villanelle, since at any
point she can get bored with an interaction and murder someone, and so the
whole time we’re more or less waiting to see who’s going to provoke her. But
the whole family behaves as though it’s 90% fine and 10% deeply screwed up, and
so there’s an additional tension as we wait for the visit to go off the
rails. Some of these moments are played for slapstick, like Fyodor and Yula
being flat earthers who think lizard people are in charge of things while
simultaneously doing a decent job of describing the Twelve’s influence on a
multitude of governments. And some of them hint at a darkness that never quite
surfaces, like when Villanelle tries to get Grigoriy to admit whatever it is
her mother has said about her over the years.
And her brother Pyotr is just plain odd. His stepbrother
accuses him of being too naïve for this world, and he certainly seems
gentle…until we see him hammering away at a sofa with a baseball bat to deal
with his rage issues. He’s also the only person who’s glad Villanelle is there,
which makes him seem like he’s missing some crucial judgment skill. His family
may not be the warmest people in the world, but they’re right to sense
something off about Villanelle, and her abrupt return home after twenty years.
There’s an instinct to want them to be nicer to her, but she is a murderer.
Every moment she’s in their home is a moment they’re all in danger. They
shouldn’t welcome her.
It’s an important fact about the show to keep in mind even
as we watch Villanelle experience emotional trauma and want to feel sorry for
her. She’s careful to kill only the “bad” members of the household—the two
sweet, innocent brothers are safely out of the home before she blows it up. But
Villanelle is not some avenging angel sent down to right wrongs. These people’s
relative crimes do not actually make their deaths justified! Being kind of
stupid and annoying is not a capital offense. And Villanelle is certainly not
qualified to make that assessment.
The combination of liking Villanelle and knowing she is
fully the bad guy in any scene she’s in is something Killing Eve is perpetually dangling in front of its fans. It’s so
sweet that she leaves money for Bor’ka to see Elton John! She also just
murdered his parents. It’s the same painful information that lurks behind any
tentative hope that she and Eve will in some way consummate their relationship,
or be together in any real way. She’s a monster. And thankfully, the show
doesn’t try to offer a complete answer to Villanelle during its visit to the homeland.
For one thing, she’s a work of fiction, and so any attempt to say A + B =
serial killer is going to be fraught. But it’s also a more interesting way of
telling this story. Which ends, as it must, in fiery death. “I think I need to
kill you,” Villanelle tells her mother. We’re left, as we always are, to wonder
why she does.
Stray observations
- The casting of Rob Feldman as Villanelle’s brother is great. He looks just
like Jodie Comer. Also, how much work did it take to ensure this episode aired on Mother’s Day? - It’s a funny thing to realize that while we are reading
subtitles and knowing Villanelle is following all the dialogue, Comer
presumably doesn’t speak much Russian, although I’m sure they walked her
through what would be happening in the scenes. - A variety of moments in this episode are quease-inducing,
but the most uncomfortable by a long shot is Villanelle leaving her eyes wide
open as her mother, who she has suggested is just as dangerous as she is, wipes
food away from them. - It’s hard not to instinctually expect that something sleazy
will happen in the scene where Villanelle approaches Grigoriy alone, but it
never does, and her mother interrupts them quickly. Killing Eve may be changing
showrunners every season, but they’ve stayed very consistent on the subject of
Villanelle never using sex appeal to get her way. - I almost got into this above, but the episode does a good job of not condescending to the small town. It’s painfully easy to contrast Villanelle’s glamorous wardrobe and affection for classy European cities with this tiny place, and while she does make a few comments about why her brother should leave it, she mostly seems to enjoy sampling the food and absolutely dominating at the harvest festival games.
- So is that the last we’ve heard of Villanelle’s weird
brothers?
58 Comments
I can’t decide who has the best laugh, Villanelle or Konstantin.Anyway, this episode was delightful for about the first 50 minutes, even with the occasional light ominousness. That only made the ending land harder.
I love the misdirect with the game of “Killer”, ending with an Elton John singalong. Although, there’s some dark foreshadowing there amongst the humour; Tatiana “kills” her son with no remorse, suggesting that she may be as callous as Villanelle suggests.
“Also, how much work did it take to ensure this episode aired on Mother’s Day?”They premiered the show two weeks early, and maybe now we know why?
Although it’s not actually mothers day in the UK (eternally confusing having American and UK ones different – whilst you guys probably don’t notice, most of us over here will always have a few “oh shit did I forget” moments when social media gets plastered with mothers day stuff in May)Given this is an international production I’m sure they were aware it was to be shown on the US version though!
Well it’s an american show though. It’s a BBC America production not a BBC one.
“…she’s a work of fiction, and so any attempt to say A + B = serial killer is going to be fraught.”-Example: Todd Phillip’s “Joker.”Awkward families usually produce good material (and I’m inclined to believe V’s mom- she’s a bad seed if there ever was one!) I really liked how this unfolded. It felt like the show itself was on vacation. But something about it didn’t quite stick the landing…“It’s so sweet that she leaves money for Bor’ka to see Elton John! She also just murdered his parents”-That there. The context lands, but the weight of it doesn’t. It’s a moment that I feel should have been more upsetting than it was. But it plays more like a punchline to the episode than a climax. A shame, since the build up fight is so good.
95% of the “previously on” was irrelevant to the episode.
I said before that if Eve & Villanelle are going to work out then they both need to change, not just Eve. I still think I’m right and based on this episode I think there is a chance of Villanelle changing, even if it’s only a little. I mean, I expected her to kill the whole family, so I was surprised that she spared the two brothers. That is an improvement!It is a bit odd to follow up Niko’s murder in front of Eve with this episode though. Would have thought they’d address that first.
Unless this episode ends up being the catalyst that turns Villanelle against the 12 for good.
I liked this more than I expected (it might be me fave of the seaso so far) and the last 10 minutes were just off the charts amazing. A lot of it comes down to the fact that two amazing actors were sharing the scene: Comer and Evgenia Dodina. Holy hell, that was some acting, lol.
The fact that two brothers survived did not surprise me, honestly, mainly because this season I think the show is constantly toying with Villanelle and her desperation to understand what love is. It’s like that line that Eve said to her “You don’t know what that is” – it hunts her all the time.Villanelle is an odd creature, but the show was always constant in portrain her as someone who actually “feels” strongly. And her, hard to classify, vulnerability was always there. Side by side with cruelty.Eve presensce however is putting that mixture into the test, that’s why V this season has such a strong identity crisis. I buy it. Because this episode showed to me that they are able to find the right balance in presenting her struggle. There were no easy answers here.
common misconception about psychopaths/sociopaths is that they feel no emotion. in fact many psychopaths can feel intense emotions, but they only relate these emotions back to themselves. villanelle can feel sadness, longing, etc. what she cannot do is project that emotion onto other individuals, she can’t sympathize with the sadness of her victims even though she has felt sadness for herself before.
An utter lack of empathy and an unhealthy amount of narcissism. Imagine if a world leader ever attained office with those characteristics. (shudder)
unfortunately, most world leaders and “successful” people are psycho/sociopaths. there are several studies in the US that have found it is almost impossible to enjoy being extremely wealthy unless you are a sociopath because of the cruelty required to attain and maintain that status (these studies have focused exclusively on america, this probably would not be the case in certain scandinavian countries).being, for example, the president of the US right now would take an extreme emotional toll on a normal person. a normal person would not be able to sleep at night knowing thousands are dying every day from a virus they failed to prevent. the weight of responsibility and remorse would literally drive them insane. psycho/sociopaths do not feel regret over anonymous mass deaths, on their deepest level they don’t even understand why WE care about it, although most can recognize the distress it causes.
From personal experience the most vicious people I’ve ever met in my life were the most insecure (deep vulnerability). Villanelle’s fundamental predatory behavior seems to stem from a really deep well of worthlessness set off from being abandoned and not wanted.
Villanelle and her desperation to understand what love is. It’s like
that line that Eve said to her “You don’t know what that is” – it hunts
her all the time.I agree. I think these words of Eve continue to echo in her brain, they went in farther than the knife Eve stabbed her with. This and Konstantin abandoning her in Rome to go be with his own family (supposedly) set her on this course.
These people’s relative crimes do not actually make their deaths
justified! Being kind of stupid and annoying is not a capital offense.
And Villanelle is certainly not qualified to make that assessment.
The same could be said of just about any of Villanelle’s murders. Those folk were all killed for the profit of The Twelve or because Villanelle was annoyed by them, not because they were monsters deserving of death.Which brings up the question of what kind of punishment Vilanelle and Dasha and the whole lot of The Twelve should get. I vote for being walled in a room cut off from humanity until death as Countess Elizabeth Báthory was presumed to have been (Unfortunately, the Countess, probably, got away with house arrest in her castle).
There was the kid in the hospital who lost his whole family in the car wreck that disfigured his face, Villanelle thought she was helping him out by killing him. She knew she would not want to live like that so she figured he wouldn’t either.
True. That hurt to watch, but he did literally just tell her he wished he died in the accident. We know human life isn’t exactly precious to our girl and I’m sure she thought of it as a favor. Still, poor Gabriel.
Man, I could almost believe Tatiana’s story: that Villanelle was such a clear psychopath, even as a child, that Tatiana was forced to abandon her in an orphanage to better protect the other family members. It makes sense given who Villanelle is, and of course a mother would cry herself to sleep wondering if she did the right thing, especially if that child then died. But Tatiana did such a 180 from welcoming Villanelle to banishing her, with no obvious cause, that I have to wonder if something’s off with her. She doesn’t act like a child she seriously suspected of being a sociopath has returned; she acts like a woman who’s lifelong act is about to be discovered.
“she acts like a woman who’s lifelong act is about to be discovered”
Yes, I love how this episode played with memories. How each character remembers or wants to remember things differently. Villanelle, her brother, Tatiana. It’s this ambiguity that makes this episode so strong imo.
Yeah that scene where her mom tells her to leave, had all the signs of a grifter or someone who lived a double life, telling the one person who could blow her secret “I’ve got a good thing going here, you’re not going to mess it up.”
Not just that scene, but the ambiguity looming over the question of Oksana Pilotr’s father. Gone & seemingly forgotten by everyone but Villanelle.
We do know from the criminal record Eve had for Villanelle in season 1 that when V was a kid she attacked a schoolmate with a pen (manslaughter of a minor) when she was 8 years old. The other offenses (did not state at what age these occurred) in that file were 4 counts of grievous bodily harm including castration, 2 counts of arson and murder of an adult man (probably Anna’s husband).
So from the time Villanelle was 8 they knew she had levels of aggression and violence outside of normal behavior. Given what we saw with the young boy Bor’ka and how he was self abusing and with Pyotr expressing his rage on his barn sofa, it’s clear Tatiana was a monster.
Both things can be true, Villanelle possessed latent anti social personality traits AND her mother possessed her own darkness that she infected her children with.
The whole situation of how they lost each other was odd, too. I assumed that Tatiana told the orphanage to tell Villanelle that her family had died, and then told everyone else the story about the fire that killed her daughter. This is assuming that she was really trying to get rid of her; it just seems odd to me that an orphanage would lie about that to a child and the child’s family, but maybe there is something I don’t know about Russian orphanages.
This episode is the most I have ever liked Villanelle. I loved her doing right by her brothers at the end
For Villanelle’s standards of doing right. I’m not sure what’s actually going to happen to those boys, neither of whom seem particularly equipped to face the outside world, on there own with only an envelope full of cash to their names.
Hell, she may have jump-started their own paths to serial killing! Let’s just hope they’re as stylish about it as she is.
I don’t know that any of their “crimes” rose to the level of requiring execution by immolation. The idiot couple and the step-father didn’t do anything remotely deserving of all that. And even the Mom’s culpability is left ambiguous. We didn’t hear her actually say anything terrible to her son, and life after the fact had probably justified her getting her family away from a psychopath of a daughter. But awesome episode in any regards. Comer is just fantastic.
That’s probably as much as we’ll ever learn about Villanelle’s origins. At least, if the showrunners are smart, that’s as much as we’ll learn.
Turns out she’s the secret granddaughter of the (presumed dead, but really still alive) founder of the Twelve.
So, the prize for throwing shit was a fan…
I’m kept waiting for V to try the target shooting. Maybe she didn’t want to give away her skill with a pistol?
Yeah, I liked that touch. Now about the statement “the episode does a good job of not condescending to the small town”…nah. It was making it fairly blatant that this place is country AF. Dung throwing, cringe-worthy dance troupes, and Elton John singalongs? Cheesy as hell. And I say that as someone who has performed in a dance troupe at the North Florida Fair. We went on after the cloggers, and our show music was interrupted by the bugle that heralds the pig races.
Yes but she didn’t mock it, and seemed to really have fun.
Yeah, I thought they did better job here than in Polish episode, mainly because here we actually spend some time with the characters (the cast was really good in this episode, they worked so well together). So while overall take on Eastern Europe was really cliche, here it sort of worked, because that place looked almost unrreal. Like this whole episode.
We went on after the cloggers, and our show music was interrupted by the bugle that heralds the pig races.Uh, not helping your case there.
What I’m saying is, I know cheesy, ‘cause I been cheesy.
Brilliant observation.
I just knew it wasn’t a question of whether she’d murder them, just a question of how many.
Ep 3×3
You really like this child, huh? It’s not even yours?
Ep 3×5
– Clean your face.
– Can you do it?
– You are not a child.
– I want to feel like one…please?
I certainly enjoy continuity of certain themes that this season is trying to explore. Sometimes it’s subtle, sometimes it’s not, but it worked rather well in this ep.
I thought it was a little bit boring til the end when her mother began to show darker shades. I would have liked to see them cutting back to Eve, if only because Eve is the only person in the world who wants to see her, which is poignant and weird given this is a family reunion episode. I still don’t really understand what was going on with Villanelle and her mother. I didn’t remember Villanelle loving her dad so much (I thought he was in the mafia or something, I can’t quite remember). My only thought is [warning: armchair psychology] that sometimes daddy’s girls become so as it’s the only way they know how to get attention from (or instead) of their mother; I guess that explains why Villanelle would progress in the show from S1’s serial castrator to prospective buyer of a No. 1 DAD mug (assuming the series is trying to be consistent). But the dad is literally a dead end, and what could Villanelle possibly have expected her mother to give her? So I don’t see how the character really moved forward at all, with the exception of once again being unsatisfied with killing. That could change with the next episode(s) but for right now, I’m not getting much.
* So Villanelle’s family are flat-earther, lizard-people-believing, Elton John cultists? Figures.* The dung-throwing prize was a fan. Beautiful.* I actually felt halfway sympathetic to Villanelle in this episode, if only because her mother was such a (to me) clearly duplicitous manipulator of her family. Sealed by her telling her (obviously already troubled) son that he was stupid for losing the baking contest. * “Killing Eve may be changing showrunners every season, but they’ve stayed very consistent on the subject of Villanelle never using sex appeal to get her way.” She did use her sex appeal to lure her victim in the Amsterdam brothel.
Im actually interested in V’s brothers coming to look for her. and her wife. And her Father who is still in the wind.
Yes, I was waiting for some revelation about her father, so does the fact we didn’t get it mean we will seem him at some point?
That “Crocodile Rock” moment was . . . a lot.
The cut after Villanelle starts to sing along was perfectly timed.
I’d heard this was going to be an all Villanelle episode and I wasn’t sure if no Eve or Carolyn of Konstantin would work. The episode played the humour quite broad – a Elton John? Really? The harvest festival and Villanelle – Oksana as she was back to being this episode – winning the dung throwing.That scene between Oksana and her mother was about the most all out, humour free scene the show has done, and no surprise Jodie Comer was excellent. Her bopping along to a song in the 80s jumpsuit at the very end also saw a range of emotions flooding through her.Did her mother deserve to die? I’m not sure what age Oksana was when she was sent to the orphanage – was it mentioned? But I found Oksana’s argument that her mother sent her away because she could recognise something bad in her because of her own darkness was quite believable. She was screwing up the young lad in a similar way – although the way it was filmed, it wasn’t clear whether she was winding up the boy for losing the baking contest. Maybe he is the budding psychopath, making up stories and laying the blame on his mother for his own screwed up psyche? Surely the Elton obsession is a sign of mental instability!!!The last 2 episodes have shown they are not afraid to change things up halfway into the third season of a successful show. While episode 3 was a throwback to the classic Waller-Bridge blackly comic melodrama, eps 4 and 5 have seen them take a few risks. Plaudits for trying but for me, ep 3 was by far the best the show has been since S1.
I did wonder if that kid was lying about his mum saying he was an embarrassment. He knows Villanelle has enough money to travel the world, so maybe he thought he could play on her sympathy and she’d give him the cash he needs to see Elton John. (In which case, mission accomplished, sorta.) And Tatiana’s posture didn’t look particularly aggressive when she was talking to him. But unless it’s followed up we probably just have to go with the story as it’s presented.
The one other thing we know from context: Tatiana wasn’t the one to help Bor’ka with the baking contest; his brother (Pyotr, if I’m trying to spell it correctly this time) did. While I’m cautious about presuming gender norms, it is tough for me to reconcile Tatiana playing the supportive mother role after the competition, when she was of little help beforehand.(…or they both helped with the competition, and I need to watch the episode a second time before coming to a conclusion.)
The kid kept flinching the entire time she was sitting next to him, as though she were pinching him or sticking him with something sharp. If your kid behaves like that when you sit next to him, you’re probably not a candidate for Mother of the Year.
I feel like Villanelle is almost the next iteration of Tatiana. Her mother is cruel and manipulative, but wants to hide it, so she creates the fiction of being a good mother and only abuses the people around her. Villanelle, however, wants to be seen, wants to be noticed. So she spreads her wings and finds ways to hurt interesting new people in flashy ways. She has her mother’s darkness, but she’s honest about it, while Tatiana lives in denial.
Jodie Comer was so great in that final scene on the train. Normally I watch Villanelle with such massive aesthetic distance because she’s such a piece of highly stylized art with no verisimilitude, so while I get that she’s brutal, it’s an engaging brutality that makes me feel something like art appreciation. But that scene was the first time I gave in and saw her as an absolutely terrifying monster.But again with the motion smoothing, what the hell!!
Someone wrote on twitter that for the first time the show allowed the audience to believe her and this – like you said – somehow makes this even more chilling. That’s why the moment when she breaks the fourth wall (just for a sec) is legit “whoa moment”. Because it’s clear that it was a conscious choice, and it worked so well here.Villanelle is a “pedestal” type of character. Villanelle and viewers believe that she is free, but just think how many times other characters told her what she is, what she can or can’t feel. The irony of this is that maybe she was never free. She says to Konstantin in ep 3×3 that The 12 owns every part of him, but same can be said about her. She just doesn’t want to think about herself this way.
What I find most interesting about this review is how the writer
lavishes such praise upon Jodie Comer, the 27-year-old White co-star,
while Sandra Oh, the 48-year-old Asian star of Killing Eve is not
even mentioned once. I had no idea Jodie was such a magnificent
actress she apparently accomplished all this on her own without the
blessings of performing with established thespians such as Oh, Fiona
Shaw and Kim Bodina.
If at least one critic made even the tiniest effort to give some
credit to Sandra Oh for Comer’s rising star, this would not grate on me
the way it so does, but perhaps you are so accustomed to women of
color being erased that the thought of acknowledging their
accomplishments or existence, never enters your mind.
Pity that.
I’m sorry, but the biggest problem this year is that they are obsessed with this idea of showing Villanelle being adorable right before murdering. It’s a story beat that’s been happening over and over and over and I’m tired of it. Not only because it’s becoming tiresome, but it is ruining the character. As kooky as V was in the first season, she was still frightening. She maintained that for much of last season, but near the end they started getting away from it, obviously so what she did to Eve would be SOOOOOO shocking! (It wasn’t.) Villanelle is no longer shocking. She’s no longer scary. And her outfits are getting awful.
I took the final scene with her mother as Villanelle trying to incite a reaction of some sort. If she was truly like Villanelle, she’d resist and fight back. If not, she’d probably plead for mercy.They cut away before we got to see a physical confrontation, so I wonder if they’ll ever reveal what really unfolded. I was NOT expecting Villanelle to be in that much emotional turmoil at the end, so I’m taking that as a sign that she didn’t get what she wanted (for her mother to admit or reveal she had the same ‘darkness’).On the other hand, we also get the impression that her mother was a serial manipulator and emotional abuser. It’s quite possible whatever she said (or didn’t say) up until the very end was her way of getting back at Villanelle.
Kudos to all of those responsible for this season’s rebound. They have eschewed TV cliches and also allowed the extended cast to really shine this year. The writing and story structure and editing has been dynamic and effectively used. The subtle tensions and foreshadowing keep you on the edge of your seat waiting for that last drop before the finish. It’s really good.And good for Sandra Oh for going along for a ride in what was originally her star vehicle, but has turned in to a fantastic ensemble with Comer emerging as a breakout star. Oh’s character is still the narrative core, but it’s all those particles racing around it that are making the show really great.
This episode was a solid A for me, as Jodie is my fav person in this show. I’d be happy if she finally killed Eve and the show carried on. This entire episode could be an Emmy reel – so many emotions, and very well done.
As a general rule, I usually hate episodes in ensemble shows that are dedicated to 1 character (e.g. CJ goes home to visit her ailing father and hit a high school reunion on West Wing). … this one was no exception. I want the whole crew involved!!