Killing Eve signs off with just a few more shocking deaths, as is its way
The Sandra Oh/Jodie Comer spy drama has stabbed its last
TV Reviews Eve
Ending a show that was, at heart, about the dangerous allure of violence was always going to be a fraught prospect. The idea that any of these people would survive was always unlikely (and often a source of commentary on the show), so as Killing Eve wound down, an escalating body count seemed all but assured.
Of course, that’s unlikely to insulate the show against criticism around the “Bury Your Gays” trope, especially given the way Villanelle’s death immediately follows the happy consummation of her relationship with Eve after four seasons of longing, echoing other infamous instances of the same pattern. In this case, their happiness is basically a giveaway that it’s not going to last. How could these two have a happily ever after? Where would they live? What would they do? Can anyone picture Eve coming home from a day at the office, kissing Villanelle on the cheek, and then settling in to binge a new true crime drama with her?
But that’s the end. Let’s go back through everything else that happened here, as Killing Eve signed off after four seasons of international locales, glamorous fashion, and constant murder. The first shocking death of the two-part finale is Konstantin’s, as the show’s most unlikely survivor goes out in a cheap motel room, hours after learning that his daughter has decided to join The 12. The death is sordid and tawdry, coming at the hands of a person he has just tried to rescue, at the orders of a person who’s now dead, and after predicting, correctly, that the women on this show would be the death of him. That he would go out this way feels apropos for a nihilist who made very clear he knew his association with the criminal underworld meant his life was in constant danger. That it happened now, for this reason, was a distinct case of finale-itis. Hélène’s almost complete autonomy within The 12 was one of many dangling threads the show seemed indifferent to resolving in its latter episodes, and it’s ultimately not even that clear why she would have chosen to take him out of the picture. She had him in her perpetual grip for blackmail purposes! What does it accomplish to eliminate a useful guy like him before he’s even finished training Pam?
Pam, by the way, might make the sole smart choice in the history of this show, which is to say, getting the hell out of this entire world the minute Carolyn offers her a job. Doing what? Unclear. For whom? Also unclear. After spending the entire season seeming bereft and lost, the original version of Carolyn returned in this episode to be steely and mysterious, defecting back to the Brits (is this…possible?) and apparently giving up on figuring out who in The 12 ordered her son’s death. One reason to give up on this, the quest that was allegedly driving most of the action this season, is that there are no other existing characters who could conceivably run The 12. Wait, no, it’s because she knows Villanelle is going to kill them all, maybe?
Truthfully, untangling all the various choices made around The 12 in these last two episodes is such a baffling mess that the show doesn’t even really care to try, leaving the entire group to be killed essentially offscreen in one final bloodbath by Villanelle while Eve dances at a wedding. Somewhere within all of this there is some point to be made about how impossible it is to ever fully exit this lifestyle, but it’s not made particularly coherently, and making Carolyn the architect of Villanelle’s death on what seems to be the same day she rejoins British intelligence makes about as much sense as anything else that happens here. Why has Carolyn, apparently of her own accord, decided that Villanelle and Eve should die? Certainly, Villanelle is the initial target, but that’s not the shot that kills her—it’s the assassin firing repeatedly into the water, where Eve is as well, that does it. It’s brutal and sudden, leaving Eve more alone than ever before just as she’s definitively made the choice to actually accept and embrace the violence of being in Villanelle’s life.
But it’s worth dialing back further once again, to the idyllic little road trip that Eve and Villanelle take over the course of most of the episode, which shows the two of them as a blissful, mostly functional couple now that Eve has finally decided to accept Villanelle’s love. The whole thing feels like a dream, in part because this show has just spent four seasons proving that Villanelle is a violent, unpredictable person who murders on a whim, which she proved as recently as earlier this very season during her quest to improve. And suddenly she’s won Eve over at last, in part because Eve finally starts violently killing people as well. Who are the two people in love in these scenes? It’s not like there isn’t a case to be made for them ending up in a relationship—this show has always been a romance between these two characters, and a central question of the entire series has been whether or not Eve would succumb to her attraction. But the show seems indifferent to how incredibly bleak this outcome is. It’s not a sunny road trip. It’s a person choosing to be with someone who tortured her husband, killed her best friend, and strongly influenced her to become a more violent, unfeeling person. It’s a shame the show isn’t more interested in the fundamental darkness of Eve choosing this path. Why would this be a happy ending?
And of course, that last, agonized moment in the water is going to haunt anyone who’s stuck with the show this long, leaving open the question of What It All Means. This final season has focused in large part on Villanelle’s quest to be good, or to understand what it means to be good, or whether it’s possible for her to become good after the life she’s led, and the ultimate answer appears to be that it doesn’t matter, because the world she’s in used her, chewed her up, and then disposed of her once she had served one final purpose.
But the show isn’t called Killing Villanelle, and it’s a lot harder to understand what all of this has meant for Eve. Don’t leave your stable desk job? Love is impossible? It’s a cold cruel world? In the end, participation in this dangerous world means that you exist solely at the whim of whoever currently has the upper hand?
The whole thing feels dramatically incoherent, a misuse of some supremely talented actors on a show that used to have a lot more of a central thesis about what it meant for a middle-aged, bored paper pusher with phenomenal hair to gradually become more and more immersed in a life of violence and danger. What it meant all this time, apparently, was this.
Stray observations
- It’s been an interesting four seasons on the Killing Eve beat, to say the least. Thanks for reading! I would have liked to go out on a more positive note, but even when this show was at its lower points, it was always dense and lush and fascinating in a way that left plenty to write about it.
- The performances kept this thing afloat in a way that the writing often didn’t, and if nothing else, it was fun to get one more deeply dry Fiona Shaw reading of a line like, “You really have hit her with a deluge of penis portraits.”
- I am curious to see if that shocker ending worked for other viewers. I did appreciate the show taking a big ambitious swing in its closing moments rather than doing something easier. And I honestly think I would have been fine with that ending if the rest of the episode (and season) had held together more.
- Choosing to believe that that truly odd, off-camera murder of the alleged leadership of The 12 is the show agreeing with me that the whole thing was a waste of time.
- I said this on Twitter along with my first recap of this season, but this post will be my final AV Club byline. I’m leaving for the same reasons you saw a lot of other writers and staff depart. It has been a joy and an honor to write for the site, and I hope people found my recaps/reviews compelling despite the nitpicking. We nitpick because we love! And that’s what drew me to writing for the AV Club in the first place.
86 Comments
Can anyone picture Eve coming home from a day at the office, kissing
Villanelle on the cheek, and then settling in to binge a new true crime
drama with her?i never expected a happy ending. i couldn’t imagine a happy ending for them until i saw them this episode being a all cute as a couple.
Truthfully, untangling all the various choices made around The 12 in these last two episodes this entire season is such a baffling mess.Why has Carolyn, apparently of her own accord, decided that Villanelle and Eve should die?i think carolyn killed villanelle to get back into mi6 and to promote the spinoff starring carolyn and oh bad writing.
this post will be my final AV Club byline. I’m leaving for the same reasons you saw a lot of other writers and staff depart.more sadness. thank you, lisa <3
Love Carolyn, but a whole show of her would be… a lot.Wow, I didn’t even notice, but yeah, this is a huge gaping plot hole.
i think the carolyn spinoff is a carolyn prequel too so i don’t know how much fiona shaw will be involved. perhaps the actress who played young carolyn will star but they might just recast her.
there were a million plot holes but at least they gave us this
That’s my favorite Jesus now.Sorry, little baby Jesus.
to be honest i think the show will be about young carolyn, which is part of the reason this season had so much nostalgia in i
After the way the finale crapped the bed, the overwhelmingly negative response from the fans as well as the critics, AMC may want to reassess how well a show featuring one Killing Eve character who had the most popular character shot to pieces will be received by the target audience.
Hint: not well.
Wow
Imagine a coherent explanation of why and for what remaining audience this show is supposed to get a spinoff.
I believe that Eve tells Carolyn that she always knew that Konstantin killed Kenny but only now was willing to accept it I mean, there was no way for Eve & Villanelle to be together practically, and Villanelle was too bloodthirsty to settle down & have a happy ending conventionally. So in outline I approve of what the finale did. The execution of it however I feel was pretty bad. The whole final sequence was horribly rushed. I did kind of enjoy Carolyn putting out her explanation of who she was in this episode & Pam wisely taking that in & getting the hell away from her
Looking from a distance, it comes across that one of the major failings in the finale is that it tried to satisfy fan pressure in a situation where it could never work, which led to this baffling sequence of choices. As you mention, if explained in concept, the finale makes sense, but man that execution. Also should be mentioned that this does not imply that finale would have been better if they had not sought to meet fan expectations, but rather here specifically it explains some of these particular issues.As mentioned, Villanelle is a horrible human being who is constantly shown to be incapable to truly change. That is in a certain way at the core of what makes her a great character as she has a lot of traits are generally associated with redeemable characters, so the show was able to lean on seeming friction, although it does become an issue if going too long with that. So what would even a happy ending in that case look like? Would there even be a discussion about how this character needs to ride into the sunset with majority of other characters? It kind of feels her death was the only way it would truly end as she herself would always be an engine of destruction otherwise, with little true resolution to her journey.
Yet at the same time, because the show was built on that odd relationship between her and Eve, they decided to pay it off at the end. Yet it instantly causes things to crash into each other as there’s no way for it truly to function in practice. It’s one of those things that is easy to ask for when you don’t have to think about the ‘And then what?’ question, but the showrunners should have known that inherent issue. So it feels like they were afraid of the backlash if they just kill Villanelle off without fulfilling that relationship, so they just decided to go for this backlash instead.
A lot of the finale just felt very perfunctory.I mean, the nature of things these days is that if it wasn’t perfect people were going to hate it, but it really just felt like they had a list of things they knew they needed to do and didn’t have any more time to do them. Maybe they should have drawn these two episodes out over longer to make the moments feel more earned.
Or less time on the stupid island with one of the show’s least interesting charactersI did enjoy Villanelle’s wordless response when hearing that The 12 gave this b*tch a f*cking island
Right, a character we just met. Also a waste of time: the lovey-dovey Tarot couple who exist to tell us “death is coming” (shocker there) and “they don’t pee in front of each other, and a shared pee moment will finally unlock a kiss between Eve and Villanelle.” Just, what?
Yeah. A deluge of red flags, which a character actually took note of.
Wow, haven’t seen a “f*ck you ending” like that in a long time.“The end”? yaaaah f*ck you too.
Good to see the writers were fans of The Thing.
Okay that’s actually a pretty good one.
I’ve been trying to think of any that come close, and the only one that’s coming to mind is Duckman, where the crew openly admitted they only did that ending as a last-ditch effort to avoid cancellation and never had any plan of what to do if it worked.
Killing Eve did not fulfill its eponymous promise. Why did Helene have Gunn individually torture The 12 members to discover who’s at the top when she was already on the guest list for The 12’s inner circle party? The good news is that whatever happens on the latest Riverdale, it can’t be as bad as Killing Eve’s finale.https://www.change.org/p/petition-to-get-laura-neal-arrested
Not just why but also how, considering Gunn specifically explained to Villanelle that she would never jeopardize her employers because they make it possible for her to live the way she wants?
It’s almost like they had no fucking idea what they were doing and didn’t care if it made sense.
There are really few things more pathetic than Change.org petitions whinging about show finales.
Lol, it’s a petition to have her arrested for crimes against humanity. I think you are taking it too seriously.
The shrink tells Eve she needs to find little things that bring her joy, like “A glass of wine, Archers on while your doing the washing up.”What’s “Archers” in this context? Not sure how I’d even google it.What was the gas Villanelle opened? Seemed like (literally) overkill to kill all those innocent kitchen people. She really is cold blooded.
And does putting a cloth over your mouth do anything to stop you from breathing gas?
So, just for the hell of it, I googled “Archers”.I assumed I’d have to wade through pages and pages of unrelated links, but there it was, on the top half of the first page.The Archers is a BBC radio drama on BBC Radio 4, their main spoken-word channel. Broadcast since 1951, it was initially billed as “an everyday story of country folk” and is now promoted as “a contemporary drama in a rural setting”.[3][4] Having aired over 19,500 episodes,[2] it is the world’s longest-running drama by number of episodes, and will become so by duration in 2023.[5][6] -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_ArchersSounds just like the sort of thing that would make him happy.
To Brits of a certain age (i.e. me), even those who have never listened to the show, the Archers theme is a very effective shorthand for the (boring) rural idyll/domestic bliss characterisation of England.
As I’m sure you read on the Wikipedia page, it was originally produced as a way of educating farmers on modern farming techniques to help to alleviate post-war food shortages.
“Archer’s on…”Phrasing!
👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏
The Archers are set near my neck of the woods in a fictional part of The Midlands. I’ve only briefly listened to a part of it once because I’m not that into radio dramas. That’s a weird thing to namedrop in an international based show though.
The whole thing feels dramatically incoherentUnderstatement of the century. This is the worst finale (part 2 of it, anyway) of a show that I once thought was brilliant. In fact, I’ve never complained about a finale before, even when they were extremely disappointing.
It reminded me of the old SCTV sketch “The Adventures of Shake & Bake” in which William Shakespeare and Francis Bacon are both writers and action heroes who exchange witty dialogue while fencing with enemies. During one fight, Bacon asks Shakespeare how the play he’s writing, “Hamlet”, is coming along and Shakespeare says he thinks he’ll kill all of the characters. Bacon then starts dumping on him for being unoriginal: “Can’t you think of something else? That’s all you ever do, kill off your characters!” This episode just seemed like the writers had to do a finale and just said “Hell with it, let’s just kill a bunch of people”. After running the whole series bringing up The Twelve, and making viewers thing it was important, by the end they are just all killed off as kind of an afterthought. The first season and some of the second season held my interest because it had the kind of mystery and shadowy bewilderment of Cold War era spy movies from the ‘60s and ‘70s. Later it just kind of fell apart. This finale compares poorly with a good series finale such as “The Americans”. That one followed the logic of the actions in the previous episodes, and finished with an episode that resolved the story of the main characters while leaving other plot lines partially resolved or unresolved. The characters and plots held your attention and made you think about their fates and their futures. This series just kind of ran out of gas. I doubt I will remember much about it before long.
The Americans had one of the best finales of all time. I still think about it. And it maintained a consistent quality for six seasons.
KE took a nosedive after Phoebe Waller-Bridge left and it never recovered. I wasn’t expecting anything like the quality of The Americans finale, but something mildly competent with some pay-off after four seasons of waffle about The Twelve would’ve been nice.
Yah, KE isn’t even in the same league as The Americans. I still content Keri Russell was robbed of that Emmy. (And it would have been so sweet for partners IRL Keri and Matthew to share in that adulation.)
100% robbed. Baffling that she won a Golden Globe for Felicity but not The Americans. I know the quality of tv now is much higher than it was in the 90s but c’mon.
This ending was a typical trope of writers trying to be artsy/deep and failing horribly and pissing off the fans. Same stupid shit they did with Dexter and Debra.Because of this I’m gleefully waiting for when AI or “deepfake” tech gets to a point that fans can just remake whole effing shows by animating them themselves.
I’m sorry, did anyone really think that both of them were going to survive? I’m mildly surprised that even Eve survived. Those two psychos riding off into the sunset for a happily ever after would have been the stupidest possible ending. I was assuming they were going to Thelma and Louise it.
I don’t think it was the greatest finale ever, but it was fine. I did have one issue…I thought bullets slowed down very quickly in water. I’m not sure that a bullet would do anything but bounce off her in the water.
That’s exactly right about bullets – the water slows down a bullet significantly, to the point where it only travels a small distance before just it loses all all energy. Slow mo guys and smarter every day have both done extensive videos about what fired bullets look like underwater. I would guess it’s possible to be struck by a bullet underwater if you’re basically right next to the gun – and I would think a person who is a decent distance underwater would be protected.
Thanks for confirming that. It jumped right out at me when I saw that scene.
So, I watched the scene again, and based on nothing more than my youtube education and desire to be an armchair-ballistics expert… I just don’t believe this would ever happen. That bullet traveled so far underwater, and I feel like it would’ve lost so much momentum that it wouldn’t even have reached her, let alone penetrated her flesh.
I normally hate to cinemasins style nitpick shows and movies, but considering how important this scene is supposed to be in the finale, I do think it’s fair game. This just feels so silly and farfetched to believe it would ever happen, and that’s not even factoring that the two of them are underwater AT NIGHT. How would a shooter even see them to aim?
Also, since the shooter was on a stationary point on land (maybe the bridge the bullet would have had to travel some distance before it even hit the water so it was already slowed. When it hit the water it is also doubtful that it would have still traveled in a straight path.
And she was a good ways underwater in a river at night. How’d they even see her.The underwater scenes reminded me of the creepy Shelly Winters scene in Night of the Hunter.
I thought it was the “Hero Stoically Hides Mortal Wound From Final Battle Until They Fall Over Dead” Trope.Something about the way she was acting made me look for where she was wounded.I thought she’d just collapse during the final hug.
Besides the Helene plot hole…didn’t Myth Busters prove that you can’t effectively shoot someone through water? Especially from that far away?This ending was a shit way to end the series. I think I will just pretend this entire season didn’t exist.
Felt really bad for the fans of the show after that. A happy ending would’ve been truly ridiculous, but the people who invested their time deserved a hell of a lot more than that. Such a slap in the face. I wanted Eve dead, but at least kill them both and do something that isn’t so piss-poorly written it seems like the conclusion to the whole 4 year long “find and kill the 12″ plot wasn’t just an afterthought like offing the Night King was handled in GoT.I wasn’t a fan of this show and only tried it because of the hype. Thought the writing was even worse than CW or Lifetime levels. Kept from trying out Fleabag for years too long because of this and still can’t believe that sheer brilliance came from the same person who wrote the first season of this and picked the writers/showrunners (new ones each season was dumb) for the rest.But it’s a testament to just how blown away I was by Comer’s stunning performance here that I sat all the way through* something I really hated just to watch her work. Complex, lots of subtle flourishes, riveting. Seriously one of my favorite performances of all time, and I’ll be forever grateful for the pure joy I got seeing her in action. Especially loved her and Kim Bodnia’s (Broen) scenes/relationship together. *a friend who heard how much I found Oh’s Eve to be insufferable pointed out that the coyote/roadrunner plot was so paper-thin that you could literally fast-forward through ALL of her scenes except those with Comer and not be lost was correct. After you get through the first couple of episodes you know what you need to, and it was very easy to keep up the entire way. The writing for this was abysmal.
I actually never liked that they made them romantic. The first season worked because Eve was obsessed with Villanelle in a way she didn’t fully understand and at times even came across as jealousy of Villanelle’s life. This took on the creepiness that the whole Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling BS did and I actually find it cliche and making the characters queer doesn’t improve it.
GOT I have the worst final season ever and truly the worst finale.
Killing Eve: Hold my beer, my shot, and my vape.
On the other hand, there were no dancing robots, so…
We got pretty close to having Villanelle run off to Scotland and become a lumberjack in episode 7, so it could have been worse I suppose.
I could almost accept Villanelle’s death as interesting/worthwhile if the last two seasons had been handled better. Season 3 was a complete mess: Eve did barely anything, the show stopped caring about geography and distance (in one ep, Eve traveled a great distance to lob a bowling ball and say something mildly threatening to someone and then left), and the writers expressed minimal interest in Kenny’s death and the 12. The only marginally interesting episode was about Villanelle’s family.
This season started out better: Eve was active, making things happen! But too much of this season made it seem like Eve and Villanelle’s relationship didn’t matter at all. I wasn’t convinced when this episode tried to cram “now they will fall in love” into it. So much of the season just didn’t make sense:*The guy who was a founder of The 12 is hiding out…in an old, unimpressive cabin…that can be located through an old friend. I’m thinking about the money and apartment Villanelle had in season 1. Couldn’t this guy have a mansion literally anywhere in the world? *Helene is trying to kill The 12 and barely knows who they are. But then cryptic invites are pinging her phone?
in one ep, Eve traveled a great distance to lob a bowling ball and say something mildly threatening to someone and then leftI can’t stop laughing at this. It’s emblematic of how ridiculous the show got in the last two seasons.
I know I’ll lose my membership card but I never really understand why things like this count in the bad “Bury Your Gays” trope, since Villanelle herself was pretty routinely and sadistically burying gays all by herself. Were Comer and Oh adorable together? Yes. But honestly I felt like this season was so bad that delivering that fanservice-y romantic comedy for a chunk of the episode and following it with just desserts for a mass murderer was oddly the best they could do. Are we supposed to only pretend that a show has life-and-death stakes for queer characters? What’s the point of putting us in this type of genre then?
I agree that ‘bury your gays’ shouldn’t be an excuse to avoid giving gay characters life and death stakes, and that sometimes people complain when it’s not really merited… but at the same time, the specific subtrope of “maintain a will-they-won’t-they for ages to bring in lesbian viewers, allow the couple to finally consummate their relationship so that you can’t be accused of not wanting them to be together, but then immediately kill one of them so that they’re not actually together for more than an episode” is just SO ridiculously common and offensive in its implications that shows deserve scorn for it even when they have some plot justification.
Except that’s not queer-specific. That happens to straight characters all the time, it’s a classic bait-and-switch shock tragedy in storytelling. By harping on this I feel like we’re asking for queer characters to be treated differently than straight characters. Which is fine I guess – treating them more sensitively makes sense. But I personally dislike it, I just want to see characters like me in general, not for them to be special snowflakes.
But the difference is that it happens very occasionally for straight couples in stories – most couples either have long relationships or else have long will-they-won’t-theys that end with them ‘living happily ever after’ after the final episode. When there is a tragic loss, it’s against a background, not just in TV as a whole but in that particular show, of non-tragic relationships. By contrast, and maybe it’s changed in the last couple of years a bit, but for a long time it felt like tragic-death-after-consummation stories were the great majority of lesbian couple stories and a sizeable minority of gay male couple stories. Tragic death couples are often the only gay people on a show, and at least at one point it there were relatively few happy couples to point to as exceptions. Add in the obvious ulterior motivations (hooking in optimistic queer viewers while pandering to the limited patience of bigots by not actually showing the couple together for more than one episode), and the persistence of the trope even when it was widely identified and criticised, and I think it’s hard not to see it as almost intentionally offensive.
Logan died after finally marrying Veronica, Ace died after finally sleeping with Nancy (although time reversed, they still can’t be together, so it would count as a gripe if they were queer), Ben died after finally kissing Rey, Jaime died after sleeping with Brienne, two couples on soaps I don’t want to admit watching ended up this way as well. These are just in the last few years, and ones I can recall off the top of my head. Given a few Googles I could list more. We only think the queer examples are more prevalent because we hyperfixate on them.
Tara died two decades ago. We need to get over it.
edit: I hope this doesn’t sound aggressive toward you lol, I’m partly speaking to myself honestly.
I think it’s more the chain of events. It’s not the fact that Villanelle died. It’s the fact that they make a point of getting the two of them together then kill her. Tara and Willow make up so Tara can get shot. Clarke and Lexa get together and Lexa is immediately killed. And while I personally think this one was more queerbaiting than anything else, Castiel tells Dean he loves him only to die and never be seen again even though he was apparently doing stuff off screen anyhow.
I mean yes, I don’t think it was organic that they got together and were all cutesy for an episode, but I also don’t imagine the audience would’ve been much happier if nothing had ever been consummated. It was such an abysmal season that I enjoyed the little road trip love story as its own self-contained thing, despite it being silly fanservice (but since they’d run out of anything else to offer, you’re damn right they owe some of that, quite frankly), and then the more inevitable/organic thing happening afterwards.I don’t think it was good, don’t get me wrong, it just did all it could do for me at the stage it had gotten to. It certainly would’ve been odd for them to be, what, dating for a season? I don’t know. I know the ended up together in the books, but they’d backed themselves into a corner here and I don’t agree with their choices to get to that corner, but I was okay with what they did in that corner once they were there. It was always building to a death of a central character as the grand finale, it felt certain from the jump, so to me it doesn’t have the same feeling as those other shows that followed the patterns mentioned above. It wasn’t shock value, fridging, a plot point, any of that. It was the end. Anyway, not trying to change anyone’s mind, I know I can’t! Just sharing my somewhat ambivalent reaction to it.
I agree 100%. Based on how the season was playing out, (and expectations) the finale basically did all it could, all things considered. I got what they went for. The best thing I can say about the finale is that it didn’t upset me. But that may be my indifference talking. (An indifference they sowed, but nevertheless.)
And to be fair, I’m not terribly invested in this either to be honest.I can just see how the choice to consummate the relationship and then immediately kill one falls into a trope even if well-intentioned.
Yet another problem that could’ve been solved by simply ending with the finale of the excellent first season. This show was SO GOOD but was SO NOT DESIGNED TO GO FOR MULTIPLE SEASONS
I know I’ll lose my membership card but I never really understand why things like this count in the bad “Bury Your Gays” trope, since Villanelle herself was pretty routinely and sadistically burying gays all by herself.Me too. I understand that the BYG trope can be hurtful but Villanelle was first and foremost a villain. It makes as much sense for her to die as it did for Walter White.
It’s Burying Your Gays because they teased a relationship for four seasons, had them get together in the last 20 minutes of the episode, and then immediately offed one of them. BYG isn’t just about a queer person dying, it’s about them being killed just as they are finally happy and together with someone who the writers have been teasing them getting together with. If you look back at the history of lesbian stories on screen, up until very recently it was basically required that one lesbian either die or go mad and the other one ended up alone and miserable.You said it would have been odd if they were together for a season, but would it? Personally, I think it would’ve been a more interesting season if instead of wasting time focusing on new characters and Villanelle finding religion, they had Eve & Villanelle hunt down the 12 together. It would have given the show space to explore their fucked up dynamic. I was never picturing a happy ending for them, but something more triumphant and funny and campy would’ve been more this show’s style.
I can’t believe I watched 4 seasons, half of them exhausting for this. That was the most rushed, idiotic ending ever. The last two minutes felt like: “P.S. Villanelle’s dead, Carolyn ordered to kill her, bye suckers!”
And why did Caroline kill her? What was the point? Who was she working for, what did she get out of it, how did she feel about all of it? She went from being an intriguing mystery to being a total mess of a character who did whatever the plot demanded at that moment.
True on all points. The excuse head writer Laura Neal barfed up was Carolyn had Villanelle whacked because she couldn’t go back to MI6 “empty handed” after her little defection to the Russians.
If the sniper happened to kill Eve too, that just would have been gravy on the biscuit.
“I am curious to see if that shocker ending worked for other viewers.”
It didn’t and though I’ve come to brace for the expectations of a shows finale disappointing me, it still manages to move that bar lower. It almost feels like writers want to leave things to where fans will always talk about them…even if it’s negative, though it comes across as an easy out because they don’t know how to successfully tie up and conclude things, so they just kill folks off.
Honestly, it has me racking my mind to think of any show I liked going out in a way that answered plot stories and/or left me satisfied. I wouldn’t say I expected a happy ending, but it could’ve been better.
season 1 was fun, i guess.I can’t find any interviews with the writers discussing the queer baiting criticism. No interview i’ve read, asks them about it.
I dunno, folks. In the pantheon of finales that make me retroactively wish I had never seen the series at all, this one still didn’t hold a candle to How I Met Your Mother.
HIMYM was the biggest f**k you finale of all time.
I think HIMYM’s was a bold idea that suffered because of needing to be cut down to fit airtime. I’ve seen some of the additional scenes they shot for it, and it makes the overall story feel much more earned.In some way, I admire the show runners for planning to kill the Mother from the beginning. It even turns on its head the idea of Ted as a reliable narrator. At the time of telling the story, he’s been alone for a number of years, and he’s likely coloring everything he’s telling with more of Robin than he realizes.I’m with everyone that sees the problems in execution, but I don’t hate the finale as much as others.
I LOL ‘ed. This ending and this show deserve each other based on the trajectory (Meanwhile “Severance” just busted out one of the best season finales to a show in years.)
so great rellysandwich panel
I thought the ending was very sad, and beautiful. And mythic. Villanelle dying in the water was perfect: water is always the unconscious, cleansing, and a return to the primordial womb. She will live on in Eve’s unconscious (providing someone picks her up out of the Thames, and she survives all the infections she’s going to end up with), but unstained by her crimes. It was delusional to think that these two could end up happily ever after. Villanelle is a psychopath, and that’s not curable. Eve is now pretty ready to kill, herself, so I wouldn’t want to be in the room when they argue for the 49th time over whose turn it is to load the dishwasher! Or would V sneak out once in a while, kill someone, then slip back into bed? Where could they possibly live, and what would they live on? It was impossible. I thought it ended as it had to end, and was only surprised Eve remained alive. I get that some people will focus on the queer death trope, but I don’t think that had anything to do with it. V was a killer, a brutal killer who loved watching the light go out; it turned her on. Yes, she was trying to get someplace else, but all that effort did was depress her. It was way, way too late. She was marked for death from the moment she started on that path.
Anyway, never mind all that. Derry Girls is back tonight!
I was half expecting Villanelle to come flying down on her dragon and burn the building, with The 12 inside. then Eve would stab her.
This is one of the most disappointing shows ever, given just how good Season 1 was and the fact that absolutely no one cares that it’s ending now.
I had low expectations for this finale, yet it still managed to disappoint. In an episode where the characters finally get to confront the Big Bad that’s controlled their life for four seasons, there was zero sense of stakes, zero sense of danger or excitement, and unsurprisingly, zero payoff. It felt so rote – Eve is in danger, let’s have a gruesome death, ok now we take a road trip, Caroline says something cutting, oops Villanelle is dead.
They could’ve at least put Villanelle in a designer gown for the last few scenes – hasn’t half of the enjoyment of this show always been in the beautiful costumes and locations? They totally jettisoned that this season, and the writing wasn’t anywhere good enough to pick up the slack.It’s a testament to how far this show has fallen that all I felt watching Villanelle die was relief that the show was finally over.
Also, Sorry you’re leaving. Fuck G/O, fuck AVClub and the garbage way they treat their writing staff.
Killing Eve will best be remembered for the brilliance of the Phoebe Waller-Bridge first season and the luminous performances of Sandra Oh, Fiona Shaw, Kim Bodnia and Jodie Comer’s breakthrough role as Villanelle. There was a lot of wit, fun, fashion and creative kills through the Waller-Bridge run that slacked a bit by Emerald Fennell’s follow-up second season, but was still mostly in place.
But oh, those third and final seasons. There’s a sliding scale of head writers and the fall-off by the end was too substantial even for the talents of Oh and Comer to carry. By the end I wasn’t watching Killing Eve as much as I was tolerating it. A good kiss between the two leads (finally!) and a violent death for Villanelle won’t lift the show from a finish that scrapes Game of Thrones and Dexter levels of badness.
Best of luck to Lisa Weidenfeld.
I watched all of these episodes, the entire time and really enjoyed some of it. But as things got more and more convoluted I felt like they started to make less and less sense with even less attempts to explain anything.
The start of a bored woman drawn to an interesting, yet dangerous woman makes some sort of sense.
Question that I do not think they even attempted to explain over the course of the series.1. What exactly is the 12/what is their purpose? I mean, who knows. Sure they kill people for… reasons. but what is that reason?2. Why is Helena showing up and killing people in the 12? She doesn’t seem eager to take it over, nor to destroy it so why does she exist? I mean other than to tempt Eve with an equally violent and dangerous woman who seemed a little more stable?3. Carolyn? Just… everything.
This show SO lost its plot – and everything else. This and “Book of Boba Fett” are in competition for the worst show of the year IMO.
You can’t make the plot itself (destroying The 12) in to a McGuffin. The show and particularly the finale are a complete mess and ruined some great characters and an incredible cast. You could write a book on all the senseless deaths, screen filler, and wasting talent, but for four seasons they built up the hook up between Eve and Villanelle. And the four seasons worth of build up was “consummated” in a van seat, off camera, in a three-second allusion to it from the street. That was it. I’m not expecting a graphic porn scene. I mean they had NO ability to write a scene for those two. We watched that idiotic half-hours or more at a bothy, then a van ride of googly faces- and they give us THAT as a culmination of watching this show for four years?? And the entire boat scene was directorially botched, not funny, not anything, just lazily filmed – and THAT was the culmination of this season’s worth of build up to kill The 12. Awful.
Why has Carolyn, apparently of her own accord, decided that Villanelle and Eve should die?In Carolyn’s own words (to Pam), “You don’t go back to MI6 empty handed.”And she also says, perhaps she wanted Villanelle and Eve to do whatever it is they were going to do.
Should have ended with the Christian group from the first two episodes of the season coming back and somehow causing Villanelle’s death. She would have deserved that at least.
The Finale should have basically been spread over 2-3 episodes. The ideas weren’t BAD, it’s just that it’s like they only had 1/5th of a show written, even for the whole season. Basically this whole season felt like Filler to get to the finale. Especially after how season 3 ended.Just so much uninteresting shit for this season have it all end in maybe the lamest way.I wish they had gone with a Soprano ending where violence and death was probably about to happen.So cut to The End with them diving into the water with bullets raining around them. Maybe they survive, maybe one dies, maybe they both die, but this is the world they picked. They both had chances and choices to leave so far, maybe their luck is over.