Sandra Oh suggested an even more depressing Killing Eve ending, apparently
The BBC America spy show has come under serious fan critique for its bloody dismount
Aux News killing eve
[Note: This article contains spoilers for the series finale of Killing Eve.]
Last month’s series finale for BBC America’s Killing Eve was not received, let’s say, well by fans of the four-season spy drama, with many accusing the show of falling back on tired “Bury Your Gays” tropes in its handling of the final resolution of the years-long game of cat and somewhat more psychotic cat between Sandra Oh’s Eve and Jodie Comer’s Villanelle. (Especially frustrating for fans, in that the show’s source material, by author Luke Jennings—who’s also expressed his unhappiness with the ending—gave its central pair a far happier conclusion.)
Now series star Oh has opened up a bit about that finale, including the revelation, which she granted to Deadline, that she’d been pushing for an even grimmer ending, in which her character, instead of Comer’s, ended up dead at the bottom of the Thames.
“You should kill my character,” Oh reportedly told series showrunner Laura Neal, as the show’s ending was tinkered with again and again. “I thought that would be the strongest and the most interesting [ending].”
“Eve was starting to get into, like, a nihilistic place,” Oh explained, “And we’re like, ‘Let’s just continue that line and go straight into it.’” But the writers ultimately declined the Emmy winner’s offer of simulated self-sacrifice. “They came to me, and they said, ‘We can’t do it. We need to change it… Eve needs to live.’”
Neal herself has talked a bit about the ending at this point, including the notion that Eve, who at least starts the series as its introductory viewpoint character into its world of sexy professional murder, might be the one to go. But, in Neal’s words (per an interview with TVLine), “It just didn’t feel very truthful. It felt right that Eve has this rebirth and is allowed to go on and forge a new life for herself with everything that Villanelle has given her. And it also felt right for Villanelle’s story to end as it does.”
Neal has also laid out the basic rationale for killing at least one of the duo off in the show’s closing moments. “We certainly discussed an ending where they both live happily ever after. But our problem was that we couldn’t really imagine them doing so.” She makes the argument that Villanelle’s death is about as good an ending as an international super-murderer might hope to get: “There’s a sense,” Neal explains, “That she doesn’t really die. She just sort of ascends to a higher place.” (Whether that “sense” came through for the show’s still very angry fans, presented as they were with the reality of a beloved character “ascending” to the bottom of a river with a bunch of bullets in her, is an, uh, open question at this point.)
17 Comments
That ‘Higher place’ quote really made me go huh. Like I’m not expecting to say they were wrong and it would be dumb to demand such a thing, so no judgement at all for them defending it. But then to try to offer that explanation just made it go off the rails.So I guess that explanation was kind of fitting for the ending of the show.
I mean, they could’ve just ripped off the ending to Hannibal’s third season, and that would’ve been infinitely better than the one they went with.
Stopped being terrific when Waller-Bridge fled, no matter how game the actors were. Especially that one guy who looked like the spitting image of Steven Toast.
“Ray F*****G Purchase!”“Well, well, well!”
Honestly that would have been better
what’s everyone talking about? the show ended on the bridge at season 3.it was a nice ending! good job.
Exactly. That is my head-canon as well. There is no Season 4.
Sandra Oh is only an Emmy nominee, she has (sadly) never won
I do like the idea of the show doing a sort of How I Met Your Mother where the actual killing of Eve happens in the final moments.
Small quibble, but Sandra Oh has never won an Emmy, although this article describes her as having done so. She’s been nominated a bunch of times, but has lost every nod–including to her co-star Jodie Comer.
IMO the focus on the “bury your gays” trope has saved the writers from being savaged for a dozen other reasons this season, and particularly this finale, sucked so badly. Show runners are not novelists any more than novelists could just step in and produce a TV show – but the showrunners have bigger egos and better agents I guess. But collectively their fucking up a LOT of television series and adaptations the last few years.
Katharine Trendacosta just did a real interesting article on showrunners over at Vice, and basically showrunners these days don’t have any training into how to actually run a showhttps://www.vice.com/en/article/epxeze/television-is-in-a-showrunning-crisis
With all the murdering they both did, neither deserved a happy ending. It would’ve been silly to give them one. Come on, if they both lived, will Eve blissfully standby as Villanelle kills the mailman and the paperboy?
Exactly. Villanelle is literally a psychopath. Them ending up alive and happy in the end was never gonna happen or work.
Oh was right.
But, in Neal’s words (per an interview with ), “It just didn’t feel very truthful…”The show is literally called “Killing Eve.” How is an ending where Eve is killed not truthful?SPOILERThe finale’s real sin was the where and why they left things with Konstantin.
I feel like it has to be occasionally okay for a gay character to die on a tv series. Also, Villanelle was a lunatic serial killer who murder a young child in season 2, and a whole host of other people left right and center. She was a monster. As everyone else has been saying here, any kind of happy ending with her free in the world would have been crazy.