And, with an incredibly poetic (albeit frustrating) final scene, Killing Eve wraps its most uneven season to date. While I’ve been writing about it for the past eight weeks, often calling it out for its shockingly incoherent plotting and spiraling narrative, I had genuinely high hopes for the finale. I was expecting it to tie the season’s rather disparate arcs into some semblance of a bow (hell, I would have settled for a simple knot). Instead, the series managed to pay off exactly none of its arcs in a satisfying manner, while once again confirming that the series is terrified to actually take the story to its logical conclusion by killing key characters. When you have a cast this incredibly talented (while I often found myself yelling at the TV in frustration while watching the show this season, the show’s cast tried their absolute darnedest to pull off some truly bad writing), it’s disappointing to see them utterly wasted playing out a story that is held together by duct tape.
While there were a number of huge issues with the season, the most glaring (well, I supposed the second-most, after the tone-deaf restructuring of Villanelle as a killer with a conscience with little or no explanation for that massive piece of character assassination) has been the writers’ sudden penchant for simply explaining away key plot developments without bothering to show us anything leading up to them. In this episode alone we had Carolyn telling us that Mo had discovered Paul’s position with The Twelve – but never bothering to show us the evidence he received and provided to her prior to his untimely murder, the deus ex video that proved Konstantin was involved in Kenny’s death (something I called from the first episode, if I recall correctly) with little to no explanation as to what actually happened (I’m willing to give the writers some leeway here, as they don’t want us making a judgment on Konstantin quite yet), and the whole mystery of how Villanelle managed to always find Eve (or give Eve directions to her) while we weren’t watching them. Now, I’m not saying the writers need to let every possible scene play out, but the corner cutting throughout the season when it came to telling and not showing us was inexcusable for a series that both relies on mysteries to power its plots and delights in the little character moments. One of the best scenes of the season occurred just watching Eve and Villanelle providing the color commentary for Carolyn’s interrogation – not because it was providing context to the scene (although it was a crutch for the writers to drop some missing exposition in our laps), but because it served those two key elements of the series.
But, naturally, I have a major bone to pick with that sequence as well: When did Eve decide she’s willing to give into her darker self and accept her feelings for Villanelle? If the answer is when she waved at her on the train, ok, I’d be willing to accept that. It tracks, albeit on a hell of a rickety track. But boy, would I have loved some additional time spent with Eve as she reasoned out just what she was accepting by throwing caution to the wind and choosing to stand beside Villanelle. The entire series has been leading up to that single moment – Eve facing down the monster inside of her and choosing – and we were robbed of getting to see it play out. That final sequence on Tower Bridge was a lovely coda to everything, but it doesn’t make up for not getting to explore such a crucial moment for our protagonist. This woman lost her home, her husband (whose own life was utterly destroyed through her attraction to Villanelle), and was willing to walk away from everything to be with the woman who caused all that turmoil. And yet, we never got to experience the moment when she consciously made the choice to give in. I suppose one could argue there wasn’t a single moment, that Eve’s been sliding down the proverbial slippery slope for three seasons, but this new revelation read as muddled in a way it shouldn’t be. We care about Eve. We’ve watched her try to resist the pull to be with Villanelle. And yes, as the pair spoke of on the bridge (in some eye-rollingly on the nose dialogue), they feed each other’s darker urges. What made Eve break? Helping kill Dasha? If that was it, show us that was the reason. Realizing she has literally nothing left except Villanelle? Ok, but show us her realizing that and making the choice. You can’t cut corners when it comes to the moment the series has been leading up to for three seasons.
So, where do we go from here? Hell, I would be ok with that final moment on Tower Bridge being the final one of the series – the bad guys are still out there, our girls are standing the precipice of their future if they’re willing to jump together (for good or for ill), and Konstantin is on the run – although we know The Twelve are going to catch him at some point. There’s a ending there, a pretty realistic one at that, should they want to keep it. But I think we are smart enough to know things will continue into a fourth season. Plot-wise, Carolyn has all but ordered both Eve and Villanelle to abandon their investigation into The Twelve, but we all know that’s never going to happen. So, Eve and Villanelle will be firmly in the realm of the gray, working together and struggling to stay on the up and up while fighting The Twelve. Will Eve be turned into a killer? Will Villanelle descend into her baser instincts once more? Both women have their eyes fully open now – there’s no hiding anything from each other. How will that change their relationship. Eve wasn’t wrong in her assessment of their possible future together: This is a duo that will burn bright and then burn out. Hopefully their streak of light will be more cohesive and coherent in season four.
Final Thoughts:
— Added to the list of “Things That Were Handled Horribly This Season” was the arc for Geraldine. Gemma Whelan is a talented actress who deserved way better than to be given the role of the wet blanket whose sole purpose was to annoy the hell out of Carolyn and do nothing else. I’ve written about how one of the major issues of the season was that all the major characters spent most of it isolated in their own arcs, and the use of Geraldine to stifle Carolyn’s story was one of the more egregious examples of the flawed season narrative. A total shame.
— If you want to split up your central characters and add a number of new characters to flesh out those individual arcs, you better have a plan for how you’re going to tie it all together in the end. Suzanne Heathcote (season three’s showrunner) didn’t. And boy, was that a major misstep. One novel element of Killing Eve is that the show elevates a different writer each season to serve as showrunner (meaning it changes showrunners each season – something that is all but unheard of in the world of television). While it has allowed different women to have a chance to spearhead the series, it’s also meant a loss of cohesion from season to season (and two seasons that ended with massive cliffhangers that were incredibly hard for the incoming showrunner to solve). While season three ends on a less dire note, it’s still not an easy story to pick up for whomever gets the task in season four. Heathcote did the previously unthinkable and essentially got Eve and Villanelle together. You can’t just rip them apart again without good reason. And, after watching a season where they had little to nothing to do with one another, I really don’t want to deal with that again. It’s going to be an incredibly tricky dance to figure out.
— At the start of the season I lauded the series for finally bringing some stakes back by killing Kenny. Well, the finale all but proved that the season premiere was a fluke. Not killing Konstantin was just plain lazy. Killing off the two extremely underdeveloped season villains was necessary and uninspired. Leaving Kenny’s death as a question mark was disappointing, but I’m not particularly torn up about it. For a show with such interesting, often emotionally stunted, characters, we could have used all that time spent setting up arcs the show was planning to drop like a hot potato (Geraldine, Kenny, Niko, Villanelle’s family, Irina) actually getting to learn about these characters. As nice as that final scene was (and it was lovely), it also wasn’t earned. We didn’t get the character development necessary to make it land. We still haven’t gotten any real explanation for Villanelle’s emotional maturity (killing her mother is not a suitable explanation for a character that seemed incapable of emotional depth suddenly becoming an emotionally rich character). Eve’s sudden acceptance of her feelings for Villanelle lacked clear character motivations. Carolyn’s inability to kill Konstantin – or at least extract key information from him – made no sense for her character. We need to understand why a character chooses to do something. In season three of Killing Eve, the characters let the plot mechanics drive them rather than the other way around. Hopefully season four puts the characters back in the driver’s seat.
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