Jodie Comer as Villanelle in Killing Eve invited you to watch Killing Eve on Amazon Prime Video/ BBC America as soon as possible
In its last season, the gritty, edge-of-the-seat spy-thriller from the badass trailblazing Phoebe-Waller Bridge who executive produced and wrote the first season. But passed her seat to other female writers to take their take on the story of Eve Polastri and assassin Villanelle each season. It's a show by women, for women featuring gender-swapped roles rightly so as Fiona Shaw shines as Carolyn Martens. As a feminist in progress, this is the show for me.
Villanelle embracing Eve in Season 4
Whatever else is going right and very right wrong in my opinion in Killing Eve, it helps if we know immediately which series we’re watching. An exciting brutalist landscape with exciting ladies at the helm. Does the season premiere start with “Russia” written in giant pastel letters, retro-reverb beehive pop on the soundtrack, and a woman in biking leathers breaking into a government building wielding a gun and silencer? You bet as this can only be the opening set to season 4 of Killing Eve.
Villanelle and Eve give us everything in the posters for season 1, 2 and 3
This is a taste of season four. If you didn’t catch seasons one to three, what have you missed? Well, there’s a diffident but determined intelligence agent called Eve (Sandra Oh), and a fearsome yet emotionally fragile brittle assassin called Villanelle (Jodie Comer), and they’re obsessed with each other because … actually we’ve never fully established but I just think they emotionally appreciate each other despite being on the opposite sides of the aisle. Anyway, since Eve began tracking Villanelle, what has happened is that a criminal network called the Twelve keeps murdering beloved minor characters,( rest in peace Kenny Lodgings, I was appalled, shocked, and angry when you died) and Eve plans to destroy it, but what the Twelve wants or why we might care has remained enclosed behind the shadows.
Killing Eve is funny, sexy and the source of numerous brilliant actors’ best work, When Phoebe Waller-Bridge of Fleabag, Crashing fame originally dramatized the Codename Villanelle from the novellas by Luke Jennings. She filled the first season with one-liners so cheekily mischievous, an aesthetic so enviable and a main antagonist are so exciting that television drama has rarely created such an overwhelmingly attractive first impression with a cult-like following online, especially Reddit. Nothing before or since has felt as daisy fresh as Villanelle, modeling vicious couture in a series of prime continental locations, slaying her victims with imperious calm.
The problem was that Villanelle works as a mood, a vibe, a mythical beast. When season one climaxed with Eve – the MI5 desk jockey whose pursuit of the psychopathic Villanelle had awakened the carefree hedonist buried deep within her – stabbing her quarry in an outpouring of vengeance and lust, the only viable ending had been used up, but the show had become so intoxicating, it was bound to unwisely continue. But, not unlike Villanelle breezing out of a penthouse suite leaving bloody chaos behind her,
Here is a character analysis of Eve avoiding any spoilers of course.
She grew up in America. Though she was born in England, Eve spent her childhood in Connecticut after her parents split up. She developed an early interest in criminal minds and got a degree in criminal psychology, hoping to one day get a job in intelligence. She is living in London, contentedly if a little bored at times. She is an MI5 security officer. Though Eve has a job in her chosen field, it’s a lot less exciting than the one she once imagined. Eve spends most of her time in a desk-bound job that focuses on providing security details for foreign people of interest when they visit London. That all changes when Eve inadvertently crosses paths with a female assassin she’d been tracking in her informal investigation. MI6 Russia Section leader Carolyn Martens gives Eve an “unofficial-official” assignment to track down this mysterious killer.
Her sole interest lies in understanding the criminal mind. Her relationship status is that she is married to Niko Polastri. Eve leads a relatively happy life with Niko, but work always seems to be her priority. The challenge is tracking down a killer. Eve’s interest in the mysterious “Villanelle” is both a job and a passion. Eve becomes single-mindedly obsessed with tracking down a woman she both fears and, in a weird way, kind of admires. As Eve notes in a moment of frustration,
“She is outsmarting the smartest of us, and for that, she deserves to do or kill whoever the hell she wants.”
While as per her personality cab be described as observant, obsessive, and easily frazzled. Though she’s got a brilliant mind, Eve is more Bridget Jones than James Bond. She’s not a natural secret agent, and her down-to-earth demeanor often clashes with the world of subterfuge. She struggles when it comes to compartmentalizing her work from her personal life, especially given that she seems more interested in the former than the latter. Though Eve comes across as mild-mannered and a little bit awkward, she’s smart, strategic, and great at thinking outside the box. She also has a bold, rash side that tends to emerge whenever she’s got a lead on Villanelle.
Waller-Bridge sauntered off to work on other projects at the end of season 1.
Since then, Killing Eve has been a fiery training ground for female writers, with each season asking a new showrunner to attempt the task of keeping the story going. Season four boss Laura Neal has the hardest challenge of all, not just because of Killing Eve’s generally diminishing returns – by this point, we’re peering at a photocopy of a photocopy – but because this is the final season. But I want more.
A hint of where Neal is taking us comes in that first scene of the new run, when the armed biker we assumed was Villanelle removes her helmet to reveal that she is, in fact, Eve. Now, free of the frustrating job and boring husband that used to tie her down by giving her something to live for, she is close to embodying the dark fantasy she used to covet from afar. She’s living in a hotel and enjoying a casual thing with a muscly colleague( YUSUF) at the private security firm where she now works: and I just say that witnessing this iS a treat. He buys her burgers, sharpens her hand-to-hand combat skills, and cheerfully agrees to unfussy sex in a surveillance van after a conversation about firing a weapon turns her on.
Sandra Oh remains fantastic as Eve, whose gradual journey from nerdy safety to delicious self-destruction has been the only thing about the post-Waller-Bridge years that has ever really worked. Comer, on the other hand, is struggling as Villanelle, lost in the nonsensical idea of this stone-cold monster trying to find redemption. While season four reinvents her as working in a church, lodging in the vestry, and undergoing baptism as part of her latest scheme to convince Eve, for reasons unclear, that she’s no longer evil. I specifically like her Victorian outfits to accentuate her trying to be good while her primal instinct is to be a murderous villain. Mild carnage ensues that is an understatement, but her co-opting of Christianity is, compared to Villanelle at her awesome best who is trying to take out The Twelve. The dull British setting prevents Comer from wearing any fabulous outfits, which, in a show that once unashamedly prized being beautiful on the surface, is another pleasure lost. I mourn it as an amateur fashion critic online.
The end of episode one hints at a solution to these issues that would certainly be ambitious but looks more likely to come off as desperate. Before that, one of the series’ recurring motifs pops up yet again, when Eve and Villanelle share a confrontation that is not allowed to resolve anything: this time they are on either side of a fish tank, with Comer all in white. While the children of the 90s who make up the bulk of the audience might chuckle at the homage to Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, that sort of direct reference feels like something that the show in its pomp wouldn’t have resorted to. It’s still recognizably Killing Eve and it’s still very cool. But I hope that both Eve and Villanelle survive and emerge victorious over The Twelve happily reading together as with each passing episode there is an inkling of an epic showdown.
Until then, you can watch new episodes on Amazon Prime Video / BBC America depending on where you are in the world and chat with me on Reddit to discuss your fan theories in the comment section.
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