#laura neal go choke challenge

[trashgalactica]

So I finally got around to watching the Killing Eve finale and...hoo boy. I have some thoughts. Buckle up because this is gonna be a whole essay.

I knew going in to the finale that the ending was likely to be...not good. The mishandling of the Eve and Villanelle’s relationship, the meandering plot and subsequent rush to tie off all the loose ends did not exactly fill me with hope. I had avoided all spoilers and discussion of the finale online, which meant swearing off Tumblr entirely, but still I felt the rumblings of people’s displeasure and thought, oh, this is going to be BAD. Even then, I could not have prepared myself for just how profoundly they botched the ending. It honestly beggars belief. To somehow make a worse, less satisfying ending to this show than what we got, I feel would take genuine deliberate effort. Some part of me expected Ashton Kutcher to pop up after the credits to tell me that I just got punk’d.

I think it’s important to explain WHY this ending was so bad, because already I’m seeing smug responses to the controversy asking why anyone should expect anything but death for these characters when its been clear from the beginning that this isn’t a story with a happy ending. There’s a real ‘I told you so’ vibe coming from these kinds of takes and its frustrating to me to see people upset about the finale being painted as naive petulant children who are mad about their toys being taken away from them, because I think it fundamentally misunderstands the source of  (most) people’s ire.

The issue isn’t really that Villanelle died. I think the majority of us knew, going in, that one or both of Killing Eve’s leads dying was a very real possibility. I honestly would have been surprised if they hadn’t killed at least one of them off, despite the way the books go, because much of the shows length was spent foreshadowing that outcome and showcasing Eve and Villanelle’s mutually destructive behaviour towards each other. The issue is that they executed her death so INCREDIBLY poorly. I’m not a person who thinks you can never kill a queer person in a film or TV show- the rate at which popular media does so given how few LGBTQI characters of significance are represented on our screens is of course a concern- but I do believe it is possible to have a queer character die without invoking the bury your gays trope.

BUT.

You have to EARN it. If you’re going to kill a character off it has to make narrative sense. It should fulfil that character’s arc in a satisfying way without feeling like they’re being punished for their queerness. Villanelle’s death achieves none of this. The show spends its run building up to some final showdown with the 12 only to have Villanelle easily dispatch a bunch of faceless randos in the last five minutes of the show, while Eve is dancing at a wedding (???) I guess (???), and then have another (offscreen) rando dispatch her with a sniper rifle. The End. Literally- that’s the title card. It’s abrupt. It’s pointless, sloppy. It doesn’t tie into any of the thematic elements of the previous seasons. And it does so after it spends an entire season not knowing what it actually wants to do with its leads and wasting much of the run with new characters and subplots which ultimately serve no purpose.

It’s possible to imagine an ending where our leads die but it feels like the right narrative choice. Perhaps instead of resetting the board after season 3 and have Eve and Villanelle once again on opposing paths (the writers never did seem to know what to do with Villanelle and Eve once they actually were in the same room together, preferring instead to use the tension of their cat and mouse game to see them through the wobblier sections of the show), we actually see them trying to make a partnership work from the beginning of the season. Maybe, despite knowing that they will ultimately lose, they decide to take on the Twelve together, who, in this alternate universe, are actually a real threat instead of some mooks on a boat. Imagine, Eve and Villanelle- hand in hand, each with a smile and a gun, preparing to infiltrate some grand estate, knowing they’re hopelessly outnumbered but believing it better to go out in a blaze of glory than live long and dull empty lives or submit to the control of someone else. Fade to black. Or maybe they end up killing each other – the weight of everything that they’ve done to to the other too far a gulf for them to actually overcome, their collective darkness bringing out the worst in each other leading to their ultimate demise. Either of these options would be narratively consistent with what the show had built up until now, and provide some emotional weight to their deaths and close out their arcs in a coherent way.

Instead they fell into exactly the same trope that so many films and shows do which is to have these characters consummate their relationship at the Nth hour and then kill one of them off to wring an unearned sense of pathos out of the shock value. That’s not some shakespearian tragedy like Laura Neal seems to imagine it is. It’s just lazy writing. It’s like the episode got written at 9pm on a Friday night and everyone just wanted to get it over with so they could go to the pub.

Worse, it’s obvious that the showrunner FUNDAMENTALLY misunderstands who these characters are and what they want. To frame Eve’s survival at the cost of Villanelle dying as a ‘rebirth’ and that now she can ‘move on from their toxic and obsessive relationship’, to ‘rediscover what the normal world has to offer’ as if Eve hasn’t spent the last four seasons making it clear that she was miserable in her old life, that she felt trapped and isolated, and that Villanelle was the one person who she truly connected with- seems laughably tone deaf. And given how soon it occurs after Eve and Villanelle actually get together, frankly homophobic. Much like other examples of Bury Your Gays, this framing- consummation of a queer relationship, followed shortly thereafter by death, the implied return to the status quo, makes it feel like Eve is being punished for stepping outside heteronormative boundaries, especially with that brutal hard cut ending. Villanelle, as the ‘instigator’ and clearly the more ‘deviant’ of the two is killed as a lesson to Eve about what happens when you follow in her path. It implies that Eve’s growth over the show isn’t her embracing her true nature, but rather a corruption of it. Its Hays code era messaging, even if that’s not what Neal intended. As Eve herself says- somehow I survived, but for what? Everyone is gone- Villanelle, Niko, her friends. Carolyn betrayed her. It’s remarkably cruel and yet Neal frames this as a triumph.

It’s honestly like she didn’t even watch her own season. Some of the things she says seems fundamentally at odds with what we see on screen. Yes, Eve and Villanelle’s relationship to each other has been toxic and obsessive and destructive, but it feels to me that the show has spent the last two seasons exploring how their relationship has grown out of obsession and into something resembling genuine connection, even if the way they relate to each other and the world is warped. It asks the question- can these two fundamentally fucked up people form a relationship without ultimately destroying each other?  Now it’s okay if the answer to that question is no, but if that’s the direction you’re going in you need the rest of your narrative to support the conclusion. If you want your audience to go with you when you say clearly this relationship is destructive, that it doesn’t work and can never work, maybe don’t spend the only episode where they do get together, demonstrating how well it IS working. As the writing maxim goes, show don’t tell!

The mischaracterisation of Eve this season is probably the most egregious, but nobody comes out of this season unscathed. Villanelle’s growth over the previous three seasons is thrown out almost entirely, Carolyn, though charmingly mercenary in previous seasons, is downright sociopathic here, and her constantly flip flopping allegiances and unclear motivations- while I think meant to demonstrate her lack of loyalty and capacity for betrayal- end up just making her seem silly and incompetent. The Twelve, a mysterious far reaching, dangerous and seemingly unbeatable organisation? Turns out you can find them all just hanging out on a wedding boat, and despite their importance and the fact that they are surely aware that somebody is killing a bunch of them off, it’s super easy to get on board by pretending to be a celebrant!

So to conclude this rant, like most of those criticising the show’s ending I’m not angry that they killed Villanelle. I’m angry that they squandered the incredible potential of this show, the talents of its actors and insulted the intelligence of its collective audience by killing her in the most cheap, lazy and unsatisfying way possible. Sandra Oh and Jodie Comer are incredible actresses and they did an admirable job with what they had, but I’m devastated for them that the show went out this way. No real resolution, or sense of thematic closure, just a rushed hack job by someone who doesn’t understand the characters that she’s writing. Laura Neal, may you spend the remainder of your miserable days haunted by angry, shitting seagulls.

#killing eve #ke #laura neal go choke challenge #man i really did write a 1600 word essay at 4am huh #killing eve spoilers #killcommander #jackieshauna