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tainted-genome · 2 years

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The series finale of Killing Eve turned out to be one of the worst TV experiences in the last four years (for me definitely and many others just as much) and I truly want to understand, “why?”, why like this? because I honestly don’t get how that could have been the outcome to a show that had all the opportunities to take and disregarded every single one of them except that one.

I don’t even know in what order I should go about this because there are a thousand things to say, it’s that much of a mess. But, you know. First thing maybe being that the writers fooled themselves with a sense of “originality” when in fact they recycled every major character journey/growth and retold the whole story (quite literally from season 1-3), which, as a result, forced Villanelle and Eve to spend another season apart instead of together. A lethal and the biggest flaw considering just where the show had landed prior the premiere of season 4.

The distance in season 4 makes no. damn. sense.

Three years of examination, transformation, hell, even a cosmopolitan sense of sensibility between two characters who turned around because they wanted to continue what they have (not even regarding the outcome here yet), emotionally closing the gap… and you continue with a distance that makes no sense. Can anyone explain that to me? You have an entire outlet and legitimate material and this is what you choose to do because you know, why not. You pull them apart, again. But for what exactly? The rigorous need for “conflict”? The gratifying pain that comes with it? Some abstract form of pleasure that a season like the first or second could hold for very specific reasons? Is it the architecture of those seasons? How they inflected intimate connections and social issues? What is it?

If I were a lesser fan I would say this is just a terrible transaction since the lead writer kept changing and they were always kind of desperate to do their own thing. But I am not, and they weren’t just doing their own thing. They had the “unconventional knowledge” of Eve and Villanelle’s bond, and they threw it right out the window for the weakest condition possible: separation. That’s one thing I simply cannot wrap my head around because it gives way to the oldest, most tired and wretched resolution to a story that already stood on shaky legs but still had the right apparatus at its core. My beef, then, isn’t just with the sheer obsession with keeping Eve and Villanelle apart at all times either, but that… specifically in the final season… their dynamic conjures a weird animosity, one that isn’t just as frustrating to them as it is for the viewer (and I am being extremely light about it in my wording - I hated it), but one that leaves everything awfully powerless. By that I don’t mean that Villanelle can’t change or that Eve can’t embrace her feelings (they already have by the end of the third season goodness me, it was work from there on!). I mean that these two don’t actually have any agency of their own. Like, let’s try to be real here for a second; you cannot speak of power when your two main characters cannot control the story in any shape or form in which their feelings can be shared with each other. There is a sort of artificial boiler for both Eve and Villanelle where they either try to recover or devour something internal/external (movement as a medium):

But this conflict is already overpowering them because they can’t do it together. So instead of it being impactful it becomes transparent because it communicates that 1. Eve’s desires can be boiled down to a faceless organization which she seeks out for vengeance, completely disregarding the passion and fears she had over the course of three season because she knew the starting point to her interests found soil in the ground where Villanelle stood in and how she reacted to this darker inclinations by sheer volume of violent desperation (but it existed even before, proven by her collection of true crime books, dvd’s and her literal job). While at the same time it also renders Villanelle’s motivations of becoming “someone” way too simple, disregarding her space in which she exists without filter, changing liberty for stigma, and ultimately making the question between “life and death” unappealing because it is constantly there. That tires the narrative out because what all of this does is not actually foreshadow anything. it contradicts the entire story because neither Eve or Villanelle are given a real baseline. It’s very upsetting actually because it makes them both extremely inefficient as characters within their own stories. By that I don’t mean they have to work all the time. I mean that they always have to compormise their feelings which synthesizes the emotional and contextual element of powerlessness that I mention above. Under this notion, what can you possibly execute that isn’t borne out of annihilating pressure?

You disqualify them is the thing.

If Villanelle wants to learn not to kill for instance, then you have to give her someone to work with who recognizes those processes. Someone who hooks her in because they reject the doomstale - not entirely, but at least in a way in which change makes absolute sense (who is she?) but not necessarily how she always believed. Villanelle would have all the reasons in the world to protect Eve from her own, quite reckless, downfall after all, or would (in a better world) get to reject death in order to live herself. It’s why I kept referring to Eve’s journey to one of self-harm because she is fully consumed by the powerlessness in season 4 and she doesn’t have Villanelle’s integrity alongside her the same way Villanelle does not have Eve’s righteousness. But fact is, it would have felt organic with the migration of butterflies, symbolic of choices and partnership which she should have got to share with Eve. And yet it’s not where the story ventures. We are stuck in a church instead with Villanelle kissing (betraying) herself, a fretful state of trepidation that has no link to anyone or direction (at least the writers very sympathetically but actually fucked up way let Villanelle wallow in a sort of helplessness (the arrow), right? That borders on sickening).

It’s why I disliked the scene between Villanelle and Mel in 4x01 to be honest, because it dredges up the wrong nest. It resolves nothing for Villanelle even when Mel didn’t die there, for one. But more than that, it didn’t even open those season 3 seams for Villanelle to explore honestly, those feelings she carried on that bridge, because the key person kept missing. What it did to Villanelle instead is a massive disservice for when she does choose to kill (The Twelve in the final episode) because she knows she can in order to let someone live (Eve dancing). The “juxtaposition” erodes every sense of respect the writers should have had for her choice[s] “distract them”, because dying without having been able to maintain a grip on the one relationship with the person Villanelle should have spent her screentime with is not only “rushed” as so many stated, it corroded everything that happened between season 1-3, simply because they used a slippery narrative for one “provocative” ending that made everything unrealistic. As I remember, Villanelle couldn’t handle Eve’s mixed signals because they weren’t allowed to be clear. Villanelle especially was denied the direct contact whenever she initiated it (even from a standpoint where was already trying to do something with the little material she had to work on herself). All the religious connotations then too become useless (which were useless overall but anyways), because the joy and shock in the final minutes are as close as Eve and Villanelle after season 3. They completely missed the fucking mark, just for a messed up, dirty and worn out (tiresome) profile that Villanelle craved to shed already.

Which brings me to Eve and why the exploitation of Eve’s character made me question another writers room yet again (apart from killing Villanelle); if you want to put a character through hell, do it. Make them dig inside a house, make them dig even deeper, make them claw at grease and powder and make them chop and break those walls because every room leads to the next revelation. Put them through hell. But also try to make everything they want somehow happen because those characters don’t just have an effect on people who don’t get them, they also have an effect on those who do get them. Eve’s relationship to Villanelle has an effect to the whole story because it is the damn story. They make the centerpiece because it is them who wander outside the box, it is them who relate to each other (if only in one way or many ways) and relate to others, it is them who are stuck or having a ball and it is them who remove the layers as they go further down the line. If Eve had been so inclined to enjoy a damn croissant on a sunday, trust me, she would have stayed the fuck home. But Eve didn’t eat that because she wanted a boring life, she did it because it gave her direction, gave her appetite for what she had a gut feeling for, a desire, yearning, longing if you will:

Because if Eve couldn’t receive normalcy since it bored her to death (her marriage falling apart was legit), it still meant that she didn’t want things to be meaningless even when she was in the “game”. She needed meaning to everything she did (just look at her after she killed Raymond) because for all the dark and crazy things she is willing to do, the drive, that instinct which has resided inside her for god knows how long, she is exploring not simply accepting. Which means, she needed direction especially for her actions towards and emotions for Villanelle because it would have given her the awareness of a life possible outside of what she already knew and a life she denied with someone she had always complex affections for. So hearing “you’re about to embark on some mad endgame when in fact you know, deep down, you’re just a woman who likes an inappropriately timed croissant, on a hungover Sunday morning” left me feeling extremely - and I repeat - extremely shocked, to the point that for a moment I wondered, “why did I watch this 4 years for?” because it isn’t just a completely detached statement, it literally recycles every bit of character growth and nullifies the story, puts Eve right back to the beginning. No answers, no space, no choices, no Villanelle, nothing. Which also means: seeing that Eve’s agonizing scream at the last second of the finale is one of supposed relief… If you have nullified your character already, then that scream means absolutely nothing, except, at best and at worst, pain. I would like to ask the writers very sincerely: how can that be a powerful release when Eve did not have the connection she needed to have with Villanelle to allow not only Villanelle’s choices to be plausible insofar that she gives Eve life by protecting her because she knows “who she is”, but that she learned anything from Villanelle? If my memory serves me right, they made sure that Eve rejected every step she could have made towards Villanelle if given the opportunity (thus her own feelings). So squelching the insides of your character and calling it a “rebirth” is vicious and vile.

Same with Villanelle, all the symbolic “consent” of dunking her, combined with the fantastical celestial light that settles behind her body (both dead and alive) to drone in on some climax in her journey of self-actualization, when she was not only deprived of what she wanted (they haven’t done a single nice thing for her), but the writers neglected her. She was put through a meatgrinder and accessed no real, personal power. All they offered her is how “graceful” she looks. Just like Eve, Villanelle is put in a state of traumatic compliance that, imo, is absolute (anyone else detest “The End” card? The joke got lost amids the water).

And you see… Helene did not help Eve with anything that we didn’t already know. Gunn did not help Villanelle with anything that we didn’t already know. Pam is a supposed anti-thesis because she gets to reject what Villanelle was denied (agency). Carolyn being the main big boss just turned this whole Twelve thing on its head and made it absolutely ridiculous. Konstantin should have been dead by the end of season 3 but I digress. If season four should have been anything, it should have been Villaneve. Instead we have a literal dead character and one that screams herself to interior death. They got nothing out of this, so Eve was right: “For what?”. I hate that this line comes around so fully now, how they translated it to us.

And you know what the kicker is? The season 3 finale gave us one moment the writers should have latched onto and made their “go to place” (while putting Eve and Villanelle in a place from which they could embark and explore - together) because it truly tried to seek out what they both needed:

Read that line, and read it again. And tell me that “help me” doesn’t go for the both of them. Separation for edginess means nothing when the characters themselves call out for help, not just for a way out, but for connection. There is seriously no piece of knowledge that can derail your day like the reminder that Eve and Villanelle communicated this to each other. That is also further underscored by the way they both turn around at the end to face each other, the exceptionalism of having agency achieved through both consequence and emotional readiness to subvert any “subtextual” need for clarification and looking it directly in the eye. Becoming involved in organization politics yes, but also attesting to a terrain that not only determines their connection but ultimately what it could have brought out if they had been given the chance to try. Instead we got the rube goldberg of a story: analogous disdain which disparaged a power-up (represented by Eve and Villanelle) that could have been cutting in its actions, spiteful in its comedy, delightful in its heartfulness, infamous in its sincere framing and limitless in its complexities. Instead we got bitterness, the “natural order of things” (Bury Your Gays Trope and I don’t want to talk about that right now as it deserves a completely separate post with even more thoughts on my end) and a bond that kept the tactical machinations safe and them empty.

#killing eve spoilers #this is everything ive thought abt this season FINALLY put into words thank u op #sigh thats why ke ends at s3 for me

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