Killing Eve

Fans are not happy with the 'Killing Eve' series finale, and it's not hard to see why. The show's final episode resorts to several tired TV cliches and, ...

Therefore, her decision to chase after Villanelle and be with her in the series finale represents Eve’s long-awaited acceptance of the life she’d been chasing ever since Killing Eve’s pilot episode. That’s a twist that calls her entire journey into question, and it forces one to wonder about the nature of the show’s message. In that way, Eve’s pursuit of Villanelle wasn’t just thrilling and entertaining to watch — it also represented her desire to live a life different from the one that society had assigned to her. The trope in question was coined in reference to the overwhelming number of 19th, 20th, and 21st-century stories that end with two queer characters being torn apart by death. And that’s how Killing Eve ends, with its central duo forever torn apart in the same river that they stood over together at the end of its third season. After destroying The Twelve, Villanelle finds Eve and leads her onto the outer deck of the ferry.

One of the best shows on TV delivered final memorable moments, before heading the way of Game of Thrones.

We got another great needle drop -- Eve and Villanelle eating Revels chocolate in the camper van and head-bopping to The Human League's Don't You Want Me. And let's have a moment of appreciation for Villanelle's Chris Evans-esque sweater from Knives Out. The season 4 finale of Killing Eve -- also the finale of the entire show -- resulted in one of the most painful rug pulls imaginable. Just after Villanelle murders the entirety of The Twelve, standing in the glow of her accomplishment and embracing Eve as a happily committed couple, she's shot dead by Carolyn Martens' sniper. It felt very Killing Eve, as much as that's possible in these later seasons, often described as a diluted imitation of season 1. The sleeping bag scene is another prime example of the writers getting ahead of their audience. The show seemed to be set up for Eve to meet her fateful end.

A series following the life of MI6 spymaster Carolyn Mertens is currently in development, which will serve as a sort-of Killing Eve spinoff.

She added, "I’ve been in some wonderful shows in my life, but in the end, it’s only a handful that you really miss. Killing Eve's final episode airs tonight, but it likely isn't the end of the Killing Eve universe. The creators could have gone for Villanelle or Eve, but Carolyn provides a different take on things.

The 'Killing Eve' series finale sees Eve and Villanelle reach the end of their story in the most clichéd way possible.

After creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge left the first season on a huge cliffhanger before leaving the show itself, it can’t have been easy for Emerald Fennell to pick up where she left off, let alone move the narrative past Eve stabbing Villanelle in the gut. As I watched the baffling final sequence of “Killing Eve,” I thought back to this exchange and wondered if this particular flavor of defiance was the show’s goal all along. But if one or both of them were going to end the series dead, Eve stepping back from an embrace only to see Villanelle blinking through a gunshot wound is as boring a death scene as it gets. But no: “Killing Eve” really ends with Villanelle drifting away into the Thames, Jack in “Titanic” style, as Eve screams into the night. The whole thing is so abrupt, so hackneyed, so amazingly unoriginal that for one hopeful minute, I was sure it had to be a trick. In their last confrontation, Eve ( Sandra Oh) and Carolyn (Fiona Shaw) sit perfectly still in an unassuming pub, eyeing the other with wary disdain as Villanelle ( Jodie Comer) plays darts in the other room.

A recap of 'Making Dead Things Look Nice,' episode seven of season four of 'Killing Eve,' starring Sandra Oh and Jodie Comer.

Is that what Villanelle represents to her here, or is Eve perhaps following Martin’s advice to seek out the people who know her soul? Gunn’s burned her rowboat and moved her personal effects from the barn to Gunn’s cabin, where they can do fun stuff like whittle and listen to the shipping forecast. Earlier in the episode, before Yusuf leaves Eve catching her breath outside the karaoke bar, he tells her to find the part of her life that she can bear and hold onto it. Before he can finish the job, though, Vlad arrives to black-bag Carolyn back to Moscow. In telling Vlad what she’s gleaned from Lars’ notebook — that each date The Twelve meets is marked with a barn swallow — Carolyn realizes her mistake. Pam’s too good for The Twelve, Konstantin sweetly assures her as a tipsy father-figure and reluctant adopted daughter sit down to game plan the rest of their lives over pizza. Eve heeds Konstantin’s advice not to take on The Twelve alone and makes her way to Inverness and beyond to recruit Villanelle, who is actually more of a captive now. Somehow, the bravado that carried her through those season four showdowns with Hélène isn’t enough to see her through the minefield of her own memory. She offers Vlad a trade: the assassin-birder waiting in the lobby for time to fly to England on the strength of her new hunch. “It’s an incredible feeling, being inches from the thing you’ve been looking for,” a gentleman birder says to her with suspicious prescience. Back in London, Eve’s on the private security grind by day but struggling to leave that James Bond life behind. Villanelle spent the first half of the season chasing goodness, but Gunn represents something easier: someone to be bad with. Yet the meeting effectively launches her MI6 career, ending her marriage, which gets her shot in the back in a roundabout way.

The spy drama wraps up its four-season run with a murder-filled series finale. By Kat Rosenfield April 10, 2022 at 10:02 PM EDT.

And as Eve reaches for her outstretched hand, the current takes her, and she sinks away, vanishing into the deep. Above the surface, the light from the London Bridge shines down, throwing her into sharp relief as blood blooms from the wounds on her back: for a moment she's suspended in time and space, an angel framed by crimson wings, a poignant echo of the way she hoped Eve would see her back when she was trying to become a better person. The choice to separate the women in this moment is one of the most inexplicable things the show has ever done, and especially considering what happens next, I predict that many, many people are going to be frustrated by it. Over the course of this final season, a frequent (and accurate) criticism has been that it all feels a bit rushed. As Gunn raises her machete for a killing stroke — "You can't have her, she's mine," she hisses — Eve clubs her with a rock, runs away, and then climbs a tree to get the drop using some of those combat skills she picked up from Yusuf. Villanelle, hiding amongst the ferns, watches all of this with a zany grin on her face. There's even a glimmer of hope as Villanelle gets her tarot read by the camping couple (right before she and Eve steal their van): her future shows sunny days ahead, a path blessed by celestial light. Villanelle, realizing that she's made a serious mistake, flees into the woods while her spurned lover chases after her with a machete— just as Eve arrives at the island to put the final point on this love triangle. She's still in Margate with Konstantin, who has just gotten some bad news (a phone call from his daughter telling him she's joined the Twelve), followed by some excellent news (Helene is dead, along with her threats to blackmail him.) At first, it looks like this might be the start of a beautiful friendship: as Konstantin explains to Pam over a pizza, the two of them are going to make an escape. But more important is the centrality of this idea not only to Eve's life, but to Killing Eve writ large: once you've become who you are, what if that person is hard to live with? She keeps flashing back, not to the moment she killed Lars Meier, but further, all the way to her old life as a happily married karaoke-singing desk jockey at MI5. We see some familiar faces in this moment: Niko. Bill. Elena. All of them casualties of Eve's reckless pursuit of… She's fiercely protective of her island, and (as one unfortunate fisherman discovers early in the episode) she'll kill anyone who threatens the sanctity of her solitude. One is that the show is ending.

'Killing Eve' EP Sally Woodward Gentle spoke to Deadline about planning the series finale, potential spinoffs and a vacation in Cuba.

I think for Carolyn, deep in her heart, she knew that Konstantin was ultimately responsible for Kenny’s death, but she needed the excuse to stay in the game and to stay occupied. I have to say it wasn’t a sort of conscious thing that Eve loses Villanelle and Carolyn loses Konstantin, but I think it’s what felt truthful. Having something to drive her forward through the weird grief of Kenny’s death was the only thing that was keeping her alive.I think ultimately Konstantin was probably responsible for Kenny’s death. But I also feel like maybe he tipped her off to what Eve and Villanelle were going to do. Carolyn and Konstantin could’ve wandered off into the sunset, but I think it was unlikely. GENTLE: Well, I think the show’s always been sort of fundamentally about sort of love and relationships. They both exit to the helm of the ship and rejoice in what they’ve accomplished. When you consider that Villanelle has always worked in a high-risk industry, there was a degree of inevitability about it. Villanelle takes out the kitchen staff and gains access to the bottom of the ship. Before confronting The Twelve, Villanelle watches Eve channel her relationship with her assassin lover to preach about patience and the rollercoaster of love. Before the first part ends, Konstantin tries to convince Pam to join in him in leaving The Twelve, but instead becomes the victim of all the skills he’s taught her. After a haunting karaoke session and chat with therapist Martin, Eve realizes that she isn’t quite done trying to take down The Twelve.

Editor's note: The following contains major spoilers about the "Killing Eve" series finale.

Despite the strength of the cast, that last part was a question that seasons three and four didn't satisfactorily answer. As for Eve, she burst to the surface, but it was hard not to think, "Well now what?" finale a disappointment, because given the downward trajectory that the show has been on since its buzzworthy first season, expectations have been systemically lowered.

Ending a show that was, at heart, about the dangerous allure of violence was always going to be a fraught prospect. The idea that any of these people would ...

I would have liked to go out on a more positive note, but even when this show was at its lower points, it was always dense and lush and fascinating in a way that left plenty to write about it. But the show isn’t called Killing Villanelle, and it’s a lot harder to understand what all of this has meant for Eve. Don’t leave your stable desk job? The death is sordid and tawdry, coming at the hands of a person he has just tried to rescue, at the orders of a person who’s now dead, and after predicting, correctly, that the women on this show would be the death of him. After spending the entire season seeming bereft and lost, the original version of Carolyn returned in this episode to be steely and mysterious, defecting back to the Brits (is this…possible?) and apparently giving up on figuring out who in The 12 ordered her son’s death. Pam, by the way, might make the sole smart choice in the history of this show, which is to say, getting the hell out of this entire world the minute Carolyn offers her a job. Ending a show that was, at heart, about the dangerous allure of violence was always going to be a fraught prospect.

The last three minutes of the series are rushed, half-baked, and out of step with both the double episode finale and the show as a whole.

For all that Killing Eve blurred the lines over the years between cat and mouse, killer and catcher of killers, in the end all the agents lived, and all the assassins died, save Pam, who might have chosen to get out before she got started in earnest, and Gunn, who got her eyes clawed out and her head bashed in for her trouble. Wasn’t the point of this show that there are no bad guys and good guys, that the continuum between Villanelle and Eve has disappeared completely? If Villanelle had actively sacrificed herself to save Eve, for example, or had knowingly gone on a suicide mission that would end her own life but was the only way to take down The Twelve, the ending would have felt more satisfying, and the character would have had more agency. Other than a guttural scream to show she was alive and in anguish, Eve and the audience were cheated out of a similar moment regarding Villanelle. It’s too bad the writers didn’t commit fully to the idea of him planting it, a sort of Pam-assisted suicide.) Carolyn, Villanelle and Pam were also given the time to reflect on his death in the second hour, even if the moments were brief. Killing Eve ends its four-season run in a double-episode finale that is so entirely out of step with the final three minutes that it’s hard to even consider them together.

Killing Eve's series finale is true to the show's earliest form: Belonging almost entirely to Sandra Oh and Jodie Comer. A recap of 'Hello, Losers,' episode ...

There’s the implication of more: Villanelle runs around to the side of the car we can’t see and when we cut back to the duo in the cab of the van, they have a sort of postcoital glow. From The Dixie Queen, Eve and Villanelle can see Tower Bridge, the same bridge where they made their big goodbye at the end of season three, the one that didn’t stick. Eve seems absorbed in the Electric Slide, oblivious to what’s happening in the other room, where Villanelle is doing murders with a champagne bucket stand. Not just Bill, but Gemma and what happened to Niko and what happened to Kenny. How does Eve turn to Villanelle in the driver seat and not be reminded how much she’s cost everyone around her? To talk their way onboard, Eve poses as a wedding officiant, which affords her the chance to deliver her uncharacteristically optimistic theory of romantic love. Wait for the other movers to move and insert herself in such a way that she might be able to show her face again at MI6. Sensing there’s no future with someone who changes partners so fast, Pam wisely walks away. They finally kiss — FINALLY — after a side-of-the-road pitstop in which they pee side-by-side despite the acres of countryside available to them, a shorthand for intimacy. As they wake up the next morning in the same hard bed, Villanelle traces the bullet scar she left on Eve’s back, a reminder that death has been nearby for a while. Gunn reanimates as Eve washes the literal blood from her hands and Villanelle scrambles to pack her things. When you have a crush on someone, even the most lethal assassins and intrepid spies are just idiots talking about nothing for the sake of making more conversation with each other. Villanelle and Eve cast off down river in shambolic fashion as Gunn blindly gropes around her private island in the background. Eve resourcefully clobbers Gunn over the head with a rock, then capably if also comically climbs a tree and lays in wait.

Everyone Hates The 'Killing Eve' Series Finale Ending It's being described as “Game of Thrones level bad” or a “finale to rival Dexter.”

Fans are not buying that explanation, and it’s clear the ending missed by a mile. She does this selfless thing that I think she talks about wanting to do in Episodes 1 and 2, and she can never quite find the right way to do it. They view the ending and the death of Villanelle via Carolyn (who supposedly may get her own spin-off series) as nothing short of a betrayal.