Killing Eve

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.

Sandra Oh and Jodie Comer's romantic thriller has seen diminishing returns, but it still deserved a better goodbye than Season 4's finish.

Konstantin is a goner (officially). Carolyn is in the wind (though probably on her way back to MI6). When Villanelle comes to get her, she informs Eve that their years-long mission to eradicate the most mysterious and powerful group of people in all of Europe is done. Carolyn, watching from the shore, speaks into a walkie talkie: “Jolly good.” Eve surfaces in the water, screaming in agony. Eve and Villanelle board the boat where the remaining members of The Twelve are meeting. Rumors of a spin-off led me to believe she was being built-up as the star of her own series, and that very well may still be the case. Konstantin (Kim Bodnia) was a goner (reportedly). Carolyn (Fiona Shaw) was in the wind (though probably on her way back to MI6). Prior to their departure, Eve tells Villanelle she needs her help to track down The Twelve. “And this is why you’re here?” Villanelle says. Pam tells Villanelle of Konstantin’s death (in a curt moment that belittles their relationship, given penetrating depth by Comer’s teary-eyed final words.) Carolyn decides to step aside, letting her former employee and Havana roommate take care of The Twelve for her. “You know why I’m here,” Eve responds, letting the dual implication that she’s there to take down The Twelve and there for Villanelle set in. The show is titled “Killing Eve.” A happy ending isn’t in the cards — if it were, they would’ve started setting it up long ago. Villanelle had chaos and destruction in her past, unresolved conflict in her present partnership, and a blessed future. “Killing Eve” Season 4, Episode 8, isn’t a finale, but the finale.

'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.

'Killing Eve' lead writer Laura Neal breaks down the shocking series finale, including that final twist and why the ending 'felt right.'

We spoke about it loads, but we spoke about very particularly the nature of that scream and the nature of her emerging from the water. The way the episode ends, it’s so abrupt. We don’t get to see what happens to Eve. The last thing we see of her is her thrashing in the water and screaming. We always knew it had to speak in a sort of cheeky way for the nature of their relationship. Did you always have that in the back of your mind, that you wanted to play that at some point? I think it’s quite unusual in this show to have that space, both emotionally and in terms of the plot, to have them come together without any distractions and without any other characters there and just have this space, emotional and geographical, for them to exist in each other’s company and really test out what that’s like. We’ve been waiting for four seasons for them to have time to themselves and not have to be running around or chasing each other. And for me, there’s a sense that she doesn’t really die. So it’s almost like lots of the story is them trialing their relationship in different formats and testing it and seeing how it works. Was there ever a possibility that Eve and Villanelle could live happily ever after? Read on for Neal’s explanation of why Villanelle had to die, why it doesn’t matter who actually pulled the trigger and what was behind Eve’s final scream. She fell into the water, and though Eve jumped in to save her, Villanelle’s lifeless body was pulled away by the current, and Eve was left screaming to the heavens as we learned Carolyn had ordered the hit (!), with the text on the screen announcing: “The End.” Well, then!

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

Shaw also discusses Carolyn and Konstantin's complicated relationship and why she finds her character so interesting.

I began to get to know Carolyn as we went along and Carolyn began to get to know me, partially in response to the writers to what they were seeing I was doing. I think that’s part of the genius of the series actually is that they’re not intricately involved, not necessarily. I think the earlier episodes are the ones where we formed the characters. Yeah. I actually wish that the story had taken them to travel further together. I think everybody who lives their life as out on the edge as these people get tired from time to time and wonder would they have had a better time if they’d stayed in and whether we would’ve a better time if we were one of them. I’ve always said from the very first series, Carolyn may have many Eves working for her, many Pams, but by the time we take her out of MI6, she’s run out of all of these underlings or these students of her skills. He’s so abused everybody he’s loved, including his daughter, in such terrible ways that I’m not sure these people are worthy of the notion of love. But it is a world in which even within its own rules, all those people have witnessed or been part of or ordered or suggested or felt inevitable that somebody would die. Not in our world, in the Killing Eve world. In that way, that’s part of the fun of it. It is a genre in which people go bang and someone dies. I don’t think she’s very concerned because she’s done the task she presumably paid the price to do.

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.

The fourth and final season saw psychopathic assassin Villanelle (played by Jodie Comer) and former MI6 agent Eve (Sandra Oh) finally come together, not as ...

In the end, the only loyalty she had was to herself. Not to mention, she could pass the massacre of The Twelve off as her own work. As Eve emerged from the water letting out a visceral scream, Carolyn was seen standing on the bridge with a radio. As she waited, she heard Eve deliver a beautiful speech, leading Villanelle to realize she truly was well and loved. The shooting was relentless and ultimately, Villanelle, who had dodged death on numerous occasions, was defeated. As Eve was roped into officiating a wedding as a distraction, Villanelle got to work.