A sour Killing Eve takes an ill-fated trip to the woods

There’s a certain type of Killing Eve episode in which the only way to describe the overall tone is sour. The violence gets grimier than usual, the vision of humanity grimmer, the humor bleaker. “Don’t Get Eaten” is one of those episodes.

On the one hand, episodes like this one serve as an important reminder that the world these people inhabit is downright grotesque—no matter how gorgeous the clothes or the locations, these are people living immersed in murder and violence. And on the other hand, these episodes usually make for a queasy, disconcerting viewing experience. It’s like there’s a sliding scale for any Killing Eve episode between the near-bubblegum pleasures of its more “fun” episodes, and the ones where Villanelle, in hideous jean shorts, murders two people in a tent.

Those murders are the inevitable result of her efforts to join a church, a move foreshadowed both by Eve asking if people can really change, and also by the fact that this is Villanelle, come on. Her ongoing quest to be good, or whatever flimsy collection of characteristics she imagines will get herself there, comes to a crashing end because she doesn’t actually understand human dynamics. She assumes that splashing the pastor’s dark past in front of everyone on the camping trip will win them to her side, misunderstanding that their loyalty would be to him instead of her, and the concept that a group like this might be invested in helping people overcome their pasts, even though she herself has joined for that very reason. Her quest to be good is also going to be stymied considering her own desire to make excuses for herself—take, for instance, her explanation to May that because people started thinking she was evil, she believed them. It’s an oddly meta moment, because as a viewer you see a teary-eyed Jodie Comer pouring her heart out to May, and so you can understand, in that moment, why May is so tempted to believe her. So much of Villanelle’s success at fooling people, despite her very evidently monstrous nature, is that people are so ready to believe better of her. If she wasn’t beautiful, and stylish, and capable of working up a dramatic tear in the right moment, would this work over and over again?

It’s May’s depressing forgiveness of Villanelle that makes the sourness of this episode so distinct. There is never any reward for believing the best of Villanelle, or forgiving her, or forming any kind of connection to her. There’s only the brief and incorrect belief that she’s something she’s not, and then a range of how much that naïveté is going to cost you. If anything, the reason Eve has made it this long is that her fascination with Villanelle’s dark side means that she has no interest in Villanelle trying to redeem herself, and isn’t going to believe her when she tries.

And as usual, it’s her own desire to stick her hand into a fire that leads Eve into more trouble. There’s a point where this behavior becomes less a character trait and more a storytelling crutch. Instead of gathering intel, learning more about who Hélène is, Eve just goes barging in, and has her usual sexually charged yet violent interaction with a dangerous woman. The meandering investigations of the Twelve have suffered from this issue all along—sporadically, we’re given faces who may possibly connected to the Twelve, then Eve or someone else comes crashing in and kills them, and there’s no real forward movement on the overall concept. We’ve been hearing about this sinister group for multiple seasons now, and it’s still not entirely clear what the group even is. This season, another new face got introduced, and Yusuf spent all of one episode pointlessly telling Eve not to approach Hélène, but we as viewers know she’s just going to ignore him and do it anyway.

Meanwhile, Carolyn is stuck in the land of unsubtle plot developments, where she’s threatened with a dead rat (after defecting? Why not continue wooing her to keep her there?) and then explains in a moment of blunt exposition that actually she’s defected because she thinks the Russians will help solve the mystery of why her son was murdered. Her daughter doesn’t merit a mention, even though we spent all last season with her.

It’s all a little blah and sour, with the various leads stranded too far away from each other to provide the pop of interpersonal conflict this show usually thrives on. Carolyn and Villanelle are treading water in unfamiliar surroundings, and Eve is at least on a surface level moving forward…but completely alone, with employers the show hasn’t bothered to introduce, and a love interest who’s been given almost no characterization besides ~fitness~. As grimy as this world is under its surface level polish, at its best it’s still fully immersive, a warped vision of conflicts between the wealthy and powerful in Europe tucked inside the antagonistic love affair between its dual protagonists. When you spend too much of an episode getting distracted by thoughts like “come on, a large crowd of people can now identify Villanelle on sight and she’s murdered two people”, it gets a whole lot less immersive.

Stray observations

• Poor horny Barbara has to be told to stay in her own tent, and then gets abandoned during the trust exercise, but she does get her moment back when she tells off Villanelle…and survives the experience.
• Those jean shorts were a crime against Jodie Comer and also against the very concept of jean shorts. No, this is not a Jorts reference. I would never associate him with those terrible jorts.
• Speaking of fashion, we’re rapidly heading towards a place where Eve is going to end up the best-dressed person on the show without ever improving how she dresses.
• Is that going to be the end of Villanelle Jesus? That was brief.
• More proof that going camping is never a good idea, she said, nodding sagely from within her city apartment that she never leaves.