Killing Eve sends Villanelle to a qualified therapist, finally

It’s a very Killing Eve way to go about it, but the life cycle of a psychopath turns out to be an effective way of showing just how sinister the work of the Twelve is. The parallel stories of Pam and Villanelle are opposite ends of one narrative, from the grooming of the psychopath straight through to the collateral damage as that person’s grasp on their own tendencies starts to fray. The result on both ends is a lot of bodies, and an indifference from the Twelve about it.

For Villanelle, this has meant random murder sprees wherever she happens to be at any given moment, as she tries and fails to figure out why she is the way she is, and fails again and again to not be like that anymore. The question of nature versus nurture for her feels too complex to definitively answer—we’ve seen glimpses of her past, but we’re never going to know what the alternative version of her life was like, if someone like Martin had found her rather than a group of people determined to exploit her violent impulses. It’s an easy answer during their enforced therapy session for Martin to say he doesn’t think a true psychopath would want to change her behavior, but it’s not like Villanelle has sat through a lengthy series of diagnostic tests as an adult to figure out what’s going on with her. When we first meet her, she’s all impulse, and if anything has changed about her, it seems to be the experience of doubt. As she herself wonders, is this what it’s like to be insecure? It’s less romantic than her feelings about Eve, but when the base question is whether or not she’s going to keep killing people, that moment of doubt is much more important—it’s what initially saves May, even though Villanelle ends up going through with it later.

And on the other end of this life cycle is Pam, a troubled person with violent tendencies who hadn’t acted on them before Hélène showed up. That latent ability to commit murder might never have gone anywhere while she still experienced doubt about whether or not it was a good idea to strike back against her brother. But when she’s frustrated that her new glamorous mentor doesn’t think she’s ready for more, and she’s going to be stuck in that morgue forever, it spills over into a spontaneous moment of aggression and she goes from potential murderer to remorseless murderer.

This episode highlights how effective a manipulator Hélène is, given her behavior towards Pam and Fernanda, but also how dangerous it is for her to behave this way. Yes, she’s getting a new assassin and gossip on the Twelve, but along the way, she has a young woman murdering people to try to prove she’s ready to murder more people, and an emotional ex who spills all the same gossip to the first person who’s kind to her. There’s no tidy way to maneuver people in this way, because once you’ve pushed them to the limit, you have no control over what else they choose to do in addition to whatever need you have.

There’s also a parallel with Eve, whose manipulation of Fernanda is perhaps shorter term than Hélène’s, but it’s still deeply unkind. She found a woman so desperately unhappy that she was screaming about a handwritten note to a chauffeur in a parking garage, got her drunk and confessional, then stole something from her and abandoned her in a bar. Fernanda may not have invested quite as much emotionally in “Nicole,” but the show isn’t going to let us forget what Eve did; it’s quite pointed to see Fernanda return to their table moments after Eve bailed, and see it abandoned. What Eve did was cruel in the first place, but it’s her indifference to how Fernanda will feel later that makes the entire con that much more callous. Villanelle can kill certain people because they don’t really qualify as people to her; Eve isn’t murdering people, but there’s a similar classification at work about who matters and who doesn’t.

That doesn’t quite make her the scorpion in their little saga, as Villanelle posits. Sure, it’s a betrayal that she called the police on Villanelle…if you only see the universe existing through the lens of their relationship. What she actually did was take action to stop a person from killing again, after she found evidence that Villanelle was doing so pretty indiscriminately. She may express to Yusuf and Villanelle earlier in the episode that she doesn’t care what Villanelle is getting up to, but at a certain point, she has to recognize that she’s the only person who’s going to be able to stop Villanelle from hurting people. It doesn’t exactly reflect well on Eve that she only does so once she sees a picture of the victims and realizes that Villanelle is endangering a friend of hers, but the end result is the same.

Villanelle’s exhausted return to prison feels of a piece with Carolyn’s weariness, even if Carolyn is periodically disguising it better. The two of them seem very, very tired of all of this—the endless maneuvering, the bloodshed, the way it’s never really over. Eve has been more downtrodden in prior seasons, but it’s hard not to get the sense that she’s the only one with the energy left for this fight. Or rather, the delusion that this fight is winnable.

Stray observations

• I like to use stray observations sometimes for wacky theories, so today’s theory is that Yusuf is the secret assassin. He’s clearly quite skilled, he’s still weirdly mysterious, and Eve is both a good investigator and perpetually oblivious about what her paramours are feeling or doing. Plus, it’s more interesting dramatically if he’s the one doing it rather than another character we’ve never heard of.
• I truly don’t understand what the title cards were supposed to do in this episode. It didn’t even make sense to give them to Yusuf or Elliot, neither of whom had much effect on what’s going on here. This felt like a normally structured episode that arbitrarily had bookmarks in it.
• I choose to see Pam’s rocking out while she works as a reference to We Are Lady Parts and I won’t hear otherwise.
• Fiona Shaw can do almost anything with almost nothing, but it would be nice if this season gave her something approaching a coherent storyline at some point. My personal feeling on this is that she’s so talented that it was impossible to resist giving her more of a backstory, but that it’s proved enduringly difficult to craft a life outside her spycraft that is as compelling.