Killing Eve signs off with just a few more shocking deaths, as is its way

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 survive was always unlikely (and often a source of commentary on the show), so as Killing Eve wound down, an escalating body count seemed all but assured.

Of course, that’s unlikely to insulate the show against criticism around the “Bury Your Gays” trope, especially given the way Villanelle’s death immediately follows the happy consummation of her relationship with Eve after four seasons of longing, echoing other infamous instances of the same pattern. In this case, their happiness is basically a giveaway that it’s not going to last. How could these two have a happily ever after? Where would they live? What would they do? Can anyone picture Eve coming home from a day at the office, kissing Villanelle on the cheek, and then settling in to binge a new true crime drama with her?

But that’s the end. Let’s go back through everything else that happened here, as Killing Eve signed off after four seasons of international locales, glamorous fashion, and constant murder. The first shocking death of the two-part finale is Konstantin’s, as the show’s most unlikely survivor goes out in a cheap motel room, hours after learning that his daughter has decided to join The 12. 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. That he would go out this way feels apropos for a nihilist who made very clear he knew his association with the criminal underworld meant his life was in constant danger. That it happened now, for this reason, was a distinct case of finale-itis. Hélène’s almost complete autonomy within The 12 was one of many dangling threads the show seemed indifferent to resolving in its latter episodes, and it’s ultimately not even that clear why she would have chosen to take him out of the picture. She had him in her perpetual grip for blackmail purposes! What does it accomplish to eliminate a useful guy like him before he’s even finished training Pam?

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. Doing what? Unclear. For whom? Also unclear. 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. One reason to give up on this, the quest that was allegedly driving most of the action this season, is that there are no other existing characters who could conceivably run The 12. Wait, no, it’s because she knows Villanelle is going to kill them all, maybe?

Truthfully, untangling all the various choices made around The 12 in these last two episodes is such a baffling mess that the show doesn’t even really care to try, leaving the entire group to be killed essentially offscreen in one final bloodbath by Villanelle while Eve dances at a wedding. Somewhere within all of this there is some point to be made about how impossible it is to ever fully exit this lifestyle, but it’s not made particularly coherently, and making Carolyn the architect of Villanelle’s death on what seems to be the same day she rejoins British intelligence makes about as much sense as anything else that happens here. Why has Carolyn, apparently of her own accord, decided that Villanelle and Eve should die? Certainly, Villanelle is the initial target, but that’s not the shot that kills her—it’s the assassin firing repeatedly into the water, where Eve is as well, that does it. It’s brutal and sudden, leaving Eve more alone than ever before just as she’s definitively made the choice to actually accept and embrace the violence of being in Villanelle’s life.

But it’s worth dialing back further once again, to the idyllic little road trip that Eve and Villanelle take over the course of most of the episode, which shows the two of them as a blissful, mostly functional couple now that Eve has finally decided to accept Villanelle’s love. The whole thing feels like a dream, in part because this show has just spent four seasons proving that Villanelle is a violent, unpredictable person who murders on a whim, which she proved as recently as earlier this very season during her quest to improve. And suddenly she’s won Eve over at last, in part because Eve finally starts violently killing people as well. Who are the two people in love in these scenes? It’s not like there isn’t a case to be made for them ending up in a relationship—this show has always been a romance between these two characters, and a central question of the entire series has been whether or not Eve would succumb to her attraction. But the show seems indifferent to how incredibly bleak this outcome is. It’s not a sunny road trip. It’s a person choosing to be with someone who tortured her husband, killed her best friend, and strongly influenced her to become a more violent, unfeeling person. It’s a shame the show isn’t more interested in the fundamental darkness of Eve choosing this path. Why would this be a happy ending?

And of course, that last, agonized moment in the water is going to haunt anyone who’s stuck with the show this long, leaving open the question of What It All Means. This final season has focused in large part on Villanelle’s quest to be good, or to understand what it means to be good, or whether it’s possible for her to become good after the life she’s led, and the ultimate answer appears to be that it doesn’t matter, because the world she’s in used her, chewed her up, and then disposed of her once she had served one final purpose.

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? Love is impossible? It’s a cold cruel world? In the end, participation in this dangerous world means that you exist solely at the whim of whoever currently has the upper hand?

The whole thing feels dramatically incoherent, a misuse of some supremely talented actors on a show that used to have a lot more of a central thesis about what it meant for a middle-aged, bored paper pusher with phenomenal hair to gradually become more and more immersed in a life of violence and danger. What it meant all this time, apparently, was this.

Stray observations

• It’s been an interesting four seasons on the Killing Eve beat, to say the least. Thanks for reading! 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.
• The performances kept this thing afloat in a way that the writing often didn’t, and if nothing else, it was fun to get one more deeply dry Fiona Shaw reading of a line like, “You really have hit her with a deluge of penis portraits.”
• I am curious to see if that shocker ending worked for other viewers. I did appreciate the show taking a big ambitious swing in its closing moments rather than doing something easier. And I honestly think I would have been fine with that ending if the rest of the episode (and season) had held together more.
• Choosing to believe that that truly odd, off-camera murder of the alleged leadership of The 12 is the show agreeing with me that the whole thing was a waste of time.
• I said this on Twitter along with my first recap of this season, but this post will be my final AV Club byline. I’m leaving for the same reasons you saw a lot of other writers and staff depart. It has been a joy and an honor to write for the site, and I hope people found my recaps/reviews compelling despite the nitpicking. We nitpick because we love! And that’s what drew me to writing for the AV Club in the first place.