Excerpt: And, really, who cares?
This is about Season 3 of Killing Eve and, yes, there are spoilers but the season is so bad it doesn’t really matter.
For a while, it seemed that only designated assasination targets were allowed to die on Killing Eve, and everyone else achieved some kind of immortality. Konstantin Vasiliev, Villanelle’s original handler, comes back from the dead even after Eve Polastri and his daughter watched his protégé shoot him through the heart. At the end of Season 2, Eve herself is shot by Villanelle and left for dead. Since Season 3 ended this summer, we already know how that went. Alas, the famed assassin has developed a bad habit of not checking to make sure her targets are actually corpses and not just wounded bodies. In Season 1, she ran over her former lover Nadia, twice, the sickening crunch indicating that, surely, the woman was dead. But Nadia would resurface in a Russian prison, forcing Villanelle to chase her in there and finish the deed.
In Season 3, she whacks her new handler Dasha Duzran on the head with a golf club and yet the older Russian woman somehow appears in a hospital bed—right next to Konstantin, who has just survived a seemingly fatal heart attack, and who discharges himself as soon as he wakes up (Dasha, we’re led to believe, may have died as he walked out, but who knows, really?). Dasha had been found lying on the golf course by Eve, on the hunt for Villanelle. Eve sees that she’s still breathing, and proceeds to stomp on the woman’s chest, only stopping to run off when she hears police sirens. This was revenge for Dasha having impaled Eve’s husband Niko with a pitchfork through his neck.
You’d imagine, of course, that such an injury would bring about instant death but you’d be wrong because Niko survives, complete with his moustache, the one that looks like an escapee from a C+ 1970s prison and road movie.
So much death, so many Lazarine returnings, and you’ll understand why I hoped that sweet Kenny Stowton, whose body is seen plunging downwards from the rooftop of his workplace at the beginning of Season 3, would in fact be found alive. Even the presence of what looked like a bullet hole through his ear and the crazy angles of his very crooked and broken body did not dull my hopeless optimism. Sure, by now we’ve even attended a funeral service for him but hope lies quietly alive. In my heart I still wonder, “What if, what if, his body was resuscitated by the excellent English ambulance forces that whisked him out of there, and he’s simply being kept in hiding somewhere?”
The end of Season 3 seems to end that possibility because his mother, the impenetrable and often omniscient MI6 agent Carolyn Martyns, torn apart by a grief she has been trying to suppress in public, threatens to shoot Konstantin, who is discovered to have been the last person who saw Kenny alive and whom he accompanied to the rooftop. He may also have been Kenny’s father, but who knows, really? And it turns out he also slept with Carolyn’s daughter (at this point, you may wish to gently pull out your eyeballs) who, we can only hopefully assume, has no chance of being his child. At any rate, for reasons too complicated—and by that, I really mean too meaningless—to go into here, she turns to his right and shoots her boss Paul Bradwell because he was, according to her, part of The Twelve, the mysterious syndicate everyone has been searching for. But who knows, really?
And, really, who cares?
By this murderous end of Season 3, Killing Eve has been wobbling around on the weak legs of so many predictable back stories about its main characters that it’s hard to maintain any interest in the series from here on. The show once offered the possibility that some of the most interesting women we’ve ever seen on television might actually thrive and flourish in their deeply messy and complicated ways, without being forced to live up to the ideals of Women on Television. It ended by deflating all of them, strewn around like punctured balloons, unrecognisable as their old selves and pushed into the narrative demands made by the showrunner Suzanne Heathcote.
For some sort of ostensibly feminist reason, Killing Eve chooses a different showrunner each season. Announcing that Laura Neal of Sex Education and Diary of a Call Girl would be it for the final fourth, Sarah Barnett, president of the AMC Networks Entertainment Group and AMC Studios (the people behind Killing Eve) declared, “We have a remarkable squad of ferociously smart women writers passing the baton to each other on this show, aligned around a coherent vision but bringing it to life with their own specific sparkle and brilliance. Laura Neal is the latest incredible leader of the pack on Killing Eve.”
This is Girlboss rubbish masquerading as feminism. You can’t have a “coherent vision” for a show with such strong central women if you also have different showrunners determining how all of them function as characters. “Passing the baton” implies that there’s nothing specific about Eve, Villanelle, or Carolyn: that somehow the simple fact of them being women and the showrunners being women will make all the magic work. We know this is a ludicrous idea because: look at Season 3.
Let us consider, for instance, that semi-final scene, when Carolyn shoots Paul but only after saying she does in fact miss Kenny very much and that she actually cared for Konstantin. Here, we’re meant to be reassured that Carolyn is a woman with feelings. And yet, all this runs counter to what we’ve known of her so far: someone who has spent her life successfully reigning in her emotions in service of the work she clearly loves to do. In one memorable scene before this one, Carolyn gives in to her daughter Geraldine’s demand that they each write out their feelings about Kenny’s death, acknowledge where they’ve gone wrong in their relationship, and what they’ll do to move on and towards each other. Geraldine, a self-described Empath, ends her letter asking for her mother’s “forgiveness and acceptance.” When it’s her turn, Carolyn picks up a journal, turns to a fresh page devoid of any words and pretends to read: “Dear Geraldine, I think it’s time you left.”
It’s a flicker of genius in the writing that hasn’t been present so far in a season that’s been all about mothers and children. It’s a short scene, and Carolyn’s quick clearing of her throat just as she bends down to pick up the journal, as if she had a mile to read, is part of that genius. It’s the kind of detail we had celebrated in the show’s first season.
We know that Killing Eve’s initial brilliance and the reason it came charging out of the gates the way it did has everything to do with Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s very particular genius (a word we’re reluctant to ascribe to women). It’s not just that she has a way of constructing characters out of odd bits that look like they might never work together but do (Fleabag, as an example) but that she has a way of pacing the narrative that is just, excuse me for being repetitive, pure genius.
The second season floundered under Emerald Fennell—by then the show had embarked on this strange idea of a different showrunner each time, but at least there is some tension especially towards the end when Villanelle and Eve find themselves in the middle of a Roman ruin (and by then, such visual clichés were already beginning to irritate: ruins, ruined relationship, oh, whatever). Season 3 decides to make everything quite literal: the tension we’ve seen between Villanelle and Eve is now translated as something that’s perhaps sexual and we’re given a ballroom scene, where the two tango. No, really, I mean, literally: they dance the tango, confused at first about who should lead—note the earlier point about clichés. Combine all this with dead bodies that refuse to stay dead, and mothers who love and mothers who don’t (Villanelle’s mother is both, so of course her daughter burns her alive) and mothers who crumble under the weight of maternal grief. Here, I can only sigh.
At this point, it feels tiring to even go on writing about a show that has dulled so much but kept us coming back with all the promise of the glory it showed us in Season 1. The fashion, certainly, kept us enthralled: I’m told there is at least one sewing group dedicated to recreating Villanelle’s wardrobe and I’ve already seen myself in that daring pink sequined coat ensemble ( as has everyone else: it’s sold out). To its credit, Killing Eve’s fashion, whether in the Lands End-ish clutter of Eve or the sumptuousness of Villanelle or the devastatingly quiet elegance of Carolyn, never detracted or distracted from the plot: it always added to it. To “slay” with fashion took on a whole new meaning here. But even all that has failed to save it.
At the end of Season 3, Villanelle and Eve stand on a bridge, talk, and then part, walking in opposite directions and turning to look back. Johnny Jewel’s “Tell Me” plays over the credits with the lyrics shouting out the message in case it wasn’t clear: “Tell me I’m your baby, and you’ll never leave me, tell me that you’ll kiss me forever…”
Killing Eve promised us we’d never have to settle for the same old love story about two hearts drawn to each other despite all their reservations about not being right for each other, whatever that means. It hooked us with a bigger budget in Season 2, more expensive clothes and exquisite locales and interiors (an entire apartment in Barcelona that looked like a Moorish palace, for instance). We weren’t stupid, even if the showrunners clearly thought so: we kept waiting for the dark twists and strangely dark humour that had brought us in.
We never wanted this kind of love, we wanted something more complex: our pretty little feminist heads can actually take in a story about love that’s not just about romance.
And in the end, what did we get? Two lovers on a bridge, walking away, like some demented twenty-first century version of a demented 1950s romance about star-crossed lovers.
That last song should have been Peggy Lee’s “Is That All There Is?”
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