Villa-No-They-Didn’t: How Killing Eve’s Final Season Took a Stab at Women Everywhere

Or alternatively, Goodnight, Sweet Psycho: In Defense of Villanelle

Note: The finale of Killing Eve aired over 3 months ago and it’s taken that long for me to form thoughts that don’t include simply swearing and spewing anger for a wholly inappropriate amount of time. The time has come for me, however, the time to let it go and send her off my way. This one’s for V.

[A quick heads up about what this critique will not cover: the awful bury your gays trope and the wildly prevalent mistreatment of queer stories on television. It’s not that these aren’t important topics. It’s that others have already covered them brilliantly in relation to Killing Eve and I have more to add about women in general.]

Get ready because this is a long one, but if you care about women’s stories, I hope you’ll read it all. Okay, let’s goooooooo!

WHAT IS KILLING EVE ANYWAY?

Based on Luke Jennings’ Codename: Villanelle novellas, Killing Eve, helmed by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, sprang onto the scene in 2018, with arguably one of the best seasons of television ever made.

Though the premise, on paper, might’ve seemed like a replay, something we’ve all seen countless times before — an MI6 agent (Eve) getting tangled up with the psycho assassin (Villanelle) they’re chasing — it was a refreshingly new take. It was as dark and twisted as it was surprisingly funny. And perhaps the most intriguing thing, the underlying pull — it was about WOMEN.

It wasn’t simply about women because the two main characters were female, though that’s the obvious read. It was emphatically about women because of the story under the story: how we work out our identities as women in a society that wants us to be “normal” as defined by tradition and convention, as well as what it means to be a woman who’s decidedly NOT normal in a world that will tolerate nothing else. 

The spy angle was a vehicle, a thrilling way to wrap up the bigger story in something we’d almost recognize from the outset, but Killing Eve on the whole was never a story about consequences and comeuppance. Never a story about redemption or catching the “bad guy” (woman, in this case). It was a story about destruction and deconstruction, about choosing, as women, to break ourselves down to the ugliest pieces, facing our inner darkness and desire, and being brave enough to integrate those parts to form fully fleshed out people — regardless of how the world at large might reject the notion. It held up a mirror that forced us to admit we’re all “bad guys” in some ways, and that we might even like that a little bit.

That thread, that beautiful story woven underneath killing, violence, and international crime syndicates, was sadly lost. People will argue about when it was lost, but I’ve not yet seen anyone argue it wasn’t lost eventually.

A NOTES SECTION APPARENTLY

Note the first: I personally identify a lot more with Villanelle than Eve and that’s why she’s the focus here. I appreciate Eve, but we’re coming at life from different directions, so hopefully there’s someone out there who can do her character justice as well, who can talk about being the buttoned up perfect normal lady who wants to break out of the mold society has shaped for her. For me though, I’ve always been the one on the outside trying to get in, the one exposed to boatloads of trauma she desperately wants to and thinks she has to overcome to be accepted, and I think Villanelle embodies the push and pull of that perfectly. For all the women who don’t quite feel like women, or even humans, because they’re not what everyone expects. For those of us who feel like our voices are tossed aside in favor of “normal” people. For all of us weirdos. We are Villanelle.

Note the second: Jodie Comer (Villanelle) and Sandra Oh (Eve) turned in incredible performances and did their very best with what the writing gave them to work with. I thank them for that. I also want to acknowledge Kaleigh Llewellyn, a writer on season 4, who fleshed out the best scenes and tried so hard to honor the characters we all know and love in her scripts. Her love was evident.

Note the third: Stop putting notes in the middle of posts. Anyway…

A SLIGHT DETOUR BACK TO THE BEGINNING

Oksana “Villanelle” Astankova is one of the most complicatedly captivating characters to ever grace television. Full stop.

Part of me feels like I could stop there, because the truth of that statement is so simple and all encompassing. Yet, there’s nothing simple about Villanelle as a character, so I’d like to discuss who and what she is, was, and will always be.

The pilot of Killing Eve establishes Eve Polastri (Sandra Oh) as little more than a mid-forties desk jockey at MI5 who’s hoping for something more in life. She’s very intrigued by the idea of female killers and suggests in a briefing, out of turn, that a current MI6 investigation might point to a female assassin. She’s right. Brought in by Carolyn Martens (Fiona Shaw) to lead a task force tracking an international assassin known only as Villanelle (Jodie Comer), Eve is about to embark on the most insane adventure of a lifetime. Sometimes darkly funny and sometimes downright terrifying, her new experience will be anything but boring.

Villanelle, in contrast, is a mid-twenties psychopath who leads an exciting and lavish lifestyle, conveniently funded by the thing she seems to love most: killing. In the first episode alone, we see her commit one hired assassination, then go to a hospital where Eve's witness is being held to kill again.

Eve is at the hospital to interview the witness — against orders — and takes a break to visit the bathroom. Dressed as a nurse, Villanelle emerges from a stall only to find Eve putting her hair up, yet seemingly struggling with what style she wants to achieve.

Villanelle is awestruck, dumbfounded, in love — in the form of obsession — from the moment she sees Eve. She stares so intently that Eve has to turn in the mirror to ask “are you alright?” Villanelle hurriedly leaves the bathroom, stopping at the door for only a moment as she suggests, "wear it down." And then she's gone.

A few minutes later we see, from Eve’s POV, the carnage Villanelle left behind in the same hospital as she killed not only the witness, but brutally slaughtered three more people in her wake after "meeting" Eve for the first time, their interaction leaving quite an impression on the young assassin. It shows early on that Villanelle, contrary to what she’s been told, feels things quite deeply, but has no healthy outlet (understatement) for her emotions, instead expressing her frustration through violence.

ABUSIVE PASTS AND PSYCHOPATHS

There’s an ever raging debate in the real world between nature and nurture and how psychopaths are created. The query boils down to this: are they born or bred?

What that ultimately amounts to, in many ways, is an attempt to establish culpability, which begs two more questions. Can they help it and, if so, can they change?

There are plenty of qualified folks who will tell you, it’s likely nature AND nurture, in many cases. People can be born with a predisposition toward lack of empathy that’s then stoked, like a fire, by early trauma.

But not every case is the same, nor is “psychopath” a term with meaning outside societal context. A true “psychopath” is someone with Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD), which is categorized in its extremes by many of the characteristics Villanelle exhibits: disregard for right and wrong, persistent lying or deceit to exploit others, being callous, cynical and disrespectful of others, using charm or wit to manipulate others for personal gain or personal pleasure, a sense of superiority, recurring problems with the law, and repeatedly violating the rights of others through intimidation and dishonesty.

The above traits are not even an exhaustive list, but they sure paint a picture, most likely of someone you’d never want to be around, and most certainly someone you wouldn’t want to be yourself.

They also paint Villanelle, in her simplest form. She should be wholly unlikable. The audience should be rooting for the demise of the psychopathic assassin from the get go.

(Some did, but it was mostly members of groups who somehow seem to think unlikable males are antiheroes and unlikable females are, well, bitches. I’m not too interested in their thoughts, if I’m being honest. Not everything is for everyone, and this story, this character, isn’t for them.)

Despite all evidence of her misdeeds, we find ourselves inexplicably drawn to what Villanelle embodies: freedom from the confines of expectation, along with the very darkest of what humanity has to offer.

She makes us ask what it must be like to do whatever you want and get away with it. Anything at all. I wonder what all us good people over here judging a fictional character would really pull off if we were given the chance.

As Villanelle herself says in 2x01,

You can see scary people a mile away. It's the good people you have to worry about.

That’s sound advice coming from Villanelle, because in her mind, good is interchangeable with fake. Good is inauthentic. People lie to themselves, live in a deluded fantasy world where there are heroes and villains and it’s obvious who’s who, when reality is a lot more complicated than that. Because very few people, if any, are as good as they may seem, as good as they think they are.

Villanelle is that whole laundry list of psychopathic traits when we meet her, and honestly she’s most of them all the way through the narrative. But as Eve tells her in 3x08 when she asks “Am I a monster?”, the truth is “[she’s] so many things.”

And at the core of what she is sits a small girl who’s been abused and abandoned her whole life, who could never count on anyone, who forged her own path rife with violence and death because they were the only things that afforded her any power. All her life, for as ostentatious and vibrant as she is, Villanelle has lacked one key factor: agency.

Her father, who she seemed to admire greatly, died when she was a small child. Her mother was a monster who threw her into an orphanage at eight, but kept her brother, because she didn’t want to deal with a difficult Villanelle. Her high school French teacher had a completely inappropriate sexual relationship with her. Later, even her de facto father figure, Konstantin, is withholding and manipulative.

This leads to a confused sense of self, a tendency to believe she is what others have called her, that she is ONLY what others have called her, and to act out those things. Her job, while she no doubt enjoys it, affords her an easy life full of money and nice things. Her life is simple: want, take, have. 

It’s also boring AF. She is bored and stuck and living at someone else’s whim because what her lavish lifestyle ultimately doesn’t afford her, is agency. She is still imprisoned. An international criminal organization known only as The Twelve may have taken her out of a literal prison in Russia (while she was serving time for killing the French teacher’s husband… yikes), trained her to be an assassin, and given her everything, but the figurative prison she lives in as an expendable asset soon becomes extremely apparent to her.

In episode 2x06, Villanelle finds herself pretending to be someone else, an addict named Billie, to get close to a mark for MI6. However, the speech she gives is arguably the most honest she is throughout the entire series, perhaps because there’s no fear of exposure. She’s not playing at being herself, so the truth isn’t as scary. I wonder how many people can relate to that.

If this wasn’t written (or at least contributed to) by someone intimately familiar with depression, I’ll eat a sock. I get to pick the sock. It’s only fair.

Anyway, in Villanelle’s own words:

Most of the time, most days, I feel… nothing. I don't feel anything. It is so boring. I wake up and I think, “Again? Really? I have to do this again?” And what I really don't understand is how come everybody else isn't screaming with boredom too? I try to find ways of making myself feel something more and more and more, but it doesn't make any difference. No matter what I do, I don't feel anything. I… I hurt myself, it doesn't hurt. I buy what I want, I don't want it. I do what I like, I don't… I don't like it. I'm just so bored.

That’s the way Villanelle has been living! A lonely existence void of feeling. Depressed (among other things), as it were. She fits nowhere and has no one. She kills to chase a high, having learned there is no greater power you can have over someone than to take their very life. It’s twisted thinking, but it’s true. She uses sex as a pleasurable distraction, but nothing more. She’s not engaged in the life she’s living. 

It’s the real world equivalent of any of us using alcohol, drugs, sex, you name it, to numb our pain. And guess what? Like anyone when they do things merely to numb themselves, Villanelle is wholly unfulfilled.

Then along comes Eve, who is the first person to ever see her, to ever look past her actions and underneath her larger-than-life persona to the woman who resides therein. Eve, who somehow accepts her, which gives Villanelle strength to want something new, to break free of her chains and choose what her life will look like. Through Eve, Villanelle finds a whole new identity. Through Eve, Villanelle finds Oksana, and who she might’ve been under different life circumstances.

Still a dick, but so sweet! Rude and charming. Annoying and hilarious. Childish and intelligent. Unapologetically contradictory. Unapologetically Villanelle.

IN DEFENSE OF VILLANELLE

I’m not literally defending Villanelle’s actions. She’s categorically insane in so many ways. You can’t just go around killing people for fun and be someone worth identifying with. On the contrary, I’m defending what Villanelle represents: “otherness.”

This story is fiction, but any good fiction has an underlying premise that shadows real world issues. Season 4 derailed the ones formerly present in this show.

The issue I take with Killing Eve season 4 is that the narrative brutally and pointlessly quashes a simple human ambition: trying to grow as a person, trying to embrace all sides of your identity. 

Honestly, if the theme of the season wasn’t “hey women! don’t dare try to be anything other than ‘normal’ because you’ll be punished for it,” I don’t know what it was.

Because for all the growth Villanelle underwent by choice — acknowledging others’ right to their own choices, leaving room for Eve’s feelings and wants, developing a tenderness that somehow complemented her rage, protecting Eve with everything she had — for all the ways she tried to better herself while never losing what made her her, she was pointlessly and unceremoniously killed, in what has to be the most pathetic attempt at parallel religious iconography ever put on screen. The one thing Villanelle’s arc lacked in the end, besides coherence, was the one thing she lacked all along: that pesky agency.

Honestly, Eve was served up the same punishment when she was forced to watch the person she loved die, shot and drowned in a dirty river with no comfort, last words, or closure. Eve’s scream, which serves as the last moment of the series before the blatant disrespect of THE END being thrown up on the screen, will always be haunting. She chose Villanelle and the powers-that-be decided to burn it all down.

There was no payoff. No future. There was only death for the sake of shock. They couldn’t even give it a purpose.

It also brings up a stunningly ironic fact, that a group of WOMEN couldn’t see a way out of death for a character that refused to fit in a box.

And that, friends, should hit a little too close to home for all women.

They couldn’t see a way for her to live on in “domestic bliss,” so she had to die. I could seriously write a whole dissertation on why that phrase is absolutely ridiculous, especially in this case, because that’s not what Villanelle (and Eve) would’ve wanted anyway.

If you think for a second there’s a version of this story where Villanelle never commits another crime or has another violent outburst, I’m pretty sure you’d be dead wrong (probably as dead as whoever it’s directed at). But guess what? The future with those things in it, for the first time ever, would’ve been hers. It would’ve been the life she chose.

Why in the hell would Villanelle want to live a life where she just exists, washing dishes and doing chores and being all lovey dovey or whatever? I mean, sure, we know from 1x08 she wants someone to watch movies with, but that’s because no one has ever spent time with her, not because she’s not still an absolute force of nature.

And she should’ve remained one, alive and well, as a testament to other women that it’s okay to not be exactly what’s expected of you. It’s okay to want something different than a white picket fence with 2.4 kids and a dog. One size does not fit all and you’re not any less of a woman for bucking “domestic bliss.” I don’t know anyone who lives in that anyway. What does it even mean?

Villanelle — through her sarcasm, wit, intelligence, and wild facial expressions — reminded me of something:

The most important thing you can be in this life is yourself, because it’s the one thing no one else can be.

In the middle of a show FULL of people who committed heinous acts and were terribly “unlikable” (because they were all selfish assholes by real-world standards), Villanelle was just… Villanelle, perhaps the worst, but arguably the most authentic of them all.

It took me a good deal of time to realize I not only related to Villanelle’s personality, but literally saw myself in her because of her wild and overly dramatic facial expressions. To honor that, I’ve decided to never hold mine back again — even when I worry some people think it makes me weird. Instead, I think I’ll proudly be “other,” out here living and doing life my way.

Maybe not killing people though. I’ll leave that to the television assassins, of which there will never be another quite like Villanelle.

Goodnight, Sweet Psycho. Goodnight, but never goodbye.