Revisiting Killing Eve
In honor of the show coming to Netflix, I've gathered my best writing on one of my favorite shows of the 2010s
For some people, a show doesn’t exist until its on Netflix. For that crowd, the BAFTA- and Peabody Award-winning Killing Eve is brand new. Originally running from 2018-2022, the show is a cat-and-mouse spy thriller TV series starring Sandra Oh as the titular Eve, and Jodie Comer as Villanelle, a mysterious queer assassin who seems to be oddly obsessed with Eve. Eve is a desk jockey in British intelligence who happens to be the only one to realize a mysterious new assassin is a woman, so she suddenly finds herself heading up a team to find her, under the direction of the steely-eyed Carolyn Martens (Fleabag, My Left Foot.) Kim Bodnia is also a delightful, if somewhat unpredictable, addition as Villanelle’s handler.
If you’re into A Simple Favor, moody French pop, sapphic anything, or psychological spy thrillers, this one’s for you. Sandra Oh won a SAG Award and Jodie Comer an Emmy for their performances, and the role catapulted Comer (and giant, pink, Molly Goddard-esque ugly stepsister dresses) into the mainstream. Phoebe Waller-Bridge was the showrunner for the first season before passing the baton to Emerald Fennel, polarizing writer-director of Promising Young Woman and Saltburn, as well as an actor on The Crown.
The show aired for four seasons on BBC America and AMC. All episodes are now available on Netflix.
A warning: there will be spoilers among the articles, so don't read full articles if you’re not caught up. Feel free to bookmark! Queerness IS canonical, but the series finale is utterly disappointing in that and many other regards.
Killing Eve: A Spy Show From the Female Gaze
Of the four main women, two are over forty and two are women of color. All are fully realized characters, with assets and flaws, dark sides and redeeming qualities.
There’s a level of realistic, day-to-day detail in Killing Eve that’s typical of Waller-Bridges projects but so rare in the rest of the television landscape. At one point, Eve answers the phone while on the toilet—it’s a small moment, but also the kind of thing so many women do all the time. Rather than pretending women don’t have basic bodily functions, as polite society generally does, it’s merely a part of life.
Villanelle pushes back on the men in her life in many ways, including by reveling in certain aspects of her body and her femininity. Villanelle discusses her heavy period in a way that’s completely normal to those who have them but almost entirely absent from television. Even better, she uses it as a tactic to make men uncomfortable, something many of us learned to do early on.
Killing Eve Is A New Breed Of Spy Thriller
There’s something freeing about the fact that much of the usual crime BS – rape, slut-shaming, overly humanizing a charismatic male killer, a system that lets white men off the hook – is off the table. It’s not to say that things like sexual violence don’t happen in the world of Killing Eve. In fact, many of Villanelle’s (Jodie Comer) targets engage in them, whether personally or as a matter of business, in the case of a human trafficker. But these things happen off-screen. Like Mad Max: Fury Road before it, Killing Eve doesn’t need to traumatize viewers in order to conjure up deep feelings.
Killing Eve is The Perfect Show For the Cultural Moment
Female outrage is everywhere, and we don’t care to hide it anymore…When it comes to television, this ethos translates into more women showrunners and directors than ever before, more inclusive casts, and stories that actually prioritize women’s experiences, instead of relegating us to love interests or limiting us to a pornified version of our actual lives, full of sexposition, the male gaze, and drinking wine in the bathtub.
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Killing Eve feels like a distillation of our current sociopolitical moment as well as the natural next step for pop culture. It checks so many boxes: it’s darkly funny, is escapist yet still thoughtful, boasts much better representation than so much else in the industry, and prioritizes women’s stories told by and for women. Television is not only art that reflects who we are, it’s also an escape. There is so much to escape from right now, in a moment when all we want to do is take down the bad men, burn the system to the ground, and revel in female friendship. Killing Eve couldn’t possibly have come at a better time.
‘Killing Eve’s’ Women Recast Invisibility Into a Super Power - DAME Magazine
The second season’s major innovation is the inclusion of a second killer, known as The Ghost. In some ways the antithesis of Villanelle, The Ghost is methodical, quiet, discreet, even occasionally humane, depending on the victim. The Ghost is able to operate undetected specifically because as an immigrant woman of color, she lacks power across multiple axes. We see The Ghost occupy a number of service roles to heighten her invisibility. She’s a nail technician, a cleaning woman, just about any anonymous, low-paying profession dominated by overlooked women of color.
In a critical scene we see a faceless woman going about the business of cleaning an office and killing a man inside it. What’s remarkable about the scene isn’t really the homicide; it’s the fact that Killing Eve didn’t particularly need to alter the way it filmed this scene to hide The Ghost’s identity. She was merely filmed the way cleaning women are always filmed—like they don’t matter to the story. Killing Eve invests in the transgressive interplay of women, power, and visibility, asking us to question who and what is visible—whose work, which experts, which kinds of people.
From Den of Geek’s “The Best TV Shows of the Decade”
As the women find themselves locked in a game of cat and mouse, it becomes difficult to tell who is hunting whom, and for what purpose. Is sexually fluid Villanelle in love with Eve, merely obsessed until she grows bored and kills her, or is this all some kind of ploy? Is married-to-a-moustache Eve falling for Villanelle, becoming enchanted with the idea of breaking out of her rut, or genuinely starting to tap into her inner sociopath? Who can say, but in the meantime you can catch me ogling both of their wardrobes, mainlining the trance-chic soundtrack, and counting down the days until Killing Eve season 3.
Killing Eve Rushes a Betrayal of a Finale
Killing Eve ends its four-season run in a double-episode finale that is so entirely out of step with the final three minutes that it’s hard to even consider them together. In the end, the finale will be remembered for the rushed, half-baked ending that many fans will see as a betrayal as it takes the easy way out. Using death and trauma as a stand-in for prestige and seriousness of purpose is pervasive issue in the era of Peak TV, but it’s especially pernicious where it intersects with tropes that are harmful toward marginalized groups, like “Bury Your Gays.”
It feels like we keep having to write these same articles over and over, these odes to beloved characters and elegies for finales that might have been. Supergirl, The 100, Supernatural…the details aren’t the same, but the message is. Even on shows with explicitly queer characters, like Killing Eve, that’s no guarantee that their couplings or their deaths will be handled thoughtfully. At a time when our government is making it very clear that we are not safe or welcome, we need escapism more than ever. That’s not to say everything has to be safe and easy with the corners sanded down – no one comes to Killing Eve if they’re squeamish. But there’s a base level of respect that viewers hope to find in entertainment that actively courts our viewership, and the more shows pile up, the harder it is not to feel disrespected.
I wrote a ton about Killing Eve over the course of the show’s run: spoiler-free reviews, episode-by-episode reviews, and interviews. I hope you enjoy!
Are you (re)watching Killing Eve? What do you think?