Killing Expectations But Not Tropes

(Spoilers from throughout the series, including the finale, will be discussed in this article.)

As is often the case, the final season, and in particular the final episode of Killing Eve had its fair share of both praise and criticism. Sadly, the criticism is what rings out the loudest, and I cannot say I blame anyone for having strong feelings about this series. From the start of the series, audiences were left holding their breath, juggling a thousand versions of “will they or won’t they”. This is something LGBTQ+ viewers have had to grow accustomed to. Shows that dangle two leads in front of us, more often than not two women, as we hold on for dear life, waiting to see if we will be queer baited and heartbroken once again. Or, if for one of far too few occasions, the tropes will be avoided in favor of taking a different route. I’m not saying we expected a happy ending, but what we received with the conclusion of season 4 was done in a way I’m not sure any of us saw coming, and too many of us are still reeling from.

For those who want to argue that we should have expected the ending simply because the title of the show is quite literally Killing Eve, I think you do the original writing in earlier seasons a great disservice when attempting to make things so literal. I offer instead, an outlook a lot of us within the LGBTQ+ community have had to undertake in our lives. Could it not be argued that Killing Eve was a journey of self discovery? That the real purpose behind the title was for Eve to come to a place in her life where being what everyone around her wants and expects is no longer worth it? That in “killing” what she built up over time in favor of embracing who she is and what she wants, even if it is dark and unacceptable to society, is what will finally set her free?

In the pilot episode, we meet the MI5 agent as she is going through the motions. She has a darkness and hunger for more primal urges, which are sparked by her theory that the killer they are searching for, this great assassin nobody seems able to trace, is actually a woman. Yet Eve continues to hold herself back. To reign herself in for fear of alienating her coworkers, friends and most importantly, her husband Niko. We see Eve pushing back against her bosses, see each clue she uncovers steel her resolve further, but we also see Eve walk right up to the line and stop. This stopping sees its first painful hurdle when Eve has to watch on helplessly as her former boss turned undercover partner, Bill, is murdered on the dance floor of a crowded rave by Villanelle. And after his death, we see Eve push a little further in the name of seeking justice for Bill. Each person Eve loses in her hunt for Villanelle and later the Twelve themselves, adds a bit more resolve to Eve. The pain of loss begins to show her that if she wants to get to the bottom of things, if she really wants answers and wants the kind of justice she envisions, she is going to have to get her hands dirty. She is going to have to jump off the edge of the cliff, even if it means her own death in the process.

By season four, we see an Eve who chooses to dance with darkness. An Eve who has seen glimpses of the underbelly of humanity in her interactions with Villanelle and various agents of the ever elusive The Twelve, and how she has been changed irrevocably by these encounters. In her search for answers, Eve allows herself to go to lengths she never has before. No more is the Eve who hesitated when she and Villanelle were being attacked by Raymond. Her time with Villanelle, their ongoing and ever evolving game of cat and mouse, in which each of them take turns at being the cat in their own minds, allows Eve to soften her moral code and views a bit. To go from seeing the world as black and white with a touch of gray here and there, to a cornucopia of gray hues that are ever changing. The Eve who marches into Konstantin’s office and shoots him in the hand without hesitation is not the Eve we meet in season one. And after the sheer number of deaths Eve has witnessed by the opening of season four, far too many of them having been people she deeply cared for, is it any wonder Eve has evolved? Is it any wonder she has changed and come to see how fleeting existence truly is? How limited our time on this earth is, with or without a league of assassins hot on your trail? In episode 3 of the final season, Villanelle describes Eve to Martin as “a rainbow in beige boots”. Villanelle has come to see Eve as she is. A woman who walks through the world one way, but hides a vast array of complex shades just beneath the surface.

With all of this in mind, Eve has let go of a lot of the niceties we all work so hard to maintain. After Villanelle shoots her in the back and she manages to survive, we see Eve pull back a bit. We see her attempt to go it alone and try to leave this world of death, destruction and deceit behind as she tries to simply make it from day to day, working in a restaurant and living in a small, messy flat. But all it takes is the smallest contact with Villanelle to get Eve back in the game as she teams up quietly and somewhat hesitantly with Kenny. Eve attempts to go back to who she was before all of this began, only to realize it is impossible. That the box she shoved herself into all her life leading up to now, she could never climb back into, which I’m sure plenty of us within the LGBTQ+ community could relate to. Because once you start to accept yourself, hiding away grows harder and harder to do. The closet feels much more suffocating once you give yourself permission to be who you are, even just in your own company.

When you consider all of these pieces, I hope that it is understandable why so many viewers were heartbroken by the finale. A mere fifteen minutes after we were finally given the intimacy and openness between Eve and Villanelle we had waited four seasons for, it is all over. I’m not saying that one or both of them dying was not something we were prepared for, but to set up this massive confrontation we were waiting for with the twelve to be shot and edited in such a way that we see nothing. We see Villanelle’s face and then the backs of many heads as she systematically cuts all of them down, only to be cut down herself. There was not closure. There were not answers, and that can be great in some cases. Some shows, you don't want it to be tied up tightly with a pretty ribbon on top. But the way things were crammed into one final episode, rather than paced out over two or three truly did the legacy of this show a great disservice.

My hope is that we can get more people from the LGBTQ+ community into the rooms where these decisions were being made. Because I don’t think anyone would have been okay with the killing off of every LGBTQ+ character except for Eve, who may as well be dead at this point with the amount of trauma and pain she has had to endure. To close it out with her screaming in agony, only to slap a cheeky “the end” card over the shot of the Tower Bridge? It felt like a slap in the face to the incredible work the actors, writers, creative team as a whole and the crew had worked so hard for. I’d hoped by 2022 that “bury your gays” as a trope would be seen as the tired storytelling device that capitalizes on queer fans just looking to be represented, but it seems we still have a long way to go.