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Heading into the finale, the BBC America series is a fascinating study of sisterhood’s strengths and perils
he dangerous friend isn’t dangerous because she’s daring, or precocious, or even reckless. She’s dangerous because she makes you trust her against all logical judgment, makes you want to please her even if your own happiness is compromised, and imprints herself on your mind with disconcerting speed and force." — Andi Zeisler, from the essay “Breaking Up with Smitty”
What happens when two women come together? Not meet, not smash or fall in love or like, but meld, fold into each other’s lives. What then?
“Killing Eve” has spent an entire season answering that question in a number of unpredictable ways through the lives of its main characters Eve Polastri (Sandra Oh) and the assassin known as Villanelle (Jodie Comer). Not once has it gotten close to a definitive response, and that’s fine. If it gave us an answer, there would be no reason to look forward to the second season BBC America granted it before the first premiered.
But as Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s sleeper hit of a thriller saunters into its finale, airing Sunday at 8 p.m. on BBC America, we have a clearer idea of what Eve means to Villanelle and vice versa. They’re not friends, not at all. Describing them as being in love is closer to the truth but not quite right. Mutually obsessed is better, but still inaccurate.
Maybe the best way to put it is that they’re two of a kind.
In a world that has betrayed and deceived them at every turn, they can trust in one another’s constancy. Even after Villanelle draws Eve’s partner Bill (David Haig) into a spider-and-fly dance that ends with her gazing into his eyes and grinning as she stabs him to death; even after she runs over an ex-girlfriend on a job gone sideways, we can trust Eve to have Villanelle’s back. She can’t help herself.
But who has Eve’s? That’s a good question. In the penultimate episode of this first season, Eve discovers that her boss, Carolyn Martens (Fiona Shaw), the MI6 agent in charge of the Russia desk, might not be entirely on the up-and-up. Footage shows Carolyn meeting with Villanelle in the Russian prison where she’s been dropped to complete an assassination and, as it turns out, possibly get erased in the process. That means Carolyn is at least somehow connected to the conspiracy Villanelle is serving, and she's lied to Eve.
“Killing Eve” has been dubbed a feminist thriller, which is accurate but only tells part of the story. What's been fascinating is to witness the ways that it explores the kind of trickiness involved in navigating the world as a woman, in ways that the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements are only starting to reckon with.
I don’t mean the harassment or sexism Villanelle and Eve confront but patriarchy's impact on the already delicate complexities of female relationships. The narrative of #MeToo, as it plays out in news coverage and on social media, is mostly framed in the relationships men have with women, and boundaries and meaning.
In higher profile cases, however, there are often references to women enabling abusers or benefiting from their efforts to silence, disempower or discredit accusers. What isn’t illustrated or explored is why these women would choose to turn against the interests of their own gender, aside from the offer of good old profit.
That's why Carolyn's apparent deception is such an extraordinary twist and fertile with possibility. She appears to be the least likely person to backstab her own team: upright in the extreme, no nonsense and willing to go to the mat for her people. From the first episodes the series sets up Carolyn as the essential mentor every professional woman counts on, a wise superior who has thrived and climbed the ladder, despite the obvious lack of support from her male counterparts. We presumed at the start of the season that she gives Eve a chance because she sees something of herself in her.
But it could be that in she's been using Eve as bait, getting her close enough to Villanelle to make the killer impressed, intrigued and unhinged all at once. Maybe Carolyn was only serving herself and her own career. That, and maybe the mysterious cabal bankrolling Villanelle’s jet-setting lifestyle and her assassinations known as The Twelve. (There must always be a shadowy cabal running these deals. How else does one justify future seasons of this kind of show?)
Trust is all we have. Trust links women who are coming together in virtual town squares on the internet for support and to seek justice. Trust is keeping Eve alive, that and whatever forces compel Villanelle to want Eve alive instead of dead.
Just when we believe we can count on one true and solid link of trust between two women in this drama, it turns. With Villanelle, these about-faces have been shocking, even when they shouldn’t be. The first time we meet her, she smiles at a little girl admiring her in an ice cream shop, only to swat the child’s sundae into her lap as she leaves the place because, why not?
Villanelle takes joy in the pain of others because that’s part of her job, and one should enjoy what one is good at. Eve only learns that lesson after she loses her position within British intelligence, where her intellectual curiosity goes unrewarded and underemployed.
Even so, Eve remains so bound to the notion of being right and doing right that the possibility that there might be a traitor sitting beside her never occurs to her.
In this way, “Killing Eve" shows sisterhood’s might and peril; it is powerful, but it’s also complicated and devoid of guarantees. That’s never been something women have been comfortable exploring carefully, and this show does it without tumbling into tropes about competitiveness. Through Carolyn and Eve, Villanelle and every woman she's been intimate with, it posits that rock solid sisterhood, the kind that passes the Bechdel Test, can still turn out to be false and a trap.
It also depicts, with great loveliness, how women can be drawn to one another as ardently as the long gravitates to the grifter, as moths hurtle toward flames. And women like Villanelle realize early on that they can lure to hungry hearts, and they use that awareness strategically and carelessly.
Villanelle has no moral fetters holding her back, but, in these last episodes, that has gained her little. We’ve found out much more about her throughout these seven episode that have aired, that she’s been raised to kill without guilt or concern, but she’s also been raised without love or the loyalty that would result from having such a thing.
Though her handler Konstantin (Kim Bodnia) exploits this, mollifying Villanelle by treating her like his daughter even when she’s holding a gun to his face, it’s really the women within Villanelle’s range who are most endangered by her affection deficit. At the moment, in fact, Villanelle has Konstantin's actual child as her hostage.
Meanwhile, in the most recent episode, Eve meets Anna, Villanelle’s French teacher, and discovers that Anna’s mistake was in caring about the assassin. She stepped up, she declares, where other teachers stepped back in fear. And the kind-hearted instructor was rewarded with affectionate letters, an obsessive love and her devoted student murdering her husband.
The killing in “Killing Eve” is its own form of dialogue; it slakes one's desire to see piggish misogynists get what's coming to them. Anytime a handler derisively refers to their female charge with an overly familiar pet name such as pumpkin, watch out. Villanelle’s new boss, introduced recently to hand over her latest assignment, was fired by way of her putting a bullet in his head.
His mistake was in insisting that she sit down and know her place.
For this and so many other reasons, “Killing Eve” allows us to love Villanelle as much as we love Eve. Refreshing as it is to see any series shun the simple protagonist/antagonist binary, it's been particularly satisfying to witness this with a pair of female lead characters. Oh’s and Comer’s performances make embracing both characters easy, but the production's careful awareness of the love languages of fashion, music and setting all play roles in strengthening our affair.
Support, understanding, betrayal, regret, Eve and Villanelle have raced through it all, away from and towards each other. And while the relationships around them have proven to be false in a number of ways, Eve, the MI5 agent and Villanelle, the assassin, have turned out to be the closest each will get to their own One True Thing.
This could change in a breath, of course. That much we can depend on.
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