To whoever pulled the trigger on that Killing Eve series finale death... I swear I just want to talk! (And to anyone who hasn’t seen the ending and wants to remain unspoiled, this is your warning to leave.)
Ever since those posters of Sandra Oh getting sexy-choked by Jodie Comer first came out, it seems safe to assume most fans have spent Killing Eve’s run awaiting one thing. We just wanted Eve and Villanelle to finally embrace the intimacy they’ve run away from season after season and become, as writer Lyra Hale put it in an outraged blog post for Fangirlish, “murder girlfriends.”
Instead fans got a cruel slap in the face.
In a rushed and overstuffed finale, Eve and Villanelle finally give into temptation and make out. (This, after the even more intimate act of peeing next to one another.) But this last-minute relief to romantic tension left simmering far too long is not even the greatest insult. Moments after they finally act on their overcooked feelings for one another, a sniper rifle takes Villanelle out from afar as MI6 boss Carolyn murmurs a “Jolly good.”
Did we just watch yet another boring episode of “Bury Your Gays” in the Year of Our Lord, Rihanna, 2022? That might depend on whom you ask.
It’s been almost exactly 20 years since a stray bullet killed Tara, Willow’s girlfriend on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in 2002, and sparked an outrage we would relive over and over again. The pairing (Twillow, for those in the know) was one of TV’s first depictions of queer women in a relationship, and Tara’s death was just one of many disappointments to come. A more specific hashtag related to #BuryYourGays? #DeadLesbianSyndrome—because there are just that many examples.
It’s not that gay characters should never die on TV, but that too often they die just after or as a direct result of accepting love. Our censorship laws have historically banned favorable depictions of queerness and, at times, explicit portrayals of queerness entirely. Shallow depictions of queer people who die soon after we find out they’re queer can be found all over the place through the decades, but in recent years these stories and the outrage they stoke have become their own news cycle.
We talked about this in 2016 when both The Walking Dead and The 100 both abruptly killed off queer characters, cutting romantic arcs short. We talked about it again in 2019 with that ridiculously tragic The Magicians death, and in 2020 thanks to Lovecraft Country and Supernatural. Is The Haunting of Bly Manor an example? We had that discussion at the time, too. I could go on but who has the time?
Fans have spent years waiting for Eve and Villanelle to finally give into their feelings for one another. That final-act snog was better than a stray Exclusively Gay Moment, sure. But what do Villanelle’s death and Eve’s wailing sobs accomplish?
Executive producer Sally Woodward Gentle told Deadline that Villanelle’s death has been on the table as a likely ending since the beginning.
“We sort of knew what was going to happen quite early on,” she said. “... [W]e were open to something else sort of declaring itself, but it never really changed.”
“When you consider that Villanelle has always worked in a high-risk industry, there was a degree of inevitability about it,” Gentle continued. During the show’s final season, Villanelle’s arc focused on embracing humanity. To the EP, “Her selfless shoving of Eve over the side of the boat was something that we felt connected to where she started in episode one, trying to prove to other people that she could be a good human being.”
Eve’s survival, in Gentle’s eyes, constitutes a rebirth of an extraordinary woman.
It’s possible to imagine such an ending, but that’s not quite the one we got. Eve’s final moments before the words “The End” appear on screen depict not a new woman but a broken woman who might one day find rebirth. With each new season and show-runner, Killing Eve has grasped for plausible reasons to keep its central cat and mouse apart. The longer Eve and Villanelle have needlessly circled one another, the dizzier the series has become.
Another version of this series, one that allowed Eve and Villanelle to hook up a season or two ago, would have had time to get Sandra Oh’s quietly dangerous mouse to that place. There also would have been time for Villanelle to go out properly. After years spent watching Jodie Comer splatter victims’ blood all over a delicious collection of haute couture, that anti-climactic death-by-sniper rifle might be the greatest sin of all.
