Something Completely Your Own

Notes on Killing Eve's Series Finale

When I first decided to write this essay — because I knew I had to say something — the skeleton that I had in mind was completely different. As in, it was a different piece entirely. I was going to write the essay that I’ve wanted to write for years:  about the legacy of tragic endings that we as sapphics have inherited — some deserved, some not. I rewatched my favorites, fast-forwarded and rewound to grab the perfect quotes. I sifted through articles, looking for Céline Sciamma’s poetics on what the endings of lesbian love stories mean in relation to the continuum of our cultural works. I even flipped through my copy of If Not, Winter, Anne Carson’s translation of Sappho’s fragments, jotting down lines that would fit in nicely, in the same vein as I do most everything: melodramatically. I still intend on writing that essay one day, but the unfettered bitterness I felt as soon as I finished Killing Eve has simply not let up. I refuse to let the anger and hurt I’ve felt as a longtime fan slip through the cracks so easily. So instead, I’m writing this. I hope that’s okay.

Art credit: “Never let me go” by @TullulahShark on twitter/ig:@codenametullulahshark. Click here for their redbubble.

Many of you know me as one of the reviewers who have covered the final season of Killing Eve over the past two-or-so months, whether or not you have agreed with my thoughts (read: scales of gayness). Something that I have expressly intended to not obfuscate is that before I am a reviewer, I am a fan of the show — have been one since it first aired in 2018, and at that, one who has been lucky enough to have access to the screeners, the purpose of which to ultimately write an essay on our beloved Villaneve (feel free to read that too, if you’re interested). When I tweeted my initial review of the fourth season, I was not expecting to get a response from anyone other than the friends I’d already had on Twitter. And even when I first tweeted about the show, I expected it would probably be a one-time deal. But then, in what seemed like minutes, I was plunged into stan twitter — one that I had never been a part of myself, even before the journalism thing. Little by little, my weekly coverage became something that I’d looked forward to. The outcome was this: a bunch of new (queer) people with whom I could interact regarding the new episodes of my favorite show. A pretty sweet deal from any angle, barring the occasional cattiness, of course.

For those who are reading this who consider themselves to be very normal about Killing Eve, allow me to illustrate what it’s like to not be normal about it. This series, whose target audience seems to be limited to queer women and non-binary people, breeds an unparalleled dedication among its devotees. By unparalleled, I mean that even in other communities of fans, I have never seen quite the same kind of intellectual hysteria. And it’s not too difficult to figure out why, but on paper, such a logic could not fully be understood; you have to see it to really get it. This seemingly unprecedented adoration is cinched irrefutably on the way the two central characters fall victim to the gravitational pull that is forged the moment that they fall into each other’s orbit. The sheer combination of talent and chemistry of its main actresses, Sandra Oh and Jodie Comer, is singular. The sycophant in me says that no two other people could have played them, and I think even critics with much less of a bias would agree. 

In the early days of season one, Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s foundational work breathed life into this trailblazing story through the nascent magnetism between these two women. Even though the story was then in its antediluvian days, PWB immediately validated the inherent queer character to Villaneve’s relationship in one of the earliest interviews for the show: “Every moment alone in this show exists so that these two women can end up alone in a room together” (Variety, 2018). With sapphic representation only becoming a readily accessible element of pop culture in the past decade or so, a series that stakes itself on the hunger of two women for one another (amplified by their societal roles — an MI6 agent and an international assassin, each on the hunt for the other) would inevitably bewitch a select group of queer women and nonbinary people, and likely even beyond the LGBTQ+ community. For those of us who have been otherwise dissatisfied with the lack of flavor in sapphic representation on screen, or the little variation in the stories told, a series with this premise is like the promise of water in the middle of a desert: an indescribable, potentially carnal drive that will keep you trudging along for four years, merely for the thought of the first drop hitting your tongue.

Moving beyond the sapphic plot, what Killing Eve’s representation specifically entails is — and I don’t say this in passing — revolutionary. The seductive cat-and-mouse chase isn’t just between two women, but between two women of different racial profiles and a notably gorgeous age-gap: Eve is a Korean-American woman in her late forties, and Villanelle is a Russian woman  in her late twenties. This kind of dynamic delivered by a network as far-reaching as BBC America and its counterparts in different countries, is, quite frankly, incredible. Age-gap admiration in sapphic culture is ubiquitous and deeply rooted, yet it is so rarely presented to a public outside of our community, especially not through mainstream entertainment. The true importance of it is stretches further than what is often spoken about through gay women’s obsession with ’MILFs’ on social media. Even deeper is an indelible quality of lesbian/sapphic culture that is so anti-patriarchal I could not possibly imagine how mainstream culture could ever market it for capitalistic purposes: for lesbians and queer women, aging is so valued that you could even go as far as to call it sacred. Physical attributes that the heteropatriarchy has tried to reverse or erase, such as laugh lines or grey hair, are immensely attractive to and adored by the sapphic community. And effectively, in Killing Eve, Sandra Oh’s physical qualities, evoking both her age and her Korean heritage in their integrality, drive Villanelle to the absolute ends of desire. 

In this fourth and final season, the foundational desire opens up the amphitheater to larger questions about love. The fourth season deals with this beautifully in a queerer fashion than has ever been done before on the show, through the integration of more lesbian culture tropes. Already in episode three, we get a maudlin Villanelle in Martin the Therapist’s garden, horizontal in a lounger, waxing poetic about Eve (a woman she has never formally dated): “She’s a rainbow in beige boots.” At this point, there’s no longer a question of whether or not Villanelle is in love, which makes the continued subject of ‘queerbaiting’ laughable in relation to the show. (Queerbaiting effectively is a technique from the production side that hints at a character being queer or engaging in same-sex attraction, but ultimately there is no such content that is explicitly depicted. The first episode of the entire series confirms Villanelle’s attraction to women, and later, the mutual sexual and romantic attraction between Villanelle and Eve is the lynchpin of the show. Therefore, no queerbaiting). Not to mention the lesbian drama acting as the icing on the cake — between Eve and Hélène, Hélène and Fernanda, Gunn and Villanelle, and obviously, Villanelle and Eve. 

All of these moments of pure lesbian storytelling ultimately culminate in the finale. The finale, grand or not, contains the 25-odd minutes that every dedicated fan has been waiting for — it’s the water. Fate, in the words of the cynical Eve (“Then what’s this?”), has woven them together at the hip. It would not make any sense for them to be apart — not even for me, who has been conditioned to appreciate tragedy in sapphic love stories. And the moments of the two of them in unity are better than most could have expected. They are soft and open to each other. They mock the obnoxious straight couple together that put them up in their cabin. Together in one sleeping bag, Villanelle traces the indentations of the scar she gave Eve, Eve’s back to her. Eve turns around and they face each other with soft eyelids. (For a moment I’m brought back to Marianne and Héloise in Portrait of a Lady on Fire, on their last night together). Villanelle and Eve have a giggle in the camper van over mocking the straight people once again, Eve throwing candy into Villanelle’s mouth. They share curly fries. Squatting in a bush, they pee in front of each other — their intimacy, arguably at its peak, is exhibited in the least conventional of ways, playing on Villanelle’s earlier criticism of their hetero hosts: “One of her organs is inside of him and they still can’t piss in front of each other.” The closeness is clearly overwhelming to her, compelling her to do what she has stopped herself from doing so many times before: Villanelle pecks Eve on the cheek, and to her utmost euphoria, Eve pulls her into a kiss. They don’t pull apart from each other the entire trip down the street to the camper van. When I watched this scene on an ordinary Wednesday night, fans not even having seen the episode prior, I heard the ear-splitting screams from 11 days out. It just makes sense that all of the time they lost away from each other would lead to the easiest relationship either has had with anyone before. There’s the tragedy — exactly the right person, but nowhere near enough time. 

The fact of the matter is this: the first 38 minutes of the Killing Eve finale are nearly perfect. Of course, there will no doubt be those who are disappointed at the lack of explicit sex scene, or even something more than the slight indication of Villanelle chasing Eve to her side of the van for nothing more than screeching. That is totally understandable, especially when there has been a great deal more shown between Eve and Niko, or Eve and Hugo (though I have never ever rewatched those scenes, so I couldn’t say for sure). But even I think that those who are discouraged by the lack of physical intimacy on screen would still make do with the contents of the finale. I could even predict that the many fans feeling out of joint from the flagrant lack of Villaneve progression, especially in this final season, would settle for the little time the two get to spend in their brief solace in the finale. However, any net positive that could have arisen from a finale that ended at minute-38 — Villanelle and Eve in each other’s arms, relieved at the annihilation of the twelve, euphoric to have come out of the upheaval together, in front of The London Bridge where they had parted ways in quiet heartbreak — is inevitably undermined by the three absolutely pathetic minutes of writing that come after. 

After I had first finished those final three minutes, I was in an utmost state of shock. After certain decisions made throughout the fourth season, especially the one that saw to Villanelle’s injury in episode five, all of my suspicions involving a death in the finale had been washed away. As I have made clear many times online, I am not someone who is opposed to unhappy endings. Maybe years ago, I was, and I am not at all trying to convey the notion that my opinion is the correct on here, but it is my opinion after having been conditioned to associate the most powerful sapphic storytelling with tragedy (read: Portrait of a Lady on Fire, my holy grail). However, the conditioning doesn’t work the other way around: I don’t immediately deem a story effective or poignant solely due to the sadness of its ending, and that is what is key here. The baseline is this, from an objective, critical point of view: tragedy for the sole endgame of tragedy is poor writing. It’s unjustifiable and flavorless. Tragedy without a more profound purpose has been the collateral downfall of incredible television series in the past, most notably in Game of Thrones. Though when you apply this narrative collapse to a sapphic story, the results are not just disappointing, but ultimately violent.

For most of Killing Eve’s viewers, the on-screen tragedy in the finale is not their first rodeo. It is inevitable that those who have engaged with media made before 2017-2018 have been in some way subjected to the endemic state of queer television from that time period, which frequently saw the deaths of its sapphic characters. Even those who are of a younger age, who have realized their queerness more recently, or who had never engaged with queer television prior to Killing Eve, many are likely aware of our morbid history of representation on the small screen, or of the trend used to describe it: #BuryYourGays. I am not a scholar in the history of this representation, I’ll admit, and being only 24 years old with no more than seven years in the community, I’ve been privileged enough to have access to content that was not diametrically opposed to my existence. That said, I will link you to Autostraddle’s post from 2016 that lists all of the sapphics who have been killed on screen, for which the rates are much higher than their heterosexual counterparts.

The reality of the situation is this: we are currently in an era of television in which sapphic representation is ubiquitous. (The representation is not perfect, though, especially since white sapphics most certainly outweigh sapphics of color, when we look at the numbers). However, I am pointing out the increase in representation because, when a sapphic character is killed off in modern television, it is not necessarily a symptom of the culture, because the culture has changed. The death of The 100’s Lexa in 2016 was the straw that broke the camel’s back, and rightfully infuriated the show’s queer following that had waited and waited for Lexa and Clarke to finally be together romantically. As an outsider, it reads like a sick joke: Lexa and Clarke finally consummate their relationship, and then as soon as Lexa leaves the room, she is shot and killed. The rhetoric of this is Pavlovian: when you put two visual events close together in time, one will be associated with the other. From another perspective in behavioral psychology — B.F. Skinner’s behaviorism, it can even further be interpreted as event and reward, or event and punishment due to the relationship of cause-and-effect. In the case of Lexa’s death, this translates to lesbian love being associated with punishment via the death of an audience’s favorite queer character. Breaking this down, and having analyzed the impact that spurred unflinching backlash on social media, you would think something like this would never happen again — no less in 2022, no less from queer writers.

The Killing Eve finale is an egregious slap-in-the-face from a room full of writers who certainly should have known better. When Villanelle is shot dead in the Thames River (it has taken me up until this moment to be able to actually write it out) in the very same episode where she finally is allowed to be with the woman she loves, the message is the same as with Lexa’s death, regardless of the writers’ intent. The difference is that in this era of television, it’s so much worse. We as queer viewers have allowed ourselves to feel safe, trusting those who work behind the curtain to not deliver us violent narratives that unjustly end the lives of the characters most dear to us. For Villanelle to be killed in the way that she is, and for us not to even see the ways in which Eve will grieve — the results are simply unforgivable. Interrupting one of the limited scenes we have of just the two of them, of our beautiful assassin basking in her full-blood relief in the arms of the person she loves most in the world, Villanelle is shot multiple times before they both manage to jump overboard. With both of them alive in the water, one could even be content with the possibility of an ambiguous ending, with both of them still fighting for their lives. But as if the first few bullets weren’t sufficient enough, Villanelle continues to be shot underwater, her blood seeping out of her, forming angel wings behind her. In an instant, she’s gone, and Eve watches the life drain from her eyes, trying to swim towards her, their fingers almost touching to evoke Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam (1512). And then, as Eve resurfaces, her screams are edited against a red title card of the words, “The End.” It’s nothing short of barbaric. The devastation is unfathomable, and for executive producer Sally Woodward Gentle to call it “operatic?” How spineless and appalling. You can try different combinations and permutations of the equation, of how the ending could have gone down (and I am well aware fans have been doing this for years), but the canonical outcome is by far the most insidious. That fans, young and old, had been willing to sacrifice the lives of both characters instead of just one, to diminish the suffering of one character living without the other, which would have provided for ample tragedy, is incredibly dismal. But that the writers would not settle for this as the lesser of two tragedies is rather inconceivable. I don’t really know how to ascribe any kind of empathy to those who could elect for the combo of extremely subpar writing and the shock factor in exchange for fans feeling any kind of closure.

I have spent an immoderate amount of time over the past week wondering at what point the decision makers’ got it in their head to execute something this horrific and vapid. (For the record, I am not placing the blame solely on the writers’ room, as I’m sure there are producers out there who couldn’t care less about their fanbase). The choice could not have been for the love of the fans, clearly, and based on how poorly written the ending is, I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt to presume that they could not have been vapid enough to think it would do well with the critics. Even the author of the novellas — Luke Jennings, a British man in his sixties — saw to a well-conceived ending in which both Villanelle and Eve are alive. So, really, who wins? Who wins with an ending where one dies, and the other doesn’t, with an execution I could only judge as remedial writing?

I am someone who has, especially since coming out, latched onto pop culture like a life vest. For many people in the LGBTQ+ community, television and film are used to escape more bleak realities, or even to engage in sapphic culture when the possibility of doing so is otherwise limited, for one reason or another. I’ve cycled through so many emotions in the past eleven days, thinking about the psychological wreckage this would cause on young queers who have poured their hearts and souls into loving Villanelle and Eve, for those who have felt validated in the representation of either’s sexuality or identity, or for those who have been waiting for the grand payoff — that a love this epic could exist. 

I specifically have thought a great deal about those who have discovered their own sexuality through Villanelle, who have invested so much of themselves into her character that they could not separate their own self-discovery from the presence of her character in television. I ache the most for these people, who have found comfort in their own identity through Villanelle, because I know what it’s like for a fictional character to be able to do that to a person. At 17 years old, I was able to come into my own self-identity because of Orphan Black’s Delphine Cormier. The reasons are diverse and lengthy, so I will save that anecdote for another time. However, at the time, when I thought that she would be killed off the show, and that she would be gone forever, a part of me kind of collapsed in on itself. Because at 17 years old, when you have lived such a small portion of your life, any representation that you can connect with is immeasurable — it allows you to envision a future for yourself in your own identity. It’s a small invariable part of yourself that you can hold onto when ‘real life’ gets tough. I remember spending hours and hours of that summer crying, drafting letters to the writers only to later delete them, and overall feeling totally betrayed by the creatives I had entrusted with my devotion as a fan. Because back in 2016, we were not safe at all. I didn’t have the security blanket that I believed time and evolved screenwriting would bring, that would bestow the faith in me that my favorite queer character wouldn’t be pointlessly killed off by those holding the pen. But I got lucky. Whether it was the long-haul plan all the while to keep Delphine alive, or whether Graeme Manson & John Fawcett decided to listen to their fans who had already suffered so much at the hands of other showrunners, I will be forever grateful her story was able to continue in canon. A pivoted decision could have changed the relationship I have with my identity forever. That’s the kind of power that art holds.

As it turns out, the security blanket of time has only been an illusion. I’m so sorry for the newcomers who have to suffer the same way older generations have. I know how much it is going to hurt for all who love Villanelle and Eve. I know how sour it is going to feel to go back and rewatch the series, knowing that the last three minutes have tainted the hundreds and hundreds that came before — the feeling of seeing Eve and Villanelle meet in front of the hospital restroom’s double-mirrors, knowing what’s written on the last page. I know how much fans’ relationship with queer storytelling is going to change due to an ending that could have been made disproportionately better with the easiest fix by a 10-year-old on iMovie. 

What I have learned after many years of loving films and television is that storytelling is a reciprocal process. Actually, I have to thank Céline Sciamma the most for this one, who has made it clear in every one of her filmmaking decisions that there are no decisions at all if they are not received by an audience. As lesbians, bisexuals, queer individuals — we are as important to the creations that we engage with as the creations are to us. Killing Eve has had too much of an impact on too many people for all of the credit to go to the people who made the series, when its importance would mean very little to an audience of 0. I have spent the last two months reading profound theories, looking at phenomenal fan art, and following the vast connections made by hundreds and hundreds of sapphic fans online to ever think that the power rests in the hands of a minority who couldn't even slenderly grasp the significance of the story to the same degree that its viewers have.

Physics says that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. When you give yourself to something so completely, even in the case of a creative massacre like this, that thing stays alive inside of you. Killing Eve is what it is because of the value it has been afforded by the people it has touched. No three minutes of screen-time could change that. We’re too fierce not to wield that kind of power. So screw ‘em. Write your own ending.

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Thank you all for reading. I would like to take this space to thank my amazing editor and collaborator, Vitti. Thank you for your shoulder on which to cry, thank you for the guiding words, and thank you for helping me make this piece as authentic as possible. I would never have even attempted it without you there. You rock!!!

Please follow her on twitter — she’s the best.

Thank you also to my twitter pal @TullulahShark for allowing me to use their beautiful art. Follow them on twitter as well as on instagram (@codenametullulashark). Their work can be purchased here.