Killing Eve: A review of the final season

The fourth and final season of the spy thriller series Killing Eve opened as if the world had stepped into a looking glass. The characters we adored for their charisma lost touch with their past selves. Villanelle, our favorite psychopath that leaves trails of bodies as works of art, finally gets in touch with her emotions.

Eve Polastri is a brilliant agent whose obsession with finding Villanelle encouraged the psychopath in her. By the start of the season, she shoots people, manipulates them, and is living her life out of hotel rooms, much like Villanelle herself.

Lastly, Carolyn’s mastermind was initially reduced to the desk of Cultural attaché in this season, but she acted as an agent of herself with an eagerness to find the person who ordered the killing of her son, Kenny. All of this led to one big twist that might have been unexpected but remained unsatisfactory.

The show was notoriously popular for its style of balancing gore with its grim humor. However, this season lacked all of its original flavors.

Villanelle

This glorious character was introduced to us trying to mimic human expressions. However, throughout this journey, her sense of belonging and lack of emotion weighed on her so much that she ended up losing a chunk of her defining character.

Despite these changes, her fixation on Eve has grown into genuine care and even love. Villanelle is trying to change, mostly to prove to Eve that she can and that she is worthy of care in return.

Villanelle abducts Carolyn (Image via BBC America)

Villanelle's character, at the beginning of the season, turned to God and ended up killing an innocent father-daughter duo who was trying to help her. She reluctantly tries therapy by restraining the therapist from leaving his own house and ends up in prison.

She was hired to kill Carolyn but decided to go against it and ended up joining her team for a minute. Meanwhile, she kills the husbands of the women who were victims of their abuse out of the “goodness” of her heart.

Acting on an impulse, she kills the mastermind behind the murders of the members of the Twelve, Helene. She gets to have a well-deserved moment with Eve, but that only lasts for a moment, and she is killed while embracing Eve.

This season of Killing Eve has been a rollercoaster ride for Villanelle’s character. In the last episode, a tarot card reading shows that even though her past was riddled with conflict and death, her future stores magnificence and glory, as indicated by the card of The Sun.

Thus, the creators preserved her character with glory. She was free from the power that was holding her down, and she got some moments of vulnerability with Eve.

Eve

Eve goes undercover (Image via BBC America)

Eve is an odd character who was desperately seeking Villanelle beyond the realms of reason. With seasons of growth, she let this obsession go, and she formed a new one instead.

Eve is determined to end this game where The Twelve are in power while people like her are just pawns to their will. The need to uproot the organization in its entirety has been the driving force for her character this season. She is tired of losing people and losing her sense of self.

For the better half of the season, we witnessed Eve not caring for Villanelle, ignoring her invites, shoving her out of her room, and ruthlessly letting the police imprison her.

She enters the season on a motorbike, literally kicking people out of her way to Konstantin, who gets shot in the hand while seeking information on The Twelve. She is now part of a security organization where she is trained to fight and is equipped to carry out missions. She enjoys a fleeting relationship with Yusuf, her colleague, who is at times helpful but mostly just concerned about her.

Eve now runs in the company of Helene, who has been murdering agents of The Twelve herself and forms a weird equation with her. From entering a bath with Helene to kidnapping her daughter, she does everything to get her attention.

And she succeeds in doing so, which leads to an arrow being shot at Villanelle in the back while she is forced to witness. Helene's death led her to the cruise where The Twelve were meeting. While Eve dances carefree at the wedding they crash into, Villanelle hacks into the bodies of the members of the Twelve right below that deck.

After the deed is done, in a moment of respite, the characters hug each other, content that they have finally fulfilled their purpose, when Villanelle is shot from behind. Jumping into the water doesn't help much with the bullets finding their target.

Villanelle is shot several times underwater while a panic-stricken Eve swims towards her, unable to do anything at all. She just watches the body of Villanelle drown slowly. As she surfaces, she is left with nothing, everyone in her life has gone beyond reach, and she bursts into a scream at this realization.

Carolyn

The unwavering coldness of the character was perhaps the only aspect that was consistent throughout the series, even at a time when the scene was meant for her to feel for the loss of her son. Carolyn, the former mastermind of MI6, is brilliance oozing out of power suits.

She has her own set of absurd dialogues that manage to be quite relatable, and she also has an eerie ability to walk into dangerous situations without using weapons and manage to come out alive.

Carolyn’s character is written all too well. She is not wasteful, and she has a knack for finding talents that she could use in the future. She knows everyone and possibly everything, except for who runs the mysterious organization, The Twelve.

In this season, Carolyn insists that the intent behind her actions is to find out who ordered the killing of her son, Kenny. To this end, she betrays MI6, her country, her correspondence with Russia, and Eve (if that even matters).

However, it was revealed that Carolyn was one of the original members of The Twelve, and in fact, she was the one who named the organization. They showed young Carolyn coming to terms with her father's sudden demise and forming a nurturing, albeit volatile relationship with a young Konstantin.

She is shown working as a double agent from the very beginning. All of this was interesting as it was disclosed, but it still doesn’t point to a specific reason as to why she ordered the killing of Villanelle and perhaps Eve as well, which she missed.

Wrapping up the last season of Killing Eve

Villanelle as God in her imagination (Image via BBC America)

It was not revealed who the people behind this magnanimous force were that made government intelligence seem like amateurs. Maybe that is a positive because then the show would have needed something omnipotent that could have filled that void, and that seems like an unachievable task.

Regardless of their lack of an identity reveal, the fact that an organization that had been running the whole plot of the series was slaughtered to death by their assassin was unnerving, to say the least.

The genius of the first season was that it was something that had never been done before. It had three dangerous women following their fatal instincts, always in fabulous attire, to make way through the chaos that they had been scripted into.

They did just that and with charm. Different threads of spies, murders, government agencies, and obsessions kept crossing over till it was difficult to squeeze sense out of the lot.

On their way to finding The Twelve in Killing Eve (Image via BBC America)

The important thing that had the audience hooked throughout the ups and downs of the series was the magnetism between the characters Eve and Villanelle, who kept finding their way back to one another. However, even that would have run stale had it not been beautifully portrayed by the talents of Jodie Comer and Sandra Oh.

It is an understatement to say that along the way, the series not only lost touch of that rush of excitement from intelligent writing, but it also left the audience feeling like they had been robbed of a better ending with no loose ends.

Edited by Siddharth Satish