The series finale of “Killing Eve” –– and, to a lesser extent, the entire final season — is one of the most egregious misfires in television history. By unceremoniously killing off one of its leads and violently tearing apart the queer romance at its center, the series destroys its liberatory potential — instead serving as a tragic, harsh reminder of the continuing problems with queer representation in mainstream film and television.
“Killing Eve” centers on Eve (Sandra Oh), a British intelligence agent with a fascination for the macabre, as she relentlessly pursues Villanelle (Jodie Comer), a prolific serial killer and assassin working for the international terrorist organization known as the Twelve. Over its four seasons, the BBC America drama has deepened the mutual obsession and attraction between its two leads, as Eve and Villanelle find themselves increasingly connected to each other’s lives — falling in love and becoming more and more alike along the way.
For much of its run, “Killing Eve” was critically acclaimed for its sympathetic and nuanced portrayals of queerness. I was pleasantly surprised at how the series largely avoided conventional tropes of queer-baiting and heteronormativity, instead repeatedly leaning into the homoerotic subtext of Eve and Villanelle’s relationship. Eve comes to realize that Villanelle isn’t just a ruthless killer –– she’s as funny and free-spirited as she is tortured and terrifying. Villanelle’s love for Eve isn’t portrayed as warped or psychopathic, but as a tethering force that ties her to her basic humanity. Though they are rarely physically intimate, their connection is more romantic and believable than almost any other women-loving-women relationship on television; it’s no wonder that queer women are such a significant portion of “Killing Eve”’s audience.
Reception for the series’ fourth and final season, which finished airing on April 10, was significantly mixed. Under the direction of new head writer Laura Neal, “Killing Eve” made a series of bizarre narrative choices. The series’ secondary protagonist and Eve’s former boss Carolyn (Fiona Shaw) becomes the season’s overarching villain, overriding three seasons’ worth of development to the contrary with little explanation. Many of the series’ dangling plot threads are resolved off-screen or left unexplained, even as new characters are seemingly introduced and killed at random.
However, what incited the most anger from “Killing Eve” fans, including myself, has to be the season’s fumbling of its queer themes and representation. In spite of introducing more explicitly queer characters and relationships than ever before, the show has never felt less like it was written with representation in mind. By the season’s end, six of its queer characters — five of them women — are killed, with only Eve left alive. Villanelle is killed in the show’s final minutes after finally reuniting with Eve for the first time as a couple earlier in the episode, after she and Eve jump into the River Thames to escape. As “THE END” flashes on screen, Villanelle’s corpse floats away in the river as Eve emerges from the water, screaming.
It’s hard to overstate what a slap in the face this ending was, both as a repudiation of the queer audiences that sustained “Killing Eve” and as a reminder of how far queer representation has left to go –– even in ostensibly progressive portrayals.
In recent years, media studies scholars and queer activists alike have commented on the overuse of the “Bury Your Gays” trope in film and television, where LGBTQ+ characters are violently killed off in meaningless ways. This typically occurs either as a form of punishment for the character or as a way for writers to ostensibly demonstrate the dangers associated with living a “queer lifestyle.” The trope has also tended to disproportionately impact queer female characters, including Lexa from “The 100” and Rose from “Jane the Virgin.” Criticism of the trope is not to suggest that being queer should necessarily make characters exempt from death or harm, but rather to indicate that straight relationships and characters — and, to a lesser extent, gay men — have been granted happy or meaningful endings at disproportionately higher rates.
When interviewed about her decision to kill Villanelle off in the series finale, Nealsaid she saw it as both a “happy ending” for Villanelle and an “escape” for Eve, who can now “remember what the normal world has to offer.” What queer audiences perceived as Eve’s pain and sorrow in response to Villanelle’s death, Neal perceived as triumph. Furthermore, every moment Neal wrote between the two characters in the final episode — including their declarations of love, their first moments of physical intimacy and even their banter over curly fries — were supposed to convey that these two women could and should never be together. With Villanelle gone, Eve no longer has to live the non-normative lifestyle she might have otherwise pursued.
Neal’s fellow writers and other defenders of the finale’s narrative choices have since argued that Eve and Villanelle could never have had a happy, domestic relationship — that their union would have ended in violence, destruction and death. They contend that Villanelle would have eventually shown her true nature, even killing Eve (no pun intended). This assertion flies in the face of everything the two characters have been through. Eve has always been Villanelle’s anchor to humanity; their love was the single source of joy in “Killing Eve”’s otherwise miserable world. Why reunite them, if only to separate them later that same episode? Why give queer audiences everything they have hoped for and demanded for the entire series, only to violently and purposefully strip it away? The homophobia here is real, intentionally or not, and it’s more hurtful than ever because we know “Killing Eve” can do better than that.
In the middle of the episode, Eve officiates a wedding between two gay men for reasons unclear. The scene largely serves as a way for Eve to monologue, teary-eyed, about her relationship with Villanelle and how the beautiful ways in which they “reunite” are what bind them together. Within 5 minutes, Villanelle is dead, Eve is screaming and everything is worse. The writers’ cloying, taunting sentiments undergird every facet of the finale, not just insulting to any viewer invested in Eve’s and Villanelle’s relationship — but especially damaging to queer women, who will have to wait for the next groundbreaking portrayal to finally get their chance at a happy ending. Any hope of “Killing Eve” leaving a tangible legacy died at the bottom of the river with Villanelle.
