As a warning, this article is full of Killing Eve spoilers!
After finishing the tenth season of Grey’s Anatomy in my senior year of high school, I followed Sandra Oh on her social media handles to see what she was doing after leaving the show. This inevitably led me to binge-watch the first season of one of her greatest works to date, Killing Eve. Now, I’m terrible with gore and found a lot of scenes unsettling, but I fell in love with the chemistry that Sandra Oh and Jodie Comer had, particularly the game of cat-and-mouse that got even more intense by the episode. I was hooked.
Unfortunately, life got in the way and I barely finished the third season. I decided to patiently wait for all eight episodes of the last season to air on BBC America before binge-watching in one day. This plan drastically changed when I went onto the show’s Instagram page and scrolled through the comment section. Suffice to say, I was also peeved to find out just how much the writer of the show changed the outcome of Villanelle and Eve’s ending.
For those who didn’t know, Killing Eve was based on a book series by Luke Jennings. It emulated the same dynamic that both leading women had on-screen, yet differed in terms of certain events such as the ending. Both women end up alive, living a quiet life together by the end of Jenning’s novel. With Carolyn murdering Villanelle in the last few minutes and revealing herself as a leader of the antagonistic Twelve, it left so many unanswered questions to fans.
Many blame the writer for the final season, Laura Neal, as she was responsible for creating the content. With the main creator of the show, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, bowing out at the end of the first season and consequently cycling between three other writers, the show has shown inconsistencies with how the main plot strays from the original series. With that being said, there was a lot of potential for Villanelle as it was clear that her infatuation for Eve encouraged her to slowly develop into a better person. Viewers watched her start as this selfish, materialistic, and cold-blooded assassin who cared for herself. Yet, she clearly portrayed character growth through her selfless decision-making skills up until her final moments. The way she shielded and used her last breaths to encourage Eve to jump in the water showed just how much she grew on an emotional level.
It was bittersweet knowing that Villanelle redeemed herself in her last minutes. I truly wanted one of my favorite fictional lesbian couples to be happy and hearing how the death of one person figuratively killed the other broke me. With that being said, I will be expediting the Luke Jennings series to me at my earliest convenience, and patiently wait for Sandra Oh to continue to appear in more films.