So, that happened. They fucking shot Villanelle in front of Eve after they had finally consummated their relationship and were seemingly truly happy together. Even as much as we all knew this wasn’t likely to be a riding off into the homicidal sunset together scenario, the betrayal of such a smart show with such a lazy, trope-filled ending is still astounding to behold. Yes, the show went full Bury Your Gays and Dead Lesbian Syndrome. A delightful twofer of uninspired narratives that feels about as fresh as those Crocs Villanelle had to put on to escape while recouping from her first murder attempt way back in Season 2.
The parallels between Eve and Villanelle’s ending and Willow and Tara’s ending are unmistakable. Almost exactly 20 years (May 7, 2002, the Kitten Board remembers) after “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” helped launch our modern discussion of the Bury Your Gays trope, we see the same storyline emerge and get presented as an edgy or profound. Look at the queer people suffering. Isn’t that deep? I would call this whole sorted affair the “Your Shirt”-ification of “Killing Eve.” Are we really still setting up narratives that could somehow be interpreted as “punishment” for queer characters after they finally achieve momentary happiness?
What is this, a cheesy 80s slasher flick where the teens have sex and then get axe murdered 3 seconds later because family values? Is this really great company to keep, show?
The ending to “Killing Eve” took a show with a refreshingly untethered moral compass and turned it into a strict morality play in its last two minutes. The awkward moralizing was compounded by Season 4 showrunner Laura Neal who kept referencing in post-show interviews to the final scene as Eve’s “rebirth.” Her coming out of the water with that primal scream wasn’t about sorrow, it was rejuvenation. Ah yes, I thought she sounded refreshed and reinvigorated as she was garbling in horror. That wasn’t a response to the tragedy of losing the singular focus of her existence for the past four years, it was about washing away the last four years. Duh! You can tell a storyline is really working when you have to keep going, “No, see, what we were saying was…” Anyway, I guess this explains all the Jesus stuff from the start of the season.
Also Carolyn is the one who gets to go off triumphantly (and with a possible spin-off) into the good night? I’m going to have to hard pass on that “And who has a better story than Bran?”-nonsense. I mean, I guess we should all be thankful that if this was going to be the sorry end all along, at least they had the courtesy not to drag it out for eight seasons like “Game of Thrones.”
But here’s the rub. The books the series the show is based on don’t end with Villanelle’s death. No, Eve and Villanelle live, with the latter training to be a linguist. I mean, come on, that’s pretty perfect. Talk about your killer language skills. So this was a deliberate choice to kill Villanelle for the purpose of — what? — saving Eve?
Alas, too many showrunners mistake simply killing off queer characters with emotional depth. One does not automatically translate to the other, and in the cases of underrepresented communities storytellers should take special care when considering our stories. You aren’t just killing a character. You are killing the connection and importance an entire community has placed on a character, particularly when they are the still all-too-rare lead characters. For LGBTQ+ communities, who have found ourselves right back in middle of an ugly politicized fight for our existence, representation always matters.
It should also not go without noting that Villanelle is by far not the first queer character this show has killed off unceremoniously. Starting with Bill, whose murder was the emotional needle drop of the entire first season, and going on to include Carolyn’s closeted father and the ruthless assasin wrangle Helene. And some others whose names I cannot remember becase, granted, there was a lot of death overall on “Killing Eve.” Clearly it’s baked right into the title. But, yeah, that’s still a lot of queer character death for one show. A lot.
The things is, we might be having an entirely different conversation if the show had actually let Eve and Villanelle be together for more than 5 minutes. But to build through four seasons to this moment, and then tease us with these fleeting glimpses of their unconventional yet joyous domesticity only to rip them away is not the grand pathos they think it is. It’s just cruel.
It also shows what feels like a deliberate tone deafness to our community’s history and struggle with representation over the years. The Bury Your Gays and Dead Lesbian Syndrome are truly nothing new. Heck, there should could a whole subgenre on just queer women shot in the back and it’d be longer than the list of sitting female U.S. Supreme Court justices. You can draw a straight line from Tara to Clexa to Villanelle and back again — making it an unbroken circle of Dead Queer Women as convenient plot devices.
This is not to say showrunners can’t tell the stories they want to tell. Artistic vision is not beholden to fandom. But you do owe us a good story. And this simply wasn’t that. Indeed, it feels like a misread of the entire show — like all four fucking seasons.
This was never a show about Eve destroying herself. This was always a show about Eve destroying the trappings of what she thought she wanted to tap into the raw pulsing nerve of her most urgent desires. Indeed, there is rebirth through destruction. But not the destruction of any one person or people (though, gosh, Villanelle sure seemed to have fun in her “Kill Bill”-esque rampage through The Twelve). Losing Villanelle, the thing she’s wanted the most all this time, would not be the “reset button” the showrunner envisions for Eve. And it definitely isn’t a reset for us, its viewers. It’s a let down.
Perhaps there are legions of middle-aged married women who are bored with their desk jobs and their perfectly nice mustachioed husbands for whom the ending of “Killing Eve” might be a revelation. But, honestly, I’m sure they were out there rooting for Eve and Villanelle to make it in the end, too. Like, if this show doesn’t realize that everyone, EVERYONE, who watches would swipe right on Villanelle even if her profile literally only said, “Homicidal psychopath assassin with great fashion sense who will definitely kill you” then this show doesn’t understand itself at all.
What made “Killing Eve” so great and so fun for 99.9% of its run was its unpredictability. But I honestly couldn’t even enjoy the happy moments (or even the at-long-last kiss) because the inevitability of their total destruction was all but assured - the only question was how. Before the finale, you never really knew where things were going, and the thrill of that served to us in such unmistakably stylish and seductive packaging made us all feel like Eve’s Season 1 finale monologue. Indeed, I think about this show all the time. Well, I thought about this show all the time. Now, I mostly think about how I can erase the last 2 minutes and 30 seconds from my memory forever. Sorry, baby. That ending wasn’t it.
Luckily, us queers have become adept at creating our own happy endings. We’re already a community that creates its own chosen families. So, don’t worry, we’ve already created our own better ending for Eve and Villanelle.
YALL DONT WORRY I FIXED IT #killingeve pic.twitter.com/BD39Ilweh6
— Sarah || fuck you laura neal (@ripvillanelle) April 10, 2022
3 comments:
I'd really like to know what happened before they started working on s4 because the whole season felt disjointed with s1-3, as if the writers have never worked on or even watched the show before.
There were some good moments in s4, and the final episode (except those awful last 2 minutes) was how I expected the tone of the season to go after the bridge scene in the s3 finale, E & V teaming up going after the 12.
I never expected a happy ending either, but this one was really bad
Also, that last scene on the bridge with the same music as the s3 finale, felt particularly cruel
They had two years and this is what they come up with?
I knew it was got going to be a fairytale ending but I expected them to go together, either both live or both die.
But I’ve seen this before so many times… I mean, Tara, Lexa, Xena, Silvia…
And they also murdered Fernanda and blinded Gunn. The only women that walked away ok from this finale were the straight ones.
Eve and villanelle deserved better
Thank you Dorothy, for your astute review. I really hope Laura Neal and the other writers read this. She was punching down in filming this ending, and it re-traumatized many of us. She's a talented enough writer to have been able to figure out a different ending. Her explanations, and the explanations of those who steadfastly claim this was not an instance of Bury your Gays feel like gaslighting. We are expressing how much this hurts and pointing out the physical scenes in the show that fulfill the Dead Lesbian Syndrome/ Bury your Gays trope, but are being told that we don't understand the "real" meaning. Any time you are writing a storyline from your "gut", that is a signal that you should really step back and analyze why it feels so right. Our subconscious is deeply informed by the societal structures we grow up in, and what feels right are often the storylines we've been told over and over.
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