"Killing Eve" Season 4 and the Transforming Power of Love
SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for Killing Eve Season 4, Episode 8
Killing Eve season 4, long-awaited and breathlessly devoured, has aired its series finale, leaving its audience bitter and confused.
Why all the consternation? After all, no serious fan of the show could have realistically expected a happy ending. Characters who have lived as ruthlessly and violently as Villanelle (Jodi Comer) and Eve (Sandra Oh) could not truthfully live out their stories in utter blissful peace, paying no recompense for how they have lived.
Watchers were expecting violence. Tragedy even. But not the brutal betrayal of everything these two women stood for as we watched their stories unfold over the last 4 years.
Eve and Villanelle are not characters that any moral audience should root for, and yet what kept many of us watching in breathless anticipation was the hope that somehow these messy, amoral women would find a way to each other.
Eve’s journey has been perhaps the most complex; she was living an average life, trying to keep her inner wild animal in check, acting as if condemning Villanelle’s actions or keeping her geographically far away would be enough to keep that wild animal caged.
By episode 8 of Killing Eve season 4, we see Eve finally, finally giving in to what she’s known all along—she’s in love with a killer, and the killer is in love with her.
The most touching scene of the entire series takes place when Eve and Villanelle are walking back to a camper van that they stole from an unsuspecting couple they had spent the night with, zipping up their pants after urinating side-by-side behind a bush.
Villanelle quickly and tentatively kisses Eve on the cheek as they walk. Eve stops to grab Villanelle’s hand and slowly, as they come into each other’s arms, the kiss we have been waiting to see between them finally happens. It’s not influenced by violence, mind games, power plays, or betrayal. It is vulnerable, open, true, and full of the love that has not let them go from the moment they first learned about the other’s existence.
We begin to see the slow transformation in Villanelle, who spent the majority of Killing Eve season 3 seeking out her family of origin in an attempt to find some love there, go from a ruthless killer to an open-hearted human being capable of loving and being loved.
If Laura Neal and the other writers of Killing Eve season 4 felt that the only honest way for Villanelle to be redeemed was to die as brutally as she had lived, they were wrong.
Not only does it play directly into the hands of the tired and harmful bury-your-gays trope, but it completely misses the much more powerful story of justice—a villain transformed by the unbreakable healing power of love.
If they wanted a triumphant ending, they could have found no greater glory than Villanelle becoming the person she was always capable of being if she hadn’t been brutalized in her early life. A woman who found her way back to herself by having to walk the path of loving someone else.
There is no harder journey to redemption than learning how to love when you’ve never been loved yourself. Villanelle’s salvation was not to be found in a church, a baptism, or the murky waters of the Thames. It was there all along, pulsing between her being and Eve’s, waiting for them to finally lay down their weapons, their defenses, their pain, and their rage and open-heartedly run to each other.
There are many, many reasons why Killing Eve season 4 leaves us feeling wronged, but this, in my opinion, is the greatest of them. Eve and Villanelle were not unlovable. They were not beyond the scope of what love is able to redeem. They were not denied the great and beautiful mystery of love because of who they were or the choices they made. But the storytellers denied them what was rightfully theirs; the right to live their story out as fully flawed, openly loving human beings, finding their way to salvation, one lurching step at a time.
