Season 4 started on a particularly clunky note, with the detour involving the trained assassin Villanelle (Jodie Comer) and her time-killing brush with religion. While things improved a bit after that, the show never quite recovered.
There were some major deaths in the buildup to the finish, including Helene (Camille Cottin) and Konstantin (Kim Bodnia) — the latter in typically pointless and tragic fashion — but the idea that the two leads would be reunited and square off with the shadowy organization known as The Twelve still loomed.
Still, Villanelle’s bloody encounter (after greeting her victims with “Hello, losers”) played out as part of a murkily-shot musical number, offering little sense of what exactly was being done to whom.
Then, at the moment of triumph, an anonymous shot rang out, sending Eve and a wounded Villanelle into the water, where more random shots finished off the latter. (In hindsight, it’s a shame she endured healing from getting hit with an arrow in the back in an earlier episode just to be dispatched like that.)
As for Eve, she burst to the surface, but it was hard not to think, “Well now what?” We’ll never know (or at least, hopefully never), because the big block letters “THE END” rolled across the screen, just in case anyone was confused.
By the end, as Eve noted, the title character bore little resemblance to the reserved, office-bound MI6 worker that she was when the series began, alluding to her various exploits and marveling, “Unbelievably, I survived,” adding, “For what?”
Despite the strength of the cast, that last part was a question that seasons three and four didn’t satisfactorily answer. Like Eve, in fact, as the finale underscored, “Killing Eve” might have survived but came to bear scant resemblance to the defining qualities that distinguished the show when it began, too.
