Plot: After Eve and Villanelle’s exchange on the bridge, Eve is on a revenge mission; Villanelle finds a brand-new community in an attempt to prove she’s not a monster.
Review: For its first two seasons, Killing Eve was a pop culture behemoth. Thanks to the stewardship of Phoebe Waller-Bridge (Fleabag) and then Emerald Fennell (Promising Young Woman), Killing Eve was a perfect blend of black humor and violent thrills told through the lens of a bizarre romance between Eve Polastri (Sandra Oh) and Villanelle (Jodie Comer). Then, in the absence of those two creative writers, the series took a turn for the worse in the third season. Now, after a pandemic-induced hiatus, Killing Eve is back for its fourth and final season. With a limited run of episodes to wrap up the various storylines left open, the series starts out with three lackluster and uneven outings that don’t provide much hope for this series to end on a satisfying note.
Picking up an indeterminate amount of time after the ending of the third season, Killing Eve does not start out like you would expect a final season to begin. Both Eve and Villanelle find themselves in new phases of their lives. Without divulging any spoilers aside from what is shown in the trailers, Eve has started a new job and is trying to track down The Twelve to enact her revenge. Partnered with Yusuf (Robert Gilbert) with whom she has a sexual relationship, Eve has tried to put Villanelle behind her. At the same time, Villanelle continues to try and reform herself to prove she can change. Joining a religious community provides the former killer with a chance to make amends but knowing what kind of person she really is means this is easier said than done.
Killing Eve has always been the most fun when it focused on the cat and mouse between Eve and Villanelle and this season has taken that away. Walking away from each other at the end of the third season offered some closure for Eve while it made Villanelle even more desperate for the human connections she has always lacked. Jodie Comer and Sandra Oh’s chemistry has been a major part of this series being so successful and that give and take feels more forced this season than ever. As the series counts down the final episodes it has remaining, this season opens with very little momentum. In fact, so much time is spent with secondary characters and introducing new ones that it feels like the show is ending because it has to rather than because it wants to.
While I enjoy the wonderful performance of Fiona Shaw as Carolyn Martens as much as anyone, she feels very tangential this season compared to the previous three. Her scenes are great but they feel like filler compared to the rest of the storyline. The introduction of Anjana Vasan as Pam also offers an intriguing new dynamic into this narrative but, once again, her role feels too significant to roll into a story with limited episodes left to tell its story. I wonder how much of this season will be left open-ended but after watching the first three episodes, I have low confidence that the series will stick the landing.
Season four showrunner Laura Neal, who scripted several episodes of the third season), understands these characters individually and maintains the elements that intrigue us about them. Villanelle still wears some of the best costumes of any character on the small screen and both Comer and Oh continue to inhabit these characters intimately, but there is something missing. There is a lot of surface gloss here with the series relying on witty dialogue and some solid production values, but it still feels incredibly dull and listless compared to the propulsive early seasons. Directors Stella Corradi and Anu Menon do good work in these early episodes but it still suffers from a narrative structure that offers very little substance.
Killing Eve is a series I came to late but both of the first two seasons rank as some of the best television in recent memory and I hope you check them out if you have not already. The third season was disappointing and this final run really wastes one of the best setups of any series. As good as both Jodie Comer and Sandra Oh have been on this show, I am thankful that it served as a launch for them to both do great work on other projects. Fans of Killing Eve will enjoy seeing these two women verbally spar once again even if their shared screen time is again lacking Overall, I think most will be disappointed at how far from the first two seasons this series has gone and be thankful that they won’t be dragging it out much longer.
Killing Eve‘s fourth and final season premieres on February 27th on BBC America.
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