KillingEve Perspectives

~ ViLLaNeLLe Is A PsyCoPatH ShE CaNnOt ChAnGe!! ~ 

I think my biggest sin was clinging on psychopathy as a psychology/psychiatry definition instead of it’s more fluid film language interpretation, because it misses the point. KE is media not the DSM 5. Villanelle is constructed as a character that feeds of off psychopath tropes but is not defined by them and can and does break it’s molds. And that is a good thing. 

Villanelle is not unfeeling, and thank god for that. Instead of Villanelle the psychopath it is much more fruitful to me to think of Villanelle the Id, or Villanelle the Ubermensch. Not inhumane, instead radically humane. I do love the idea that Villanelle essentially draws so much from “the psycopath”, because it functions as a shorthand to root behaviors and drives that are alienated from female characters, to make them natural. It actually goes both ways doesn’t it? Is she a psycopath because she is immoral and insatiable, or is perceived immorality and insatiability in women seen as a form of psycopathy?  Food for thought.

I would argue that lack of a moral compass does not equal being unfeeling, as amorality and emotion - empathy even - are not excluding concepts. On the other hand the idea that love implicates or gives birth to morality is a non sequitur. (Should I put a pin on that? I think I should put a pin on that).  But even so, Villanelle has a different subjective experience that I feel enriches the story tremendously and should not be removed. It’s our concepts that bend to fit her way and not the other way around, which I find challenging and interesting. So official romance between Eve and Villanelle, where they explore these growing feelings? You know what, sign me in. What would love mean to a character like her, that experiences the world like she does? What such love would withstand? What would it take? What would it give? What would it consume? What would it preserve? An invitation to explore unbridled love in it’s most radical form.

And here we go again, wrapping up.

Ultimately it is more interesting to me to see how Villanelle loves, and how Eve responds, feed off of and negotiate it in return with her own more adjusted love. In the end, is their love at the root that different? Is radical love, in itself a form of “psychopathy”? I’d watch it any day instead of how Villanelle would love after finding Jesus or whatever. I find an intense irony that for a character that yearns for acceptance so much, narrative acceptance is only granted when she conforms to our expectations of what her character should be. An articulation of my thoughts on Villanelle is better presented in this post.

The biblical story of Eve’s fall from grace is arguably the most pervasive patriarchal myth to shape our patriarchal society, but if we unwrap its millennia of projections of male anxieties, the myth holds a kernel of universal truth: The flesh is weak. We are dangerously inclined to act on desire over reason by force so strong it is symbolized by the Devil: it possesses the mind. These impulses are irrational, reckless, primal and compelling. While Freud constructed much of his theory on the fascination of unconscious drives, I believe no one has said it better than W.H. Auden: “We are lived by powers we pretend to understand”. Our lives and livelihood depend on striking a fine balance between restriction and satisfaction of impulse, and to those who have ever fell in passion with someone or something, passion can be one of the most disruptive experiences of a lifetime. Thus, Eve’s myth carries layers of meaning both as we understand our nature and also as to how we project these anxieties onto womanhood.

Eve Polastri is not just Eve, she is Eve, she is the proverbial woman. She is morbidly curious, tempted by desire, gives in, and destroys the world around her. But Killing Eve is no cautionary tale, Eve Polastri Is not committing a forbidden sin against a narrative moral code which commands an imposed narrative punishment. Thus, Eve Polastri embodies and transgresses the biblical myth: she is the woman exploring her own impulses in her own story and becoming authentic through it– which makes her a remarkable character in her own right. At the core, the character is also us, a regular person urging to become whole, that sees in the metaphorical abyss of Villanelle’s indulgence a reflection of what she yearns: liberation. There is a courage to Eve, and we watch her entranced, because, whether we want to admit or not, we all fantasize about playing with fire. However, there can be a tacit perverted satisfaction in this story: we want Eve to fall from grace but when she does, we want to punish her for it, thus sublimating and reprimanding our own impulse, and falling back in the old narratives about womanhood. 

In Season 1, Eve seemed to have been taken as a surrogate for the audience quite unproblematically, nevertheless when desire starts to show its ugly face in Season 2, part of the audience started to feel alienated from the character, and even antagonistic. Which is unfortunate, because her face off with Villanelle in the finale was arguably the most victorious, honest and cathartic moment of the character so far. Season 3 opens with a recluse Eve licking her wounds, trying to pull herself together any way she can, after all she suffered and all she learned. She changed and change is painful – in an abstract sense, violent as well. Her initial isolation was self-imposed by the character but as the season progresses Eve becomes more and more distant, which creates a parallel to how women’s suffering is perceived in real life.

Ironically, when Eve is shutting down from the world around her in the beginning of the season, she is more open to us than she will ever be in the remainder of the episodes. We are allowed to exist with the character through her painfully dull, mundane day-to-day, as the extent of her suffering manifests in the blunt messiness of her exterior life and her valiant effort to keep it together with the help of a budding alcohol and cigarette addiction. Eve is not a strong woman; she is a woman that claimed herself at a great cost. This cost was depicted with frustrating realism, just like in real life, once the thrill of the battle is over, it’s time to tend to the wounded, drag the corpses and count the dead. It’s inglorious. No wonder Eve literally and metaphorically hid, she burned the bridges with the world around her. How could she possibly explain what she went through and how could an outsider possibly understand? A question that mirrors the feeling of many a person, especially women, that entangled themselves in violent dynamics: Alienation and loneliness.

Initially, the character continues the apophatic self-definition, Eve says no a lot, symbolizing her efforts to reassert control over her life. From Villanelle, to Carolyn, to her job, Eve is trying to play by her rules and her truth, she knows what she wants not, but the interesting question posed at the end of Season 2 is “Now that Eve reclaimed herself, what will she do of what she has become?” – Sartre style. However, there is a major shift in Eve’s character after her interactions with Villanelle in episodes 3 and 4. The character’s arc becomes centered towards admitting her feelings for Villanelle as the source of conflict, however one could argue that the main source of conflict is the existence of these feelings itself. Therefore, merely admitting them shouldn’t solve the main conflict, on the contrary, due to their inherent contradictory nature it should exacerbate it. 

This sleight of hand not only impoverishes the character’s emotional landscape, motivations and general arc, but also echoes the verse: ”A woman must know how to suffer love”. Like countless women before, Eve’s story is subtly telling us that the misery comes from her rejection of a phagic “love” and the metaphorical self-annihilation intrinsic to the experience, instead of the authentic ambivalence and paradoxes of the character’s inner self. Eve’s conflict should be at its core about herself not about Villanelle – who serves as a symbolic element.  In the end, good women are expected to erase themselves and to become vessels of God and of others. Coincidentally, Eve’s character becomes oddly redeemed when she becomes a vessel for Villanelle’s need to belong.

Here is where the writers quite painfully abandon an once intriguing and compelling character. Eve doesn’t find nothing new to say about herself, no new path nor synthesis of her desires, and identity – which could and should have given Eve agency in renegotiating her dynamic with Villanelle, especially if it was to bring them closer. Eve ceases to be defined by her own inner conflict and becomes defined by her attraction to Villanelle alone. As Eve obsessively seeks Villanelle, who is in turn occupied with a story of her own, at no point the audience is asked to care about Eve’s suffering nor does the writers bother to interrogate the character about it, let alone let the character process it. Eve is deprived from exploring herself and facing her own pain, almost as if Eve was so devoid of individuality that the character itself is alienated from the obvious pain and conflict it should be experiencing. But nor Eve, nor any other character and, most importantly, nor the audience is asked to care. In the emblematic scene where Eve jumps into a dumpster to literally look for scrapes of Villanelle’s supposed affection as a way of reconnecting with her, no effort is made to reframe it or question the length at which the character lost itself, because no one cares. When in the finale, Eve, who is oblivious to Villanelle’s change of heart, is interrogated with a relevant question “Did I ruin your life? Do you think I am a monster?”, the character straightforwardly reassures the anti-hero at the expense of the rich internal conflict that should have been derived and fleshed out from these points, because no one cares.

Eve believes in Villanelle unconditionally, despite all conceivable lines being crossed, despite the destruction and conflict this relationship has brought her, because Eve is doing precisely what her character is supposed to be doing: erasing her individuality, enduring her pain in the name of this love, forgiving no matter what they do to her so that they can be redeemed through her. “A woman has to know how to suffer her love and be all forgiveness”. Thus, Eve as a character becomes a device in Villanelle’s story arc occupying the same restricted space female characters were always allowed to inhabit. Villanelle goes on a somewhat muddled character growth arc, filled with redemption elements which traditionally involves the presence of a source of acceptance and love, generally in the form of a love interest, that will be granted to the hero at the end of the journey. Eve’s function in the story is not as a compelling protagonist with universal struggles, but as both enabler and trophy in Villanelle’s story. The narrative finds itself trapped in the old tales ingrained in our collective unconscious, in a jarring contrast with the previous seasons’ transgression and uniqueness.

Paradoxically, this precise abandonment gives the season the richest opportunity for the audience to interrogate the place of women’s pain. Eve’s abandonment mirrors the invisibility of the suffering of countless women, who painfully sacrifice their livelihoods in the name of their loved ones, be it Nicos, or Villanelles, or family, or friends, or their communities. Who, day in and out, are responsible for caring and supporting others through their struggles while left stranded with their own conflicts. After all, when so much depends on their self-sacrifice their pain is unimportant, even an expected part of this glorified martyrdom. Are we keen on looking at these women who inhabit these confined roles and acknowledge without judgement the enormous burden they carry? Are we ready to empathize with them when they rebel, when they fail and break, and even more so when they acquiesce? Having a queer twist on this narrative is not enough to claim it transgressive, as this cultural recipe perpetuates itself also into homoromantic relationships, as women often see themselves trapped in this dynamic with their female partners as well. Women are no less oppressed by patriarchal ideas of womanhood if these ideas are perpetuated through their relationships with other women.

 Akin to Eve’s biblical story, the erasure of female pain is also layered, as we all crave unconditional love, and its redemption, so we can be at peace with ourselves – completely satisfied, accepted and safe – which is naturally symbolized by “The mother”. Therefore, it is easy to impose these fantasies in the ideal of womanhood, as easy as it is to relate to Villanelle and romanticize the role Eve plays in her development, her acceptance of Villanelle’s character being a powerful cathartic release for our own need and fantasies of belonging. 

However, when the season is consumed stripped from our expectations, there is a dissonance between the narrative and the other elements of storytelling which sends mixed signals, especially in the most developed storyline in the season: Villanelle’s character arc. In the midst of this confusion and inability to get a hold of the character, I tried to grasp the intent of the author instead of the material itself. Upon reading interviews with Suzanne Heathcote, Sally Woodward and Jodie Comer, many of my initial interpretations of her arc were challenged. They seemed to never seek to rectify Villanelle’s psychopathy or nature, but to explore her deep need to belong. There seemed to be an awareness towards the truth of the character, and the journeys they have been on so far. It appears that their idea is that her impulses are her true self and the tension arises from the inescapability of her own nature and its exploitation, which becomes the sole designator of her worth as a being. This is indeed much more interesting than what I initially interpreted. So, I want to revisit Villanelle’s character arc with new eyes... in more detail... and see if I can find something new.

Villanelle’s initial motivations set-up a “ Self-affirmation” arc, not a Redemption arc 

Initially, the show seems to set two main motivations for Villanelle: a search for autonomy and a search for belonging, which will prompt her desire to become a keeper and find her family. Objectively, her motivations set up a journey for authentic self-identity. 

The opening wedding sequence is a good way of introducing her search for autonomy. Six months after Rome, Villanelle is gold digging her way through life, still very psychopathic of her. This is the first time we see Villanelle exist without a parental figure and without the tight control of ‘The 12’, and it turns out she is doing just fine. Where her wedding represents her agency and autonomy, being dragged into ‘The 12’ by Dasha has her sitting in the back of the car like a moody toddler. Her relationship with ‘The 12’ is infantilizing, controlling and coercive. It does plant the seeds for her struggle by visual storytelling, which I dismissed for a silly comedic effect.

Villanelle seems more aware of the power plays behind her bargain to come back, contrasting with her previous aloofness. This time, she seems keen on cutting her own part of the deal which is to become a Keeper (which oddly never involves getting the names of ‘The 12’). Her request is so absurd, and their agreement to make her a keeper so obviously fake, that it shows how Villanelle is truly unaware of the magnitude of what she is dealing with and how little leverage she actually has. But her effort to carve some degree of freedom and agency within her world is an authentic motivation. Her overall disinterest for the job also helps to solidify the idea that she is dreading being controlled, and only agrees to perform the kills as part of her promotion process. Which should not be confused – although it easily is – with a lack of enjoyment in Killing. In fact, Villanelle thoroughly enjoys herself in the kills she performs before Episode 5, be it improving on a relic, stealing a baby, or scaring hiccups away. Villanelle isn’t opposed to killing, she is tired of being ordered to kill. As welcomed as this development is, in many moments her motivations could be mistaken by childlike Villanelle just being capricious.

Parallel to her self-affirmation comes a search for a sense of belonging. This is a deep foundational motivation for the character that had always been in the subtext of the show. There is a fascination towards family and normal life in Villanelle, that she tries to recreate with those she “loves”. Arguably not even the character can articulate this urge, so when Season 3 sets to explore it, it feels forced. Villanelle seems intrigued by the gratuitous affection the baby elicits in people, including those that don’t own it, leading her to kidnap the baby as an experiment, then literally toss it away. It did not elicit in her the gratuitous affection it elicits in everyone around her. She is a psychopath. When the baby is reunited with their father, she is once again puzzled at the happiness in the dad’s face. The baby belonged to him. Did she ever belong to someone? This question will lead her to seeking her own family, taking her to Russia. 

Being so far removed from the events of season 2 and considering that Konstantin and Villanelle’s scene was completely overshadowed by the subsequent events, I found it hard to add weight to this motivation. A large part of the audience is understandably eager to learn about Villanelle’s past, however there wasn’t enough development to justify why the character wanted to learn about her past. Instead, she enunciates her newfound fascination with babies, without elements or events to convincingly move the character in this direction.

Villanelle’s journey home: nuanced and conflicted story telling got lost in translation

I have broken down how I believe this episode not only retcons her background, but soft retcons Villanelle’s psychopathy and her entire character – and I still believe in practical terms it inevitably does - but it’s a shame, because the episode in itself doesn’t. It’s all about perception and expectation tainting interpretation. The writer’s original idea was to have the audience go on a journey with Villanelle to this disconnected corner of the world, as she is surprisingly charmed by the oddity of what she finds. It was the perfect escapism from her claustrophobic world of ‘The 12’. We wrestle with the nature x nurture question as Villanelle wrestles with it herself, we feel at home, we connect with the family and feel rejected and deceived as Villanelle does herself. This episode was written from Villanelle’s perspective alone, she is the voice telling the story, we are literally asked to see it from her eyes:

But there is a catch: Villanelle is an unreliable narrator. The writer did plant elements that challenge Villanelle’s narrative, mainly as glimpses of other characters perspectives: Bor’ka has a normal loving drawing of his mother on the fridge; Pyotr likes his mother alright and challenge’s Villanelle’s perception of their mother meanness, by stating Villanelle herself used to be mean to him, implying a connection between the two; the husband reveals that Tatiana still cries every night because of the whole thing. All of which becomes the core problem with this episode: Villanelle is an unreliable narrator but we don’t perceive her as such because of our emotional investment in the character. Who is to say Villanelle’s tendencies and behaviour didn’t genuinely scare and tear the family apart and without knowing what to do after her husband died, Tatianna abandoned Oksana in the orphanage, despite genuinely suffering from the decision? Tatianna is a very flawed mother and Oksana is a very troubled child, both these realities are valid and interconnected, in the most nuanced, emotionally challenging and complex episode of the entire show. 

Underneath Villanelle’s standpoint, Suzanne Heathcote managed to hide a sensible and honest perception of that family’s complicated past: the heartbreaking reality is that deep down, despite all the layers of pain, trouble, blame, shame and guilt, both characters wished it was different and they could somehow connect, but the truth is that they were, and still are, unable to. Thus, both characters were speaking their truths, however we are not afforded a chance to truly see her mother’s perspective because we are stuck in Villanelle’s world and Villanelle has empathy for no one (Except for her little brother but I don’t want to beat on this dead horse). Despite her manipulative and violent behavior towards her family, from where Villanelle stands - and within her own perspective rightfully so - her mother was simply neglectful, abusive, and worse: saw her as something alien. Thus, having her mother admit her own “darkness” was so important: This darkness I carry belongs to you, therefore I belong to you. Ingenious. Upon revisiting this episode, I truly appreciate it as a showcase of the potential of Suzanne Heathcote’s writting, with beautifully crafted storytelling that seems straightforward at the surface but invites us to dive deeper. Unfortunately, this gem is lost in translation.

The episode was all about how Villanelle made sense of herself and her past, not about what really happened, as the writers claimed they didn’t want to excuse Villanelle’s actions nor erase her psychopathy. It wasn’t about the authoritative writers explaining Villanelle’s past to the audience and deliberately painting Villanelle as a child tortured into becoming a monster because of her upbringing… the problem is that it feels like it was. And when later you add Dasha’s abuse to the mix, the retcon of her psychopathy is irresistible to the audience, but the creators are not naïve and especially as the word “psychopath” seem to have vanished from their vocabulary, when previously it was the selling point of the show; something doesn’t add up. Killing her mother marks a turning point in Villanelle’s character arc, and here things start to get complicated...

Killing her mother sets Villanelle in an identity crisis but what is it exactly?

When Villanelle gets rejected, she kills her mother and sets the house on fire mirroring the orphanage arson. In the train scene, we see Villanelle wearing her mother’s clothes and listening to crocodile rock while crying, smiling, jamming, reminiscing. Despite her efforts to wrap herself in the elements that symbolize the moments she felt like she belonged with that family, she is still alone and there is a lot of pain – fair, psychopaths are not painless. But what that scene represents for Villanelle is an enigma, and I believe not Jodie Comer, nor Suzanne Heathcote, nor anyone, actually knows what this scene is really supposed to mean emotionally for Villanelle.

I want to contrast this scene with another scene in a movie where we watch an actress cycling through many emotions in a long shot as she listens to music: the final 2:30 minute long take in Portrait of a Lady on fire. The scenes parallel each other, and kudos to the unafraid acting of Jodie Comer and Adele Haenel. However, there is a key difference between the two: Celinne Sciamma (screenwriter and director) knew exactly what she was looking for and walked the lead actress Adele Haenel through all the emotions she would be evoking, their succession order and meaning. All the emotions conjured in the scene were carefully crafted in the audience throughout the entire movie, generating a deep connection and understanding of the characters, the story and its symbols, that culminates in an apotheotic cathartic release. That scene was not just a beautiful, emotionally loaded scene: it had intent, it had a clear meaning. And from there on is where Villanelle’s emotional scenes start to break apart.

The display of a person suffering through emotional pain will obviously evoke feelings of compassion, care and empathy in the audience, but this level of immediate reactive connection does not equal an understanding of characters’ emotional reality. It’s important that audiences not only know that the character is in pain but what that pain means, even more so when you are exploring the boundaries of emotion in a character that has a fundamentally different subjective experience than the audience. Given the lack of build up and more extensive exploration of the mother and daughter relationship, it’s not only harder to add the appropriate emotional weight as it is to understand it’s ramifications. Thus, despite lots of tears, Villanelle remains an emotional black box after coming back from Russia. 

On the other hand, there is this interesting motif with Villanelle that death brings freedom: once a person is dead, they cease to have a hold on her, allowing her to reinvent herself. For example, when Eve hurt her in the season 2 finale, she kills her to break free from her hold. In her own words: “I’m so much better now my ex is dead”. This motif is again brought up in her conversation with Bertha Kruger in episode 04. As Villanelle tries to reinvent herself after killing her mother and whatever that meant, she learns she was being tricked by ‘The 12’ and that her promotion was a farce, bringing her full circle. She went through these journeys and still didn’t break free: she was still controlled and still rejected, thus her only solution was escape literally and metaphorically. 

Her mother rejected her because of her violence, which is precisely the only worth ‘The 12’ see in her. Both of her Nemesis reduce her to the same image: she is a violent kid that kills. Thus, her shifting relationship with killing becomes more interesting when it is framed as a desire for self-affirmation and not as a rectification of her nature as the result of a new found moral compass and compassion, which places Villanelle in the same territory as traditional female assassin characters before her. She is reclaiming her identity, from her past and from her subjugators, hence the motivation to not kill could be seen as a deliberate act of rebellion. However, it is unclear how concrete this motivation is, given that she does indeed keep murdering, and how it interplays with the emotional changes we are shown the character is going through, altogether making her distancing from killing narratively elusive.

Character development couldn’t commit to a narrative, going from nuanced to disorienting

Part of the charm in Killing Eve is what is left unsaid and implied, but nevertheless registers, connects. This relies on the smart use of character expositions and film language to efficiently get the audience on board with the character’s world organically. All previous season’s made good use of monologues and dialogue to flesh out the world and specially characters. In Season 1, Villanelle was explored and developed through excellent dialogues, and in Season 2, when exploring her intimate inner reality, the writers opted to use the AA meetings for a direct exposition via a monologue that tied together previous visual and narrative set up elements. 

This type of efficient character exploration doesn’t lend itself well to the nuanced layered exploration the writers set out to do in season 3. And still, they stubbornly committed to it, withholding characters from fleshing out information through dialogue, while overplaying ‘show don’t tell’ trying to convey character’s inner realities with fragmented elements scattered over a disjointed plot, thus relying heavily on the actors to create a semblance of coherence out of the cacophony. I truly believe this choice was extremely detrimental to the season, since it created unnecessary challenges for the main goal which was character exploration. The result is an unsettling gap between the writers’ vision of the characters and their arcs, and what we, the audience, experience. 

I want to take a moment to explore examples of storytelling choices that I found confusing in developing Villanelle past episode 05, by taking a look on her 3 murders after she comes back from Russia.

In the Romania kill, we see Villanelle sitting on the bed halfhearted, downgraded into taking this job after her promotion debacle. The title card links us back to the scene in the beginning of the episode when she realizes she was conned. This is bullshit, this job is bullshit, and yet she has to do it. All elements are underlying the conflict in her search for autonomy, but then the song in the background evokes sentimentalism, underlying Villanelle’s growing feelings, subtly implying she feels bad about the act of killing. The scene composition sends mixed signals. Then it cuts to Villanelle ready for the kill with the upbeat recap intro music playing (????), she can’t focus, gets stabbed and cut to an angry tear-eyed Villanelle stitching up her own wound in the bathroom floor, fleshing out how she felt used and that she wants out. Then for a moment, the scene gets more intimate and she says - or even confesses? - she doesn’t want to do it anymore. We look down to a defeated and vulnerable Villanelle underlying the characters impotency or is it a moral struggle? The entire sequence purposely avoids committing to whether she failed because she didn’t want kill, or because she couldn’t kill. These two conflicts have completely different implications in interpreting and understanding the character development, but we remain in the limbo, confused as to what it could be.

To make matters worse, both these motivations: quitting ‘The 12’ and stopping killing, will be flipped when Villanelle pro-actively asks for a job and decidedly kills Dasha (who survived out of plot contrivances luck ). The scene with Helene is also interesting. When Villanelle meets Helene there is a conflict around identity and belonging. A particularly childlike Villanelle is again falling into tears as Helene breaks into her personal space with an embrace. Villanelle gives in to the embrace then pulls away at the mention of the word monster. That is not the identity Villanelle wants, nevertheless it feels good to be accepted. Then Villanelle asks an exasperated Helene for another job, not before being reminded she is a child, again powerless.  

“Look what you made me do” playing in the background.The song alludes to the power domination she is under and her motivation to break free, but the entire scene alludes to her conflict over her self-perception and belonging with Helene as a mother figure. I’m nor sure I follow what the character wants, I’m hanging on a spiderweb on the wall, Villanelle is crying, and can we please stop torturing this character into feelings for five minutes? Who is this reformed character? Jokes aside, there is one message that emerges, which is Villanelle doesn’t want to be a “monster” (violent killer, or more subtly violent in general) but she is forced to do it. This scene does succeed in softening Villanelle by emphasizing this new narrative leap following her seeming new found conscience: that Villanelle was made into a violent woman, but she is not naturally one. Her brutality is not transgressively hers anymore, it is a burden imposed onto her, which again places Villanelle’s character back into the comfort of the place designated to violent female characters: sad broken woman went murderous. Which stands in sharp contrast with Villanelle characterization so far, and what made her character iconic in it’s own right. The only way to make this narrative work is assuming killing her mother erased her psychopathy and gave her the whole bag of feelings and empathy. But if episode 05 fails to sell that, then the following episodes feels like tumbling down a rocky narrative slope. But the seed still lingers on my mind after reading paratext from the creators and cast: if you’re not trying to retcon Villanelle, then what does this all mean?

Rhian’s murder is a pivotal moment in Villanelle’s arc that fell into obscurity by jarring storytelling. Here the narrative seems to finally address the elephant in the room: when push comes to shove, can she control her violent impulses, which, no matter if inherited or cultivated, became a core part of herself? The ballroom tea dance effectively distances Villanelle from killing, but Villanelle and Rhian’s exchange show things aren’t so simple. More overtly so, Rhian and Villanelle subway brawl is all about giving Villanelle a chance to fully articulate the conflict around her subjugation to ‘The 12’ and her self-agency. Villanelle beats up Rhian, which could symbolically represent her refusal to be an obeying “sheep”; but, despite trying to get a grip of herself, her nature takes over and she kills, which could represent the uncontrollability of her impulse.  Thus, the interaction between these two scenes, ballroom dance and Rhian’s kill create a conflict surrounding Villanelle’s nature, self-control and capability to change that goes beyond the central conflict of each scene alone. Interesting, better explore it late than never, right?

The next scene seems to give us the resolution of this conflict, as Villanelle exits the subway, marching forwards, defiantly looking at us while we hear “Nothing matters if you bury it deep” in the background. It sends a message that Villanelle ultimately embraced her nature, and perhaps herself, and by doing so symbolically broke free from the oppression, emerging victorious. One could say she found her mojo back by killing on her terms. However, this never has any effects on the character, Villanelle is still as conflicted about her self-identity and still expresses her desire stop killing when we meet her again in the final scene as if her march after killing Rhian never happened. so what was the writers trying to say with the Ryan’s kill sequence when, despite disconnecting and contradicting the previous and following scenes with Eve, it seems to have no effect on Villanelle herself? What narrative are the writers committing to?

Villanelle’s character arc: the faithful translation of a uncommitted vision

Villanelle’s character arc, not that it is her privilege, gets muddled by deliberate ambiguity, character isolation, confusing motivations, and overall disconnected narrative as the writers refuse to commit to a vision. Thus, set-ups, pay-offs, conflicts and cause-effect are muddled, devoiding the character development of tangible meaning or aim – nuanced or otherwise. Despite it all sort of working moment-to-moment, it’s hard to keep up with what is being established overall, the ever shifting and clashing elements making it impossible to crack these characters and their journeys. In threading the fine line between the said and the unsaid, Season 3 had its characters bottling up so much that we are alienated from them. Simply saying “something changed inside her, and she is facing lots of things” doesn’t mean anything. Having the character state that she doesn’t want to kill (be it in general or for ‘The 12′) only to have have your character still actively killing both for ‘The 12′ and for personal reasons and ignoring the conflict it creates, shows the character’s motivations don’t mean anything. Villanelle was in search for an authentic self-identity but in the end who is she? What was this journey all about? Honestly, fixing Villanelle to allow a romance no one really knows. 

So my overall impression is that Villanelle’s character wasn’t lost in translation because there wasn’t any coherent vision behind it, but a succession of floating undecided moods and motivations tied together by powerful performances that leaves you feeling like Villanelle was redeemed. Thus, the audience  - and arguably the cast and creators - are left relentlessly rationalizing Villanelle so the character doesn’t fall apart. Some see Villanelle truly in love, some see her as obsessing, some see her as emotionless, some see her as a pastiche, some see her as blossoming into her true self, some see her as two different characters (Oksana/Villanelle), some just think she cries a lot, some think she is remorseful, some think she isn’t, some believe she is a psychopath, some think she matured, some think she was never a psychopath and some think she is outright cured. No one fully grasped what is happening with Villanelle, not because her character is complex beyond comprehension but because her character remained conveniently inaccessible. Ultimately, Villanelle’s character growth is a mystery the show teased at but did not commit to crack. 

But through art we can glimpse at what this liberation would feel like. Some sort of existential voyeurism. Aristotle would call it catharsis, but what does he know? This is how some of the most remarkable characters were born, they mesmerize us by being their id – unapologetically, terrifyingly, charmingly – like the Devil himself. Characters like Hannibal Lecter, The Joker, Alex DeLarge; they are larger than life, unbind, amoral and extremely bright (and all male). Like Hannibal brilliantly put it in Silence of the Lambs: “Nothing happened to me, officer Starling, I happened” or like the perverted childlike Alex explain in A Clockwork Orange: “What I do I do because I like to do”. As simple as that. Pure satisfaction of impulse because they feel like it. When we, uneased by what they represent, want explanations or justifications, The Joker toys with us, always giving us a different version of his tragic background, as if he knew we want to give him an excuse and, in good joker fashion, he makes a huge joke out of it. They take it very seriously to explain to us what went wrong with them, because it doesn’t really matter.

While the id makes us organic, whole creatures, many attributes of it have been culturally dissociated from womanhood. The violent, self-preserving and egoistic impulses were replaced with nurturing, self-sacrifice and compassion – not surprisingly the only impulse afforded to women is motherhood (or sexual desire for the satisfaction of another). Therefore, women cannot fully materialize their humanity. These raging impulses feel alien to womanhood, something imposed on to them by circumstance so severe that it warps the nature of the female itself. Aggressive women are sad and broken, or vengeful, or mad, or sexualized – these are the portrayals we have been conditioned to expect from fiction. When compared to their male counterparts, even mild violence in a female character almost immediately requires an explanation: how someone betrayed them, or abused them, or they were conditioned into it. Rage and aggression are never theirs to own, it is always extrinsically sourced.

On a superficial level, the character of Villanelle doesn’t seem so unique. Immediately one could think of Nikita in La femme Nikita, who was a drug junkie teen, rescued and transformed into a cold-blooded femme-fatale assassin by the shadowy government group “The Centre” after they faked her death to break her from prison (Uncannily similar?). Or the movie Anna by the same writer, where a Russian girl accepts a KGB offer to be trained into an assassin in order to escape her abusive homelife. Or Marvel’s black widow who is also a Russian spy, apparently brainwashed by USSR to become an assassin. Other female assassins include The bride in Kill Bill who set off into a revenge killing spree after being brutally assaulted and left for dead, and other movies I vaguely remember about abused women becoming assassins to seek revenge, or shallow sexy female assassins with no purpose for existing other than being the sexy female assassin. However, all these characters were made into assassins by external factors. Villanelle is set apart from the typical femme-fatale assassin trope by owning her own joy of killing, by the rejection of the broken female narrative and the rejection of the objectifying male gaze. In order to unmistakably ground these traits alienated from women – violence, disregard, cruelty, indifference, sadism, risk-taking – in her nature, the character was written as a primary psychopath. Being an assassin fits her natural talents, not the other way around    

Villanelle could occupy a very special place among a roster of remarkable fictional characters like the ones mentioned earlier. She is the female embodiment of absolute, remorseless indulgence and rage, representing the unashamed satisfaction of women’s impulses, for her own enjoyment alone, with style and wit – A truly magnetic character and fresh perspective. In psychopathic Villanelle, women are allowed to reclaim these violent impulses, which is oddly empowering and humanizing. Give us that. Brilliantly, the cathartic element is mirrored by Eve herself. Eve too sees her unfulfilled and alienated impulses incarnated in Villanelle, which in turn sparks Eve’s exploration of her own identity. Ultimately Villanelle’s seduction to embrace impulse despite its danger is at the core of their electric attraction and conflict.

Thus, by retconning Villanelle in Season 3, the character no longer represents the provoking embodiment of female drive, managing to become an elevated female assassin trope, at best. The challenging take on womanhood, instead plays into all of the expectations. Villanelle is no longer a female true to her nature that gets a kick from being an assassin; but a troubled girl, tortured into becoming a killing machine by a past of abuse. A broken woman who rejects the violence instilled into her once she finds healing. Interestingly, it is not that she merely chooses not to kill but she is unable to carry on the act, signifying the deeper alienation of the violent impulse from her own self – the same impulse that once made her so iconic. This lack of impetus to kill is but a symptom of the decreased character’s libido in general: fewer shopping sprees, less savory eating, less unpretentious playfulness, less color, less eroticism, less aggression, less danger. Unfortunately, it also means the weakening of her dynamic with Eve. Villanelle is being tamed, and its well… not her best take.

We, the audience, perceive this lack of vitality oozing into the entire show, but once you shift what Villanelle represents this is inevitable. Villanelle becomes mundane, and it brings the nostalgia of the force of nature she once was. It leaves a similar taste as the brutal transformation of Alex from despicable nihilistic hedonist into a model citizen in A clockwork orange: a conflicted perverted sadness at the loss of Alex’s authenticity despite him turning into a “better” human being – ingeniously, his redemption was to gain his despicable impulses back. 

The initial character design of Villanelle was something unique and authentic. However, In the process of redeeming her, she might become a new iteration of a trope explored several times that simply reflect the current space of female characters and lack conceptual originality. Yet, there is still room for the recuperation of Villanelle’s transgressive power: a subversive redemption. By incorporating the impulsive indulgence and violence back into the character, Villanelle’s arc can be taken somewhere new, complex and truly special. A remarkable character we can’t get enough of – like the Devil herself.

Villanelle is not a psychopath anymore, I guess

Villanelle was written explicitly as a primary psychopath meaning she was mainly born this way®. Which is different from a Secondary psychopath, whose emotional developmental arrest is caused by disturbingly severe neglect and abuse in early infancy. The impairments in their brains and psychological development prevents them from thinking and, most importantly, feeling like a regular person do. They have a different subjective experience. Psychopathy is incurable in adults, which sets limitations to character development.

Villanelle can’t empathize, perceives people as objects and is very utilitarian. She doesn’t know how to show people she likes them, and her idea of love is possession. Endearing as she is, this is the character the writers wrote. And this is the character portrayed to us in the show. Villanelle is unapologetically a psychopath. She is remorseless, amoral, derives pleasure from killing, all the better to get paid for it. She is basically a self-indulgent goddess. This is enunciated repeatedly in Season 1. Of course, we are not just told, we are shown. Her face glimmers in every kill with enjoyment and cruelty. She is able to conjure any emotion to manipulate – depicted more terrifyingly with Nadia. She emulates emotions from others to connect with people like depicted in the opening scene. My favorite chilling moment is when she gives the “what it is like to die” monologue to Frank, just to terrify him before killing him. Or this face:

Season 2 dives deeper into her psyche where she tells us how she feels, or better yet, doesn’t. We establish she feels this overbearing boredom and seeks to feel anything, so she collects things (or people, no difference) that make her feel something and these things she cherishes by possessing them. The poverty of emotion is reiterated. Again, we are shown, not only told, time and again. The writers are quite clearly asking us to just accept Villanelle for what she is: a psychopath. Like Jodie Comer said herself during that season: “I think some people are bad and that’s what they are, and I don’t think she should be redeemed.” It felt impossible to make it more established within the narrative and the world building. She is, like all adult psychopaths, incurable. These are the character’s limitations, in a purely storytelling sense.

Then, Season 3 happened. In season 3 Villanelle’s character’s development is irreconcilable with the previous seasons. Much of the character’s limitations were simply erased to give her room to “grow”, starting early with one of my favorite scenes of the entire season:

It was marvelously shot and so symbolic. This time around she is gifting Eve something intimate and safe: a teddy bear. Then we have Villanelle by herself and vulnerable, stripping the layers of her feelings towards Eve, the mask of anger cracking as she tries to convince herself she wanted Eve dead, to finally giving in to longing. Her own words are repeated back at her in a loop in a little booth. It was an admission. The booth, the privacy, the lighting, the acting: It was a confession. More than that: it was a love confession. As if falling in love was something she could now do? I don’t want to entertain the actual nature of her feeling, but this is a level of emotional complexity she is just prohibited of displaying by the character’s limitations. And yet, it happened. And I will argue, all the elements of this scene deliberately lead the audience to believe these were romantic feelings.

But this is foreshadowing, and the major shift in perspective happens in her bottle episode. In this episode we see Villanelle display genuine empathy and care for her brothers, not only by sparing them but by giving them more than enough money to go see Elton John. A bonna fide display of correctly conveyed affection and consideration. Which, again, is prohibited by the characters limitations. Then the episode builds the narrative that her “psychopathy” was the result of her abusive upbringing, especially in the confrontation with her mother, when we are clearly asked to side with Villanelle.

Here is where the show subtly retcons Villanelle’s character. It cleverly never denies she is a psychopath. It retcons her ability to emotionally grow, by shifting the emphasis to childhood trauma. Nevertheless, for Villanelle as a character, the emotional growth is still prohibited – despite of trauma. The sleight of hand is passable because audiences (actually, any empathic human being) find it incredibly hard to grasp that trauma cannot be overcome. That’s why it feels plausible she has a very complex, deeply transforming emotional response to killing her mother, despite still being a psychopath. Because that is a response that feels plausible to us, the audience, despite being inconsistent with what is plausible for the character’s the inner experience of reality.

This shift not only changes all the interpretation of her character that was previously established but also changes all future interactions. Here is where we see Villanelle getting conflicted about killing, not in a utilitarian sense of it being impractical or boring, but in an emotional struggle. She starts to worry about how others perceive her, and specially that she is perceived only as a “monster”, pointing to a development of a moral compass, deeper self-awareness, self-evaluation and ability to feel remorse. This is all not only incredibly far-fetched: it was prohibited. This is a clear break in continuity from the character of previous seasons. However, after S3E05 it feels plausible.

Villanelle is a carefully crafted monster

We are, then, asked to believe that Villanelle was made into a ruthless killer, which logically follow can be unmade. Hence, her past needs to be explored so it can also be somewhat resolved, symbolizing the undoing of her atrocious (but delightfull?) persona “Villanelle” (the distinction between Oksana and Villanelle was useless before and should still be. But now it feels like it makes sense). Initially, it was established that her mother died, and she had an abusive drunk father who abandoned her in an orphanage. While I believe there was potential in creating a convincing traumatic abusive background from the established narrative, it may have seemed too unsettling to have a man mistreat an infant, which might explain the writers choice for such through retcon. Transferring the source of the neglect to the mother, might heighten the stakes, since daughters are expected to develop a strong bond and mirror their mothers. Thus, adding depth to their face-off and making her murder more symbolic. Addicionally, a full house – with her mother, stepfather and brothers –would allow Villanelle to flesh out her relationship to family and explore the conflict more thoroughly before confrontation. Despite the symbolic tension, in the end we have no definitive answer to the nature x nurture question, nor to what happened in Villanelle’s infancy, except that the metaphorical darkness may have been passed on from her mother.

Villanelle’s joy in cruelty is the most alienating aspect of her character – also the most gripping – and thus, in order for her arc to be more digestible and relatable, it also needs explicit retconning, which is mostly explored through her relationship with killing. Therefore, her cruelty is also displaced to her abusive upbringing. Most specifically, displaced to another character: Dasha. She is the source of the cruelty transmitted into Villanelle through severe trauma during her teenagerhood, ingeniously avoiding the gravity of discussing infant abuse (Dasha brings a downpour of plot inconsistencies). This is unmistakably conveyed in this scene:

Villanelle was something soft and whole that got broken and reshaped into steel, into a stone cold killer, by external forces. Thus, Dasha is an estranged mother figure from the past who tortured Villanelle into a killer, mirroring the dynamic between Villanelle and her mother. Since there is no clear narrative surrounding her early infancy, and her mother needed to be killed to spark the transformation, Dasha becomes the surrogate through which the conflict of Villanelle’s transformation can be explored. The story doubles its efforts to get the audiences to not only believe Villanelle can change, but also that she deserves to change. And here is where we enter dangerous territory.

 Killing Eve is not a spy-drama anymore, it is a rescue romance

I stand with the writers, Killing Eve was not a romance. Not until Season 3. The topic of how audiences, especially queer fans, perceive the show as a romance is worth a whole essay on its own. However, in Season 3, audiences are treated with a romantic atmosphere (remember the teddy bear scene?). Everything is toned down; the pace is slower and the investigation is put to the side. The cat-and-cat game is replaced with this reinforced sense of destiny, of fate, where characters seamlessly come together, as if all their actions were just leading them up to that moment. Their approach carries no sense of danger, their obsession is replaced with anticipation. Characters stop thinking about each other neurotically, that scrumptious voyeurism is gone. Character’s don’t need to be reminded of each other. There is no need for it anymore, it has been written for them. They will meet each other, no need to pursue.

Gone is also Eve’s curiosity and intrigue about Villanelle, along most of her character’s motivations, with one simple retcon: Eve wants to rescue Villanelle.

To which Eve replies: I don’t think so. Meaning “I believe there is more to Villanelle than killing and I will cling to that” (Why, we don’t know. But that’s for another time)

Previously, despite the irresistible attraction Eve felt for Villanelle, the story never portrayed Eve as trying to redeem her. It was precisely the fact that they are polar opposites that brings them together, each trying to quench a deep hunger through the other, in all the wrong ways. Eve pursues in Villanelle much of her unfulfilled impulses and is challenged to embody them herself. Eve’s never been attracted to what Villanelle might have of redeemable, she was drawn to what Villanelle had of profanely feral. On the other hand, Villanelle longs for the safety and intimacy she sees in Eve but has no way of even comprehending what it means.

This honesty to the character’s true desires and realities is what has allowed the show to explore an enticingly destructive dynamic while avoiding romanticizing it, which would downgrade the show to a disservice. However, ultimately, there is a writer trying to sell a story. And in this case, they are setting up a redemption arc within a romance, despite character desires and realities not aligning with that. But in season 3, Villanelle’s psychopathy got retconned to make her crush on Eve without it being too problematic and Eve’s past season character development got simply blissfully ignored so her crush on Villanelle could flourish without it being too problematic, and in the end, their attraction got stripped away from all it’s complexity and danger so they could bring characters together without it being too problematic. These characters got rewritten to give us the tease of a romance we have seen iterated one million times elsewhere.

Let’s collectively acknowledge that the whole Data selling plot made absolutely no sense. Carolyn say the operation was strictly Moscow rules then they proceed to break cover and text each other all the time and Aaron would have figured the whole thing out in 5 minutes if he had indeed tracked Billie down (Speaking of surveillance, shout out to the odd camera angles that felt like we were spying on them. Nice touch) But we needed an excuse for Villanelle to meet another psychopath and for Eve and Villanelle to come closer. And for Jodie Comer to give PSA monologue on what is like to be a psychopath.

Actually, we spent this season really invested in hammering down what it means to be a psychopath to the audience, trying to make us understand what Villanelle is and how she functions. They even went as far as giving the audience a power point presentation. Eve is an object to her. A thing that gave her feelings. A thing for her to collect and own and use as she wanted, even though in her head she might genuinely call it love. And to be discarded when they weren’t complacent or needed. The show bluntly tells us “Stop trying to understand her. It’s like trying to understand a wasp.”, take her at face value. The writers seemed to be begging us not to romanticize her, and in good reverse psychology we did, then got upset when things turned out to be exactly the way we were told they would.

However, I loved the honesty of the glimpse into Villanelle’s interior life during the AA meeting. I feel like Jodie Comer might as well have gotten the Emmy because of that monologue. She was not angry, or sad, or hurt, but bored. Desperate to feel anything, but does she even know how? It must be an agonizing existence. Truth and lie were difficult concepts for her, she really can’t grasp the relevance of the distinction. It was a gentle and tender treatment of the character. The show just wanted us to know. It did not ask us to do anything about it. I really appreciated this moment.

Meanwhile Eve’s identity continues to shatter. More and more Eve questions: “why am I who you say I am?” Why am I Eve? Why am I Nico’s wife? Why am I kind? Why am I obsessed with a psychopath? Why am I like a psychopath? Is she really what others are saying she is? When they are all silent, who is she? Eve is starting to reclaim her own sense of identity and incorporate this newfound powerful aggression. When she goes to Gemma’s house, she is deliberately violent and dangerous. I think to say she is emulating Villanelle is a disservice. She was always entranced by violence, after Villanelle’s influence she is now embodying it. But her violence is hers to own. Give women that. There is a play with her hair and mirrors, as she struggles to tie it up or let it down and all it symbolizes. Is Eve submitting to the dark side of the force? (could star wars be any more subtle and sophisticated in its description of good and evil?) Eve is integrating her violence in her identity. Which is in itself a violent process. Painful. Exhilarating. All change is violent.

Their obsession was definitely played out more sexually than we will ever get to see again, I suppose. No wonder Eve gets very horny, in deconstructing herself Eve finds a rush of Vitality. And I’m all for the sexual release and all it symbolizes for the characters. But the show reminds us rather unceremoniously that, despite all the fun we are having,  Eve is transiently a psychological self-destructive mess, spiraling down; Villanelle is a murdering psychopath and things pan out exactly the only way they possibly could: destruction.

In the finale, the writers were the most radical, adhering uncompromisingly to the characters truths. Thus, they stubbornly followed through the only logical conclusion to the episode. A painfully honest exposition of the wretchedness of their dynamic. The confrontation of it was inevitable. The only way for Eve to be with Villanalle is to give herself up, to become a thing, that Villanelle would take care and own. Eve was this whole time in the opposite direction, finding her own sense of identity, embracing her own violence and danger, which brilliantly is the only thing that saves her from self-annihilation, represented by Villanelle. At this point nothing can justify Eve running off with Villanelle except a lobotomy. Nothing can justify Villanelle not killing Eve except I don’t know… Abducting Villanelle and replacing her with empathic, socially adjusted Oksana bot.

The show almost laughs at the audience: “Are you upset? What did you seriously think was going to happen?”. Sometimes, the most subversive thing to do, is do nothing. And here to the problem of subverting expectations. In our post GoT world subverting expectations became a dogma. Audiences want to be surprised, taken aback, instead of investing in a coherent story. We have become lazy with set up and pay off. The pay-off of the plot-twist is the plot-twist itself, regardless of set-up and implications. Subverting expectations became a drug we will take to tolerate inconsistencies. So here I commend the writers for betraying the audience instead of betraying the characters. This was not a love story. No matter how much the audience wanted to believe it was. She wanted to kill you, she wasn’t buying you cake. 

I could go on forever relishing in how the juxtaposition of the colors on the title and the droplet of fluid – perhaps blood, perhaps something else – slowly flowing down is a seductive warning. See, this is elegant tone setting. The thrilling flourishing of this messy mix of lust, curiosity, hunger, obsession, seeking, which mirrors perfectly the procedural aspect of the show. These two women are confronting each other literally and conceptually. Where Villanelle represents perverted and absolute freedom, Eve represents constraint and order, and both women are unlikely linked by a fascination with violence and death. They were in control of their own worlds, they were comfortable. But do we really want to be comfortable? Villanelle says comfortable is what you make people with terminal illnesses (in a Season 3 glimpse of clarity). Danger colors life. And surrendering to desire is extremely dangerous, deeply erotic, and possibly destructive. The sexual tension quite literally writes itself. It shows female libido, female potency, and it is theirs to own.