Killing Eve Series Four

The Eve Of War

Killing Eve
Series Four
USA/UK BBC iPlayer
Air Date
28th February - 11 April 2022

So Series Four is the final series for our two constant heroines of Killing Eve, namely Sandra Oh as government spy gone slightly rogue Eve and Jodie Comer as psychotic assassin Villanelle. Now, I have to say I wasn’t expecting much from a fourth series since, as the years have gone by, the content has gotten a bit ‘the same old same old’, to say the least. Well this one had two surprises in store for me, which I’ll get to in a minute. Rejoining Eve and Villanelle are series regulars Fiona Shaw as big boss (now also gone rogue and treacherous) Carolyn and Kim Bodnia as Konstantin. We also have newcomer character Pam, a psychotic assassin in training and taken under Konstantin’s wing, so to speak, played brilliantly by Anjana Vasan.

Okay, the good news, which will be tempered by the bad stuff I’ll get to later, I’m sure, is that the new series, while following some of the same patterns and set ups of the previous years, really managed to elevate it’s game this time around. There were character reveals, close calls and various other surprising moments which heightened the show and freshened it  up. They didn’t always pan out as being significant to the storyline but, hey, they were very entertaining. For instance, we get to see a lot of flashbacks to when Carolyn was in her twenties and infiltrating the shady organisation known as The Twelve, even coming up with their name in those early days. Her personal mission now is to find which one of the mysterious shadow intelligence kingpins ordered the death of her son, as seen in a previous series. And these black and white flashbacks really give a sense of depth to both her and, to an extent, Konstantin’s characters.

However, one of the things this show does this time around is throw away a lot of the good work it’s doing by not following through and giving us a pay off. For example, in the first couple of episodes, an angel from God who looks exactly like Villanelle (with dark hair, beard and moustache) and also played by Jodie Comer, is trying to help her redeem for her past sins... until Villanelle realises it’s just taking the piss and ends up killing the angel (or God... or it could be the devil), more or less, herself. The show doesn’t present more than two options to the audience here... we know Villanelle is a psychopath but she never comes across as someone given to hallucinations so, either she really is speaking to a messenger for God or her mental health has deteriorated. However, at no point other than these scenes scattered randomly in the first couple of episodes, is it suggested her mental faculties are in any way changed from her normal state. Alas, this promising development of a spiritual aspect brought into play for one of the characters is ditched as quickly as it started and is not mentioned again. A shame, really.

And then there’s new girl Pam. A mortuary lady who is really good at killing people and who is recruited to work with Konstantin. She’s a great character and while she does have a satisfying personal arc of rejecting those who would employ her, ultimately... she’s kind of a pointless addition to the show and doesn’t seem to serve much purpose other than to kill a key person at a point and, also, find some kind of redemption in the act. I mean, yeah, Vasan plays the character well and she’s really interesting but... hmm... by this stage of the show you’d think everything should be coming together to reach a clear end game, rather than just be an addition or, dare I say it, padding to get the show to eight episodes. And I say that knowing that I’m now going to say that the ending of the last episode seems completely rushed.

Yeah, okay, the last episode seemed completely hurried and, frankly, like a truly cop out ending. Things don’t necessarily go as you might think (although certain things are sadly inevitable) and you may be forgiven for wondering why the series is called Killing Eve at all... but the way the end treats the two main characters seems something of a joke. And, also, even though it’s a clear ending and there will probably be no more shows, it actually manages to leave things open for one of the characters to return for a sequel should she want to... which is crazy but, yeah, the whole thing feels like there’s a lot of unfinished business by the final credits. You kind of want to see what happens next.

I also suspect there may have been some major interference in the censorship department too, it has to be said. For instance, in a scene where Villanelle goes to take out The Twelve in a slaughter filled scene on a boat, you don’t actually see anything of what she’s doing to The Twelve other than at the periphery of a slow motion shot, because it’s just concentrating on her face and upper body. You don’t see the faces or fates of any of her victims (apart form a few stabbings) and this has the effect... at a point when the audience needs a cathartic release of on screen violence to show the ‘The Twelve’ have all died horrible deaths... of giving a kind of tempered, watered down, unrevealing moment cross cut with Eve dancing at a wedding party on the deck above. I can’t help but think, since this seems like a huge error in terms of the presentation, that there was originally a proper sequence shot entirely differently (or from a wider angle, maybe) which would have made for a stronger prelude to the final scene of the show but... yeah, was maybe compromised by the show’s producers, perhaps.

And then there’s the sudden ending where one of the characters is picked off with a sniper’s rifle in a completely unnecessary and somewhat subdued moment, as her body sinks deeper into the Thames. By the way guys, the Thames isn’t all crystal clear water and you’d be swept away on the currents of that particular river in seconds. This is not a realistic moment at all and, that would be fine (I’m all for artistic expression) except... well, the death seemed unnecessary by this point and it leaves one of the characters dangling on a revenge arc which, I suspect, the audience now wants to see. And it was just such a clumsy way of winding it all up... it felt completely wrong and, yeah, oh well, that’s that I guess.

So, Killing Eve Series Four kept me entertained for seven out of the eight episodes and, as usual, was filled with strong acting, out of left field surprises and clever cuts but, nope, for me this resolution was like a back stab of betrayal... an unjust dessert to a pretty good series. It left me a little disappointed after I’d found myself in a position, a couple of times over the last six or seven weeks, of defending the choices the writers were making on the show to others. At the end of the day they really needed to get the ending right on this one and, frankly, they didn’t come close. So, half recommended for some excellent foreplay but, alas, no really satisfying climax on this occasion.

Killing Eve Series 3

Eve It To Griever

Killing Eve Series 3
UK/USA BBC
Eight Episodes 13th April to 1 June 2020

Warning: Spoilers on this one.

It’s funny... I’ve heard a lot of complaints about the third series of Killing Eve. People seem to think it’s lost it’s edge or is deathly dull and even my mother, who avidly watched the first couple of series with my father and I, stopped joining us after episode two of this third season. I can kinda understand the drop off in attention in some ways... this series possibly doesn’t match people’s expectations of what this one might have been in terms of the somewhat hollow but still quite strong statement of Villanelle being rejected by Eve and shooting her in the back as an end of season cliffhanger last year.

That the title character would survive was never in doubt but while the simple resolution to this where Eve (Sandra Oh) and Villanelle (Jodie Comer) meet on a London bus as Eve passionately kisses and then head butts her it’s, alas, not par for the course for this particular series in terms of dramatic resolutions. Truth be told, that’s about the only time Eve and Villanelle share screen time together until the last episode... which is kind of a shame because, while both the first two series kept the sexual/killer tension between the two strong by keeping them apart for most of the running time, it’s almost like the writers couldn’t think of anything else to do except keep them apart even more this year and... rather than bringing the ‘distance relationship’ to life, it just kind of drains the show of any real punches this time around.

Not that it hasn’t got a lot going for it... I just think people were expecting something different to what they got.

This one starts off with an episode which, on the aftermath of Eve surviving her wounds, Kenny (Sean Delaney), who worked for his mother and Eve’s boss Carolyn (Fiona Shaw) in the last show and who has quit the bureau to take a job at as a trainee journalist at a magazine, befriends Eve and is her only contact with her old espionage life... which she does not want back. However, when Kenny takes a fatal dive off a roof at the end of the first episode, all the players come back as Eve and Carolyn try to find the killer who they assume is a member of the mysterious but deadly ‘Twelve’, who Villanelle works for. That being said, Carolyn is still under my suspicions as being the ultimate leader of The Twelve so we’ll see how that goes in the next series, I suspect.

Meanwhile, Villanelle has a new and deadly set of bosses but wants to quit her assasin’s life and do something else, preferably with Eve but neither of them are that sure of each other, obviously. Hence the brutal head butt on their first, brief meeting. And, it’s all a bit familiar but with less at stake, it seems to me. Eve has to reconcile with the fact that her husband just doesn’t want her around anymore, after the way events played out for him last series and, though he gets a pitchfork through his throat for his trouble (he survives, it seems)... as a last ditch attempt by Villanelle’s employers as a frame up job to make it look like Villanelle has killed him, in order to drive a wedge between them... the whole thing seems a little less dramatic as, I suspect, most of the audience has probably written off Eve’s husband as a source of interest at this point anyway.

That being said... the whole cast are stunning. Especially Sandra Oh, Jodie Comer, Fiona Shaw and Kim Bodnia (as Villanelle’s former director Konstantin, who’s having his own troubles this series). There’s even a staggeringly interesting ‘Eveless’ episode where Villanelle finds her lost mother and then, as one might expect, kills her. To be honest though, the whole series does feel a bit like padding. The producers were already making series four, I think, at the same time as this one so the whole thing feels like much more of a fine tuning of the main players in the cast (and the setting up of a ‘big boss’ danger character for Villanelle to have to contend with in the next series) so that a dramatic resolution to the show may, if they don’t go for series five, be a possibility. It’s not dull, in other words but, at the same time, it’s not packing the punch of the previous two. Also, the end of the very last shot this year is something which is really easy to see coming. I new exactly where the credits would start rolling as the sequence started and, frankly, that’s not much of a cliff hanger either, in all honesty.

So there you go... a short review for a short series. Back in the 1970s the first three series combined would have made up the episode count for just one series so I don’t when or why having such short numbers of episodes became the norm here. Doctor Who and Sherlock are guilty of such minimalism too. Who the heck is controlling these budgets? However, Killing Eve is, as far as I’m concerned, one of the jewels in the BBC crown and although this third series may be a little sluggish in terms of character resolution or the thrills and spills of previous seasons, I think it’s still an absolutely necessary watch for fans of Killing Eve and, hopefully, the writing will pay dividends in the fourth season when, presumably, things that have been planted this year come to fruition. So, you know, maybe give it a go.

Killing Eve Series Two

Villian Hell

Killing Eve Series Two
BBC - Eight Episodes

Well this is an impressive follow up to last year’s pretty great TV show Killing Eve. In fact, I’ll even say that I enjoyed it much more than the first series. Although, it does have its problems....

For instance, the story is a little played out and once you have the basic premise explored in Series One, where the two main protagonists - secret service woman Eve (played by the great Sandra Oh) and crack international psychopath assassin Villanelle (played equally brilliantly by wide eyed Jodie Comer) - are clearly obsessed with each other and wanting to make some kind of, presumably intimate, connection - it gets a little flat. So the story takes on a lot of extra distractions to compensate, by way of new characters and ideas, to keep the suspense of that particular ‘relationship’ in play while trying to not draw attention to that padding in some places. However, the writers and performers (yeah... and everyone else) are all pretty successful holding the interest in both the characters and the shady, John Le Carre like shadow world in which they operate.

As the first series, the writers give a nice mix following both Eve’s domestic life grounding and then contrasting it with the almost surreal world inhabited by her nemesis/hero. There are also a few surprises which show up over the eight episodes comprising this second series including at least one character you might not have been expecting to see again in this one (yeah, don’t worry, this is a spoiler free review so I’m not intending to elaborate on that). There are also some, admittedly drama fulfilling, new characters brought into the mix but they are the best kinds of distractions when it comes to bringing in new things to fill the episodes with... that is to say, they are entertaining ones.

My favourite thing about this one is that it takes it’s time (at least two, possibly three episodes) to deal with all the fall out from the last 5 minutes of the final episode of series one before it gets all the main characters back to, at least some kind, of status quo. And the writers are still having fun with the dialogue in this, with some witty exchanges between various characters along the way.

And, getting back to those characters, some of them do have their interesting quirks which, as the first series, make this a pleasurable and pretty fast paced watch. The real problem with them, though, is that you can figure out just what purpose they are serving within the drama and so, yeah, a lot of what you are watching becomes fairly predictable for a lot of the time. It’s not totally the writers’ fault though because, clearly, when you’re weaving a story where treachery, deceit and the business of keeping your secrets close to your chest are the common currency in which this shadow world operates, you are bound to be expecting things to not be quite as they seem in the first place. So, yeah, alarm bells may begin to ring on this one from very early on but, frankly, this is still quite skillfully done with the audience at least still having to play guessing games about the intentions of some of the characters when everyone seemed to be fully revealed by the end of the last series.

So, for instance, Eve’s boss Carolyn, played by Fiona Shaw, is still one of those people where you are never really sure whose side she is on and whether the manipulations which are, to be fair, part and parcel of her job, are being played out for the right reasons or whether she may, indeed, be a member of the mysterious, ‘The Twelve’ which we keep hearing about (I expect we’ll get to that by the end of Series Three... they can’t keep circling these things forever). There’s also a nice cameo by Zoe Wannamaker as her boss in one episode.

Now, while I remind you that I loved this series and thought it was even better than the first one, I would have to say my biggest disappointment in Series Two was the last few minutes of the last episode. I don’t want to say here what happens but it’s both very predictable and also seems like it’s insulting the intelligence of the viewers, bearing in mind some of the things we’ve seen in the previous episodes. The ending feels kind of fake and only like it’s there to have a resting point. In fact, in some ways it felt like the end of Avengers - Infinity War (reviewed by me here) where you knew that things would not be left as they were and that’s very much the case here. Without giving too much away, we’ve seen miraculous recoveries and resurrections throughout the story so this one feels like it’s definitely not what it seems and there may even have been some collusion deliberately held back from the audience here to try and give some dramatic tension and to also allow a ‘stunning reveal’ next series. And I’m pretty sure there will be a ‘next series’ if you’ve already seen this one and know what I’m talking about here. I just hope they don’t deal with the fall out as clumsily and nonsensically as Marvel did with Avengers - Endgame (reviewed by me here) and that they treat certain characters more like they did at the start of this series.

Other than that though, Killing Eve Series Two is a pure delight to watch and, if some character deaths within Eve and her husbands non-work life and the introduction of a new female assassin, not to mention another psychopath character (which the new assassin definitely isn’t), seem somewhat obvious and lazy, well... at least they add to a lively and interesting series of entertainments and this thing certainly had me gripped right from the start, for sure. There are some nice dramatic set pieces and at least one wonderful, breakneck paced method of execution involving a lorry which is nicely staged and is as much about Eve’s reaction to what she just saw across the street from her as it is about anything else. People who loved the first show should eat this one up and I can only hope the third series will be with us sometime soon. This is one of the more high quality shows the BBC has been involved with.

Killing Eve

Kill About Eve

Killing Eve
Series One
BBC3 - Eight Episodes

Regular readers might remember that there aren’t that many TV programmes that I actually bother to watch... they hog too much time and shorten my productivity on the blog. I’m a little more of a film person, I would have to say. However, when I saw the printed 'bus sides' campaign for Killing Eve, I immediately googled it to find out if this was an upcoming film. Nope, it was apparently a TV show and it would be ‘broadcast’ on an internet channel (one which is at least free if you’ve payed your TV licence) and that, furthermore, shortly after that first episode had aired, you could watch the whole first series of eight episodes on the iPlayer.

As it happens, this is what I did with my Sunday following the first broadcast because, well... Sandra Oh was in it. Now, I don’t actually know much of Sandra Oh’s work at all but I’d remembered she’d made an impression on me with her role as a stripper in the excellent movie Dancing At The Blue Iguana 18 years ago. So I really wanted to see her again and, since the bus ad made it look like she was one of the main leads, I decided to check it out.

Killing Eve is based on four short (very short, by the looks of it) internet novellas by Luke Jennings which were later collected into one printed volume. The story tells of a psychotic assassin codenamed Villanelle and the woman who is tracking her down for Her Majesty’s Government, Eve Polastri. Now I’ve not actually read these short works but I would imagine, since the show comprises eight times 45 minute episodes (approximately), that the TV show must stray from and maybe expand the printed source material quite a bit. For instance, I know Villanelle’s actual surname has been changed from the original and I’ve no idea why this kind of detail would have been seen as something to tinker around with.

The show starts off strongly with an opening in a cafe, depicting Villanelle trying to catch the eye and attention of a little girl eating cake at a table opposite her. The cabinet behind Villanelle (played here by Jodie Comer) perfectly reflects the little girl to the right of the screen as Comer sits left of shot so we can see both of them in frame at one particular moment in the sequence and it’s little flourishes like this by various directors over the eight episodes, that really keeps things interesting as the story goes on. That and the absolutely brilliant script (story wise less so but the dialogue is absolutely beautiful) and, of course, the absolutely brilliant performances of Comer as Villanelle, Eve (the title character is played by the aforementioned Sandra Oh, who absolutely steals all the scenes she’s in) and a whole host of good actors and actresses who have somehow come together to be in one of the more interesting television highlights of recent years. At the end of this opening sequence Villanelle, who has been trying to maintain her presence in the eyes of the child, does something to finish the scene which completely shows, albeit in a mild form, her psychotic nature to the audience.

We then cut to Eve in bed with her husband and, abruptly following on from a remark that at least it’s Saturday so she can stay in bed, there’s an aggressive flash cut which takes us to the next scene where, indeed, she turns up at the office as she has had to go in on a Saturday morning due to an emergency. Now this is kind of interesting and it’s quite powerful in the way it sets up what is, after all, an old comical script cliché in a manner which isn’t all that comical and which doesn’t lose sight of the gravitas of the situation. Even though the tone of the entire series has huge doses of humour cutting through it in about as effective way as you could imagine... it all somehow seems to work.

Strangely enough, this doesn’t seem to be a directorial instruction (different director on that episode) but more of a production decision (or maybe they just liked it the first time it worked) because there is a similar flash cut at a more serious juncture during episode six which does exactly the same thing... eschewing the rest of a conversation showing you the state of one of the character’s marriage mid word to just show you Eve landing in another country. So a kind of ‘read between the lines’ attitude to the audience and I think this works rather well the two times they do it.

This aggressive kind of editing works really well for the series as a whole, which is full of impromptu mid-scene montage effects which just delete unnecessary footage to focus on getting to the next important beats of a scene. For instance, again in the first episode, there is a scene where Villanelle gets back to her apartment and she puts on the stereo to one of... and I’m sorry but I always get these confused... either the Gymnopédies or the Gnoissiennes by Eric Satie. A sequence of events is then montaged together as Villanelle takes a bath but the music stays constantly playing in the background... so it switches from a diegetic music track to a non-diegetic track because, after all, the piece of music is only a few minutes long. So that’s an interesting technique right there already but then, when Villanelle is disturbed by her boss, the music carries back on as a diegetic source cue again. Amazing... so unless we are supposed to infer that Villanelle just keeps getting out of the bath to play the same track over and over again... then something really interesting just happened to the way the music is used here and I think that kind of abstract jump is fine, actually, since it works fairly well... although, to be fair, it did pop me out of the scene while I was watching so I could analyse just what was going on with it.

There’s also something nice but unusual going on with the typography of the show. On the actual words KILLING EVE, where the top join of where the diagonals meet on the K, N and V, depending on which episode you are watching... a drop of blood will start to flow down from one of those joins. Also, the text is all in UPPER CASE apart from the ‘g’ which is a quite old fashioned form of lower case. Now, I’ve probably missed a visual pun here but I couldn’t work out a) why this was done and b) why they’ve done it for every ‘g’ in the opening and closing credits. It works but I couldn’t figure out the functionality of that aesthetic choice so if anyone knows why it’s there like that, please let me know.

The music is okay but a lot of the time there are songs on the soundtrack. I know one person in my family complained about the domination of the visual image by the music track here which, personally, I really don’t mind. I’m more annoyed that they went for songs rather than original score in a lot of places but... it still worked fine without it, for the majority of the running time.

Another thing I could see about this which annoyed me was during the episode where a man is murdered in a BDSM clinic. After various officials have been looking over the dead body and we pan down to the guy’s toes, one of them gives a very faint wiggle. Not good and I couldn’t work out why the editor didn’t catch this one, especially since it’s right in the foreground of the shot. Unless it was left there deliberately to imply something but... I don’t think it was.

Anyway, not really a deal breaker of a toe wiggle there and I’d have to say that Killing Eve is one of the best pieces of television I’ve seen in a long time (although, as I explained earlier, I’ve not seen as much modern TV as most folk, I suspect). That being said, I have to say the lack of nudity in sequences which kind of demanded it did seem rather strained and I find that kind of attitude on behalf of the makers of these things kinda offensive when they abandon common sense for lack of nakedity. Despite that, though, it's definitely a hard recommend from me here and, while the plot and big reveals are very clichéd in terms of where the story is going (alas, almost every plot twist is very much telegraphed well before its time), the acting and extraordinary dialogue on this one really comes through here. Alas, in the last five minutes of the final episode, the writers seem more interested in setting up a second series rather than trying to resolve certain issues but, even this ending which is still quite a statement, is done in a very comic manner and totally relies on the timing of both Sandra Oh and Jodie Comer to make it work. And they really knock it out the park, for sure. Killing Eve can be streamed, for just under a year from when this review goes up, from the iPlayer and a US Blu Ray disc is getting released soon. I hope the BBC makes a Blu Ray available for purchase in the UK at some point soon too because... streaming. Meh.