“Killing Eve” recently ended its four-season run, but not everyone was happy with the way the series finale played out.
As an article in Vanity Fair points out, fans were displeased when Villanelle (Jodie Comer) was shot and killed after she and Eve (Sandra Oh) finally ended years of sexual tension by sharing a kiss.
Luke Jennings, author of the Codename Villanelle book trilogy that inspired “Killing Eve”, shared his own disappointment with the ending in an opinion piece he wrote for the Guardian.
“It’s an extraordinary privilege to see your characters brought to life so compellingly,” he wrote. “But the final series ending took me aback.”
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While admitting that “you’re never going to love everything the screenwriting team does,” he felt the finale was a betrayal to the fans who had followed the show for four seasons.
“The charged looks, the tears, the lovingly fetishized wounds, the endlessly deferred consummation,” he wrote. “When Phoebe Waller-Bridge [who served as showrunner for the first season] and I first discussed Villanelle’s character five years ago, we agreed that she was defined by what Phoebe called her ‘glory’: her subversiveness, her savage power, her insistence on lovely things. That’s the Villanelle that I wrote, that Phoebe turned into a screen character, and that Jodie ran with so gloriously.”
However, he added, “the season 4 ending was a bowing to convention. A punishing of Villanelle and Eve for the bloody, erotically impelled chaos they have caused.”
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In Jennings’ view, a “truly subversive storyline would have defied the trope which sees same-sex lovers in TV dramas permitted only the most fleeting of relationships before one of them is killed off.”
“How much more darkly satisfying, and true to ‘Killing Eve’’s original spirit, for the couple to walk off into the sunset together? Spoiler alert, but that’s how it seemed to me when writing the books.”
He concluded by promising fans hadn’t seen the last of those characters, despite what took place in the finale.
“I learned the outcome of the final episode in advance, and suspected, rightly, that fans would be upset,” Jennings wrote. “But to those fans, I would say this: Villanelle lives. And on the page, if not on the screen, she will be back.”