If you’re only watching the third season for the first time @villanever, I hope you enjoy what you get from the final episodes of what turned out to be a season that went so wrong it led to Killing Eve’s surprise cancellation.
When you say, “i think enjoying this season comes down to enjoying the shift in perspective from a two character show to an ensemble show, which is a natural growth for any multi-season serial cable tv show these days,” I believe you have that backwards: Killing Eve with two co-leads (Sandra Oh as Eve Polastri and Jodie Comer as Villanelle) joined by other actors in smaller, but important roles. .
What began as an ensemble show and found great success in being one underwent a paradigm shift in Season 3 where the perspective changed from a two character show to an refocusing on one character (Villanelle), with the other lead (Eve) losing prominence in plot and story and nearly reduced to a supporting character for Villanelle.
The two women began as equals and grew to see and acknowledge their similarities, but “we are the same” was not the driver of this season. “We are family” was, and it didn’t quite work out as hoped.
Two charts have been floating around since the season and the “Where Is Eve?” question that was trending on the KE Twitter timeline. In Season One was clearly all about Eve. Season Two saw total screen time nearly even between Eve and Villanelle. Along comes Season Three and the solo episode and Villanelle had retaken the lead. Add up Eve and Villanelle’s total screen time and Eve has a lead of almost 12 more minutes.
All’s good, right? Sorry, but no. Statistically, the third season balanced the scales, but Killing Eve’s timeshare between the two leads had drastically changed.
In the first season, head writer Phoebe Waller-Bridge kept the two protagonists tantalizingly close to each other. They meet in the first episode and not again until the fifth. Then it’s not until the eighth and final episode of the premiere season that they meet again. By that standard, Suzanne Heathcote, the S3 head writer, mirrored the frequency where Eve and Villanelle see each other same as PWB.
What Heathcote changed is she kept E&V apart for two episodes, crashed them together (literally) in the third, and sent them them scurrying down various rabbit holes until they met briefly in the seventh and a bit longer in the finale. To eIaborate in greater detail would flesh out the point @villanever, but if you’re still watching the season, I really can’t without spoiling what occurs over the three final episodes. Nobody likes having the ending spoiled, so I won’t, but I have no idea how you’re navigating all the land mines on Tumblr and elsewhere that give the game away.
“Are You From Pinner” accomplished three KE milestones according to the KE Wiki:
This is the first episode in the series not to feature Sandra Oh and Fiona Shaw.
It’s also the first episode in the series to only feature one actor from the main cast, in this case Jodie Comer.
She is the only character who has appeared in all episodes of the series.
That is where the trouble begins. Giving Villanelle a solo episode would be less problematic if show were entitled Codename: Villanelle, because it would clearly be the title and lead character enjoying the spotlight. However despite it being called Killing Eve, Eve and Villanelle are co-leads. Equally important. Equally compelling characters. Put a pin in that. We’ll come back to it.
There’s nothing unusual about a TV series where the top-named actor only makes a cameo appearance or not at all. That happens all the time in episodic television. What doesn’t happen all the time is where the title character and first named actor goes unseen, is never mentioned, and the actor who plays the part only appears in the opening credits as one of nine *executive producers.
Even worse, the KE promotional team celebrated finally getting Eve out of Villanelle’s way by claiming this is what the fans were waiting for.
That’s not just omission, that’s erasure. If you were a first-time viewer watching “Are You From Pinner” you might justifiably wonder why the show is called Killing Eve when there’s no Eve in it.
Another question about the solo episode is why was it necessary in the first place? In a 2018 interview, Comer said about her character, “Fashion is her only outlet. She doesn’t have friends, family or routine.”
“i do agree that eve could clearly use more screentime, which is why i have no idea they did episode 5 without her in it doing at least something.”
Agreed, and coming off of watching Niko getting pitchforked right before her eyes, there’s was plenty a good writer could have done in the next episode, but Suzanne Heathcote is not a good writer. A good writer does not tell an award-winning actor like Sandra, “You’re not in this one. Take the day off.”
Sandra Oh is not a supporting character on a show where her name is right there in the title, but as Heathcote only made space for Jodie Comer, that’s exactly what she became. By “Still Got It” Eve was fighting Carolyn for screen time and losing, while only barely holding off Konstantin.
(* Referencing the “Sandra is an Executive Producer thing: One defense often offered by fans of Are You From Pinner is because Sandra’s an EP, that must mean she’s cool with the solo episode and her character not being in it. That isn’t necessarily so because even if she wasn’t cool with it, she can’t say it publicly without likely violating a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) that is standard in movie and television contracts. Nobody will know what Sandra thought of Jodie’s spotlight show until someone asks her or until the contact and the NDA is no longer in effect. To put it another way: can I prove Sandra didn’t like the solo episode? Of course I can’t. She hasn’t set much about it at all in interviews, thereby nobody can prove she did like it. ).
The show began with two characters, Eve Polastri and Villanelle, as the dual suns that Carolyn, Niko, Konstantin, Elena, Bill, Kenny and Frank revolved around. Villanelle initially only had Konstantin until Sebastian, Nadia, Irina and Anna showed up. Eve’s supporting cast with MI5, MI6 and The Bitter Pill has usually been bigger than Villanelle’s. Mostly because she’s a lone who is usually killing her handlers and support staff. Eve, as the investigator, has more time which is going to be doled out to the investigation of Villanelle’s crimes.
This hummed along nicely under Waller-Bridge and Emerald Fennell in Season 2, though some believed Eve and Villanelle spent too much time together and the cat-and-mouse vibe was lessened considerably. Heathcote’s “solution” was to keep them split apart and confine their two meetings prior to the end to literally a matter of minutes or seconds.
“Are You From Pinner” gave Villanelle an entire origin story without any of the other regular characters and surrounded her with all-new characters there is no reason to ever see again. If the recently canceled show gives even one minute of the final season on reuniting Bor’ka and Pyotyr with Villanelle again, it will be a massive waste of a minute.
Here we had one of the best ensemble shows on television featuring two co-leads who both scoring major awards for their roles with all the acclaim and buzz coming in the first two seasons. By Season Three, the acclaim lessened and no awards were forthcoming as the show first lost its way before becoming predictable, cluttered and losing focus.
Killing Eve ceased being about Villanelle and Eve and became all about Villanelle and Eve chasing along after her repeating, “Where is she?”
“The relationship is both animal and intellectual,” Waller-Bridge told Rolling Stone in 2018. “It’s more complex than either of them are able to articulate. They are each other’s shadow.”
That’s how PWB saw it, but Heathcote chased away the shadows and put Villanelle squarely in the spotlight.
The last leaf that “Pinner” fans cling to is its 100 percent “fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The caveat is it is based on only 13 critic reviews and is the highest-rated episode of the lowest-rated season (80 percent). Bragging about being the best reviewed episode based upon what 13 people say is an odd thing to boast about, but at least the stans who ship Killing Eve only for Villanelle got to see her dance badly and throw dried cow pies.
What a weird hill for a once great show to die on.
