“There’s no need to play the reluctant ingénue with me.” - Killing Eve episodes 2.01 and 2.02 in retrospect
Based on a discussion with @onaperduamedee that drove us both slightly crazy, LOL
Espionage stories are inherently all about fixed spaces and boundaries - nations and borders, centres and their entry and exit points - all very clearly defined systems operating on a specific language. Agents - rogues, spies, carriers of information, currency, weaponry - serve as the connective tissue in this framework. It’s a far, far more chaotic intersection of worlds than most agencies would have anyone believe, and being in control and in power is the best and most crucial spectacle that one can manage.
How does this work with women, who have, traditionally, never been considered a part of essential frameworks, be it morality or politics?
I don’t pretend to know the ways of the world.
A means to an end seems a way.
Whoever’s got the most of whatever’s best -
All the better,
May the best man win.
This song has played thrice in the show till now: the first time when Villanelle climbs the pipes into a countryside mansion in Italy to murder a mafia lord in an extraordinary display of physical vitality and witchy absurdity. The second time, when Eve defies Carolyn’s instructions to travel to Paris to meet Villanelle, helped along by an unwitting Elena - who hasn’t even been taken on the trip to Russia and simply wants to join Eve the same way Eve had once wanted to join in the thrill of a spy’s life. The third time, it’s Eve uttering her name to open the gates of her new office, entering as a professional, where she’ll be working in an enhanced capacity to apprehend secret female assassins.
It takes the bewildered confession to an absent Carolyn for Eve to realise just how horribly awry her attempts to game the rules of the intelligence mission in her favour - her single-minded goal to find Villanelle - have gone. Villanelle comes to much the same conclusion when her new handler releases his choke-hold on her - her ability to rewrite the plot to the end that she becomes its irreplaceable protagonist, shielded by Konstantin till now, has gone up in smoke. The world is suddenly far less tolerant of Villanelle’s desires, and she’s no longer in a position to just not care about the system’s insensitivity. Both Eve and Villanelle have become trapped in a snarl of their own making, where their own wishes have been revealed to be incompatible with the systems they are a part of. The System is determined to show the two women their place - in the margins, in the streets, where they are servers, workers, pawns, carrying out the will of the state.
And they feel the same pressure; the bosses and handlers in this equation aren’t gone. Carolyn is just as ruthless as Raymond, only she doesn’t resort to physical violence to compel Eve to remain with the MI6, and she isn’t a mere handler. Like Flo said, Carolyn has reevaluated Eve on her return from Paris, and she sees her in a new light now - as an asset. And, I would add, as someone who knows, and figures out, a lot more than Carolyn can always control. The only way to keep a tab on the unfiltered information that leaks out is to keep a hand on Eve’s shoulder.
With the new turn of events (series 2), Carolyn’s attitude towards Eve seems to have changed accordingly. Her body language is slightly different, somewhat more showy. She’s less deadpan and professional as she’d been earlier, and a process that began with Carolyn and Eve spending time together as part of the mission and together in the hotel in Moscow has developed into Carolyn having become used to Eve’s admiration to the point of consciously expecting it. In the scene at the end of episode 2.02, where Konstantin is revealed to be alive and currently reading a book in Carolyn’s drawing room, Carolyn smiles while scrutinising Eve’s reaction to the reveal. It’s a very confident smile, demanding a response from Eve, certain that she’d be impressed. And Eve is impressed. Carolyn expects Eve to be frightened, perhaps, intrigued, or even paranoid. She admires Eve’s roguish tendencies although they frustrate her quite often, and she likes Eve’s appreciation of a mystery, and of women who can keep them. Part of Carolyn’s control over this brilliant, emotional woman is to amplify the image Carolyn shows everyone else - as a mastermind who can do incredible things, things for Eve (linking her her moisturiser of choice, arranging a witness protection scheme for her, even a new name), things to Eve (bringing back people from the dead to keep an eye on her as well as protect her, throwing her into Villanelle’s path to be devoured as a matter of course), anything to anyone. The bigger difference here is that Carolyn, probably for the first time, is bringing Eve closer to understanding how it works.
Eve: What am I doing here, Carolyn? Going through the charade of solving your test.
Carolyn: Well, you’re proving yourself useful.
Eve: No. What’s going on? With Konstantin and Moscow, and what were you doing, talking to Villanelle in that prison? I mean, who do you even work for? Are you part of the Twelve?
Carolyn: What really happened in Paris? Why was Nadia’s note addressed particularly to you, and why are you and Villanelle so interested in each other? You see how it works?
If that necessitates revealing sensitive information to Eve in carefully considered pieces - Kenny being Carolyn’s son, Carolyn playing a part in keeping Konstantin alive - so be it. Revealing information, as Flo said, would be a test of Eve’s ability to use it, and to gauge her behaviour.
Flo, as usual, was bang on target when she said in the tags that Carolyn shouldn’t be surprised about Eve’s obsession with Villanelle; Carolyn might be just as obsessed with Eve. Eve isn’t alone in her descent into the abyss, as Bill had called it so long ago. They’re all on their way down. Eve’s particular obsessions are very much a product of the “normal” relationships in her life, their high points and their lows. It’s just that Eve doesn’t always bother to hide her desire, which, like Villanelle’s and perhaps Carolyn’s too, completely diverges from the limited spectrum allotted to women by the traditionally androcentric medical, psychological, and philosophical institutions. They literally are deranged. But Eve’s very real penchant for violence and politics is born out of her own hard work and her own psycho-spiritual crises and epiphanies.
Although she still underestimates herself, I think Eve does understand the power dynamics she's become a part of with Villanelle, Konstantin, Kenny, and Carolyn. She's taking her time to process everything because, in spite of the trap she’s found herself in after the encounter in Paris, her new position suits her. The power she has now becomes her. And she's honestly loving the fact that she's an important part of investigations without being encumbered by too many rules because she's still on the edges of The System. Eve’s status as an outside expert, a rogue agent, is her greatest weapon as well as her Achilles heel. It’s impossible for her to just “go home” now; her locus has shifted. She’d thrown away home for the sake of the world outside, The System beyond the home, and now she’s adrift. She can’t pretend anymore.
Villanelle: I know her better now. I know her better than anyone. Better than she knows herself.
Eve: You think he was murdered. You think he was.
Carolyn: Yes, so I thought I’d draft in the head of the fan club.
(Also, that last bit is hilarious. You can tell the head writer is a woman.)
An eye for an eye
Is a blind man’s rule.
I wasn’t going to follow.
I’m nobody’s fool.
So now, Eve is the one - like Villanelle in ep. 1.01 - entering and exiting government intelligence offices, palaces and parliaments of knowledge and power, who must be given protection against assassins, who’s not entirely comfortable in her marriage, who’s surrounded by people - powerful people - who want her input on Important Stuff. Eve is now the princess in the castle, and Villanelle must now play the part of the hero from the more mainstream romances, the errant knight reinterpreted, who must remain herself and journey across foreign lands and endure a Whole Lot Of Crap to reunite with the princess. The gender dynamics have been subverted and plugged to industrial-strength batteries to set the screen and our minds on fire. As Flo pointed out, Eve is at the centre of others’ attention, especially the admiration of both the government intelligence officer and the enemy assassin, the two big polarities of a spy story, but the optics is different because this triangle has nothing to do with the male gaze and the male fixation with the heroine. On the other hand, in the final scene of ep. 2.02, Konstantin sits on the sofa as simultaneously the most and the least important person in the room - the ace in the hole with some tricks of his own still left, but in the end a subject in a plot engineered by women, where the main tension is between two women negotiating the balance of power between themselves. For perhaps the first time in fiction that traditionally operates on strict gender roles, a man serves as currency here, a floating element used to reinforce the relationship between women.
Talking of home and the gender dynamics here, something in Carolyn and Eve’s exchange sticks out:
Eve: I need to go home.
Carolyn: Home? Is that really what you want? I mean, what do people do at home?
It’s the first time this season that Carolyn’s anger shows for just a second before she reins it in. But compare that with the exchange in Annihilation (2018):
Ventress: We need to come to an agreement about what to do with you.
Lena: You’re not going to let me go home?
Ventress: Is that what you want? To go home?
And then with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000):
Jade Fox: [to Jen] What good is a home? You’ve gone so far. Now we can go all the way together.
Home is an extremely fraught topic here. Just gonna quote Flo here: “This show is a dream come true when it comes to so many female narratives. We never talk about home to male characters unless as something to leave behind to live an adventurous life.” But the dynamic is so different here where the heroine and her mentor/boss are both women, and they understand on a level where the other woman is coming from. The mentors don’t want the heroine to decline the call to adventure. Carolyn certainly doesn’t want to lose Eve; she’s too powerful, too clever, too useful. Carolyn had herself given up her life and her son’s to her career long ago, to the point that her relationship with Kenny now is inextricable from her political machinations. But the female mentor here also manipulates the heroine but ever so lovingly; defining the paths they will both tread on while assuring the heroine that its all going to be okay - no, that this is the best way. It’s more subtle, but in principle, it’s not very different from Villanelle approaching Nadia in her prison cell tenderly and mockingly, and then killing Gabriel in the hospital. Villanelle here classically serves as the monster whose shocking actions mirror the twisted relationships in Eve’s world.
So just how fundamentally Eve, Villanelle, and Carolyn have already rewired The System in their favour, although it is still innately hostile to them (Villanelle is now being used brutally by the Twelve, and Eve and Carolyn are both in dangerous positions), can be seen in the overall image of them as the primary trio of the show. Flo pointed out that Carolyn is almost omniscient, but Eve is the one who brings her the information truly necessary, and Eve is the one who discovered first Villanelle and now the Ghost. It’s why both Villanelle and Carolyn find Eve so fascinating, because Eve occupies such a precarious position and is so unpredictable and impactful. The Holy Trinity here, then, is Carolyn as God, Eve as the first human (incorporating aspects of Lilith here), and Villanelle as the Devil. Carolyn, said to be always twenty steps ahead of everyone else, brings Eve back into Paradise, the secret office full of resources and speculation that’s like the inside of Eve’s brain, that lets Eve run free with her pursuit of female assassins, the landscape where she can chase Villanelle. There's a wall full of maps and images trying to establish a pattern, and Carolyn's good at spotting patterns and understanding how people tick. Her whole agenda is to capture evil so that it serves her purposes, the purpose of the good. But this is so different from her previous exercises and missions - this necessitates the use of carnal knowledge that only Eve can bring. Passionate Eve, constantly toeing the line between desire and sanity, her perceptive, intuitive heart her finest treasure. Even before Villanelle has offered Eve the apple, both Villanelle and Carolyn know that here’s someone who is truly special. And now its their game to play, their mystery to stage.
The fact that Eve dreamt about Bill and that sometimes she still grabbing her phone to text him breaks my heart, I think they should adress that between her overwhelmed feelings for Villanelle and the investigation she didn’t have the proper time to mourn him and if she feels guilty about his death.
