Better Late Than Never: Killing Eve

Of all the series that I meant to watch but never got around to in 2018, my greatest regret is that I missed BBC America’s Killing Eve. The early notices were exceptional, I’ve generally been a fan of a lot of the programming that airs on BBC America, and it got a lot of early play from the Emmys. But now that the Golden Globes, the Critics Choice, and the SAG Awards have all nominated it, as well as making appearances on numerous top 10 lists, I realized I’d better get caught up before Season 2 comes along. So I started watching it.

The series focuses on what would be considered a traditional cliché in espionage or even police procedurals: spymaster chasing assassin. But Phoebe Waller-Bridge, operating off a series of best-selling novels, doesn’t play by those rules. At the center of Killing Eve, the female protagonist is Eve Pulaski (Sandra Oh), who starts the series working for transport of material witnesses, but believes she has the skill to be a spymaster. And the assassin is unlike we’ve seen on television, a pure sociopath and psychopath known only as Villanelle (Jodie Comer). In the opening scene of the series, we see her enjoying ice cream, and watching a young child about to do the same. Villanelle than leaves the shop, and deliberately knocks the dish into the child’s lap as she leaves.

Neither Eve nor Villanelle are anything like the characters we’ve seen on TV before. Eve is married to a husband who does all the work, but clearly has more ambition and intelligence then her job will allow her. She manages to figure out that the witness to a murder, is speaking ‘heroin Polish’, and manages to figure out that there is a female assassin that has been targeting people.  When she tries to get a translation of what this witness saw, she encounters Villanelle in a hospital bathroom, and emerges to find four people dead. She is immediately sacked, but then one of her superiors (Fiona Shaw) tells her that she was right that this is a female assassin, that she’s been killing people all over Europe, and “she’s starting to show off”. Eve is given a minimal operation, and it becomes very clear that she’s been ahead of the gain from the beginning, and that there is some very sinister group that has some agenda that we can’t begin to comprehend.

Sandra Oh has gotten the lion’s share of the praise for her superior work as the scattered but ultimately brilliant Eve, who seems to be far more clever than her field will allow. But frankly, in the early episodes, it’s Jodie Comer who truly impresses. Villanelle is one of the most terrifying characters I’ve seen in nearly a decade. Even Dexter Morgan has a method to the murders he committed. Villanelle is clearly getting paid for what she does, but you get the feeling watching her work that she’d be more than willing to work for free. There have been occasions when she literally does seem to kill people just to watch them die. And she doesn’t seem to have a genuine emotion in her body, and it’s clearly starting to unnerve her handlers. I’m honestly not sure what is the more frightening thing in this series: Villanelle’s utter disregard for human life, or the idea of the organization that would employ here. I’m reminded of Deadwood, and the psychopath geologist Wolcott, who we had to meet to see true evil in the form George Hearst. What organization could traffic in a psychopath like this?

There are clearly so many mysteries waiting to be revealed, and even though I’ve seen some of the spoilers for the series, I really thing that Killing Eve is more about the journey then the actual destination. There’s clearly a sexual component to the relationship between Eve and Villanelle – that much is clear just in the moment when Villanelle sees an image of the woman who’s been assigned to find her. But how will it play out? And what agenda is this organization planning? Either way, it’s clear that the series, Oh, and Comer have been getting from various organization. I have a feeling it’s only the beginning.

My score: 4.75 stars.