WARNING: Spoilers for the Killing Eve series finale below.
After watching the Killing Eve finale, fans were so angry at what they saw that they dubbed the show “the new Game of Thrones.” This was not so much a compliment on its size and scale as it was a reference to the HBO series’ final season, which epically disappointed pretty much everyone, including author George R.R. Martin, who has been taking great pains to distance his books from the show. Well, in a similar move, Luke Jennings — the author of the Killing Eve trilogy the series is based on — is also slamming the way his characters were treated.
In a new column for The Guardian, Jennings has made it known that he was not pleased with the way the show ended. In the final moments, Villanelle (Jodie Comer) and Eve (Sandra Oh) finally share their “first proper kiss,” only for Villanelle to be gunned down and left for dead in a river. Jennings admits he was taken aback, particularly after watching Oh and Comer bring his characters to life “so compellingly.” More importantly, Jennings didn’t appreciate seeing Killing Eve fall into the “bury your gays” trope that plagues far too many series.
But the season four ending was a bowing to convention. A punishing of Villanelle and Eve for the bloody, erotically impelled chaos they have caused. 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 (Lexa’s death in The 100, immediately after sleeping with her female love interest for the first time, is another example). 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.
Like Martin, Jennings offered fans of Eve and Villanelle the chance to find comfort in his books. “Villanelle lives. And on the page, if not on the screen, she will be back.”
(Via The Guardian)