Season 4 kicked off on a particularly awkward note, with the detour involving trained assassin Villanelle (Jodie Comer) and her brush with religion to kill time. While things got a little better after that, the show never quite recovered.
There were some major deaths in the build up to the end, including Helene (Camille Cottin) and Konstantin (Kim Bodnia), the latter in typically tragic and pointless fashion, but the idea that the two leads would meet and clash with the shadowy organization known as The Twelve was still looming.
Still, Villanelle’s gory encounter (after greeting her victims with “Hello, losers”) played out as part of a murky musical number, offering little insight into exactly what was being done to whom.
Then, in the moment of triumph, an anonymous gunshot rang out, sending Eve and a wounded Villanelle into the water, where more random shots finished off the latter. (In hindsight, it’s a shame she endured the healing from being hit in the back with an arrow in a previous episode just to be dispatched like that.)
As for Eve, she surfaced, but it was hard not to think, “Well, now what?” We’ll never know (or at least, hopefully never), because the big capital letters “THE END” rolled across the screen, in case anyone was confused.
By the end, as Eve noted, the title character bore little resemblance to the reserved, office-bound MI6 worker she was when the series began, alluding to her various exploits and marveling, “Amazingly, I survived,” adding, “By than?”
Despite the strength of the cast, that last bit was a question that seasons three and four didn’t answer satisfactorily. Like Eve, indeed, as the ending underscored, “Killing Eve” might have survived, but it came to bear little resemblance to the defining qualities that set the show apart when it began.