“Killing Eve is a spy story, a murder mystery, a spellbinding character drama, and a gloriously wicked comedy.”
That was, perhaps, the best, most-accurate one-review sentence of the British TV series that inspired murder suspect Lawrence Warunge to kill his family in Kiambu last week.
According to police reports, the 22-year-old university student accused of killing four family members and a farm worker at their home in Kiambu told detectives that he searched online on the best way to execute the murderous plan and stumbled upon the series, in which a character known as Eve is tasked with hunting down a heartless psychopathic assassin. He said it was after watching the TV series that he settled on a metal rod and a nine-inch dagger as his murder weapons
Written by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, these adaptions of the novellas by Luke Jennings follow the harrowing chase by MI5 security officer Eve (Sandra Oh) for the international assassin, who goes by the codename Villanelle (Jodie Comer).
The BBC America thriller starts with Eve, the happily-married deskbound agent, becoming obsessed with Villanelle. Villanelle is obsessed with Eve, too, and their cat-and-mouse chase is really more like two cats circling each other.
It thrillingly puts women in positions usually reserved for men, or at least, where one man would normally be involved.
And even though women are often the victims in crime dramas such as these, here the tables are again turned. Villanelle, real name Oksana, does not get to choose her targets, but she does delight in killing them in creative ways.
Villanelle is exceptionally good at her job, as she takes on new assignments from her father-figure handler Konstantin (Kim Bosnia) to perform bloody murders around the world. She’s a psychopath, but she’s also strange, funny, playful, and astonishingly sincere.
Eve is then recruited by MI6 bigwig Carolyn Martens (Fiona Shaw) to continue her investigation in secret. Eve recruits some of her favourite former co-workers at MI5, Bill Pargrave and Elena Felton, to join her team.
Eve is also remarkably good at her job, intelligent, and possesses a sense of humour.
And like any good detective-killer relationship, the two reflect each other’s best and worst traits.
At some point in the first season, Villanelle leaves a job undone: Nadia, her fellow assassin and ex-lover, is still alive and being held in a Russian prison.
Konstantin sends Villanelle to finish Nadia off, but here’s where things get tricky: in addition to being a handler for the mysterious organisation known as “The Twelve”, he’s also Russian intelligence officer and a friend of Carolyn Martens’.
As Eve and Villanelle continue to encounter one another in the first season, they become part of a much larger conspiracy that suggests they may not actually be on opposing sides - a reason that the show continues to the subsequent seasons.
Season one ends in Villanelle's Paris apartment where it seems as though Eve’s and Villanelle’s mutual attraction is finally about to bubble over. And it does, with Eve stabbing Villanelle in the stomach.
The ghostly organisations they ultimately work for might be more closely connected than expected, and it is something both women begin to uncover in their own ways as the seasons continue.
Eve’s husband, Niko, becomes estranged from her in the second season, and eventually leaves their matrimonial home to stay with his co-worker, Gemma, who Villanelle eventually kills - sending Niko to a psychiatric ward.
The third season sees Eve circling the drain. After Villanelle leaves her for dead in the second season, which was written by Emerald Fennell, she has no idea what to do with her life next. Her husband - fed-up with her obsession over her job - skips the country, her job at MI-6 is long gone, and her only friend is suddenly dead. She ends up with a job as a prep cook in a Korean restaurant in suburban London.
Left with nothing, she turns to the only solid thing she had before it all fell apart: her obsession with Villanelle. Since Villanelle believes Eve to be dead, she is free to move on and into new, richer story avenues.
But Eve has nothing else, and so goes back to Villanelle, over and over again, hoping to find something new. Soon, she is once again on the trail of the criminal conspiracy known as the Twelve, with the reluctant help of journalists at an online magazine named The Bitter Pill.
Meanwhile, Villanelle also investigates her family history, reluctantly confronts her most pointed fears about herself, and pushes for a promotion auditioning for a management job by carrying out a series of killings under the supervision of a new handler, a former Russian gymnastics coach played by Harriet Walter.
But when the two finally do come back together in the season finale to their baseline of mutual infatuation, both relieved to see each other, circumstances force them to walk away from each other - quite literally.
The irony in all of it, and what makes other critics now call the show ‘stale and predictable’, is that all season, Villanelle wants to switch sides and Eve wants a more adventurous life — they’re a match made in heaven, and they’re hopelessly attracted to one another.
