Warning: this piece contains spoilers from the Killing Eve season four finale.
As an author, it’s a thrill having your work adapted for TV, as my Killing Eve novels were. You’re never going to love everything the screenwriting team does, that’s a given. You’re too close to the characters. You’ve lived with them in your head for far too long. But it’s a thrill to see your story taken in unexpected directions, overlaid with a great soundtrack (thank you David Holmes and Unloved) and dressed fantastically (that unforgettable pink tulle dress by Molly Goddard).
And the actors. Who cares about plot minutiae when you’re watching Jodie Comer and Sandra Oh do their thing, with the sexual tension crackling and the sparks flying? It’s an extraordinary privilege to see your characters brought to life so compellingly. But the final series ending took me aback.
In the last moments of the last episode, just hours after they’ve shared their first proper kiss, Villanelle is brutally gunned down and killed, leaving Eve screaming. We have followed their romance for three and a half years. The charged looks, the tears, the lovingly fetishised wounds, the endlessly deferred consummation. When Phoebe Waller-Bridge and I first discussed Villanelle’s character five years ago, we agreed that she was defined by what Phoebe called her “glory”: her subversiveness, her savage power, her insistence on lovely things. That’s the Villanelle that I wrote, that Phoebe turned into a screen character, and that Jodie ran with so gloriously.
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.
TV folk sometimes see ultra-fans of TV drama as weird and cranky, but for many young people living difficult and isolated lives, a show such as Killing Eve can be a lifeline. I recently heard from a young gay woman living in Russia. “Villanelle means the world to me,” she wrote. “She’s my comfort character, someone I’ve found representation, understanding, freedom, strength and bravery in. And I know that no TV writers can take her away because she’s ours – all of ours – and thanks to your books and our love she will live on forever.”
I learned the outcome of the final episode in advance, and suspected, rightly, that fans would be upset. But to those fans, I would say this: Villanelle lives. And on the page, if not on the screen, she will be back.
