At the wildly pumping heart of the show is the crazy dance between the two women. As Fiona Shaw,who played magnificently cryptic MI6 veteran Carolyn Martens,remarked of the central relationship in a 2019 interview with this masthead:“It is an act of imagination,rather than psychology,isn’t it?”
Her delightfully dry and quietly controlling character became one of the show’s reliable assets,as did Villanelle’s first “handler”,the avuncular yet deadly Konstantin (Kim Bodnia),a puppet master with a big laugh and a gift for self-serving shape-shifting.
Killing Eve merrily toys with the spy genre and,even though the initial reception was rapturous,that kind of buzz is like lightning in a bottle:electrifying but hard to sustain,especially when the novelty wears off. Almost inevitably,it leads to second-season syndrome and the regretful assessment that the show has lost its spark,that the follow-up isn’t a patch on the initial offering.
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Now,after four seasons (the last available on ABC iview and theprevious ones on Stan),and as Villanelle and Eve have danced their final tango,it’s reasonable to reflect on what the once red-hot spy thriller has given us overall.
The fourth season opens with the central quartet moving in different directions. Villanelle is plagued by unfamiliar and uncomfortable pangs of conscience and notions of wanting to be “good”. She’s seeking redemption through Christianity and,as anyone familiar with her history might predict,the conversion is unlikely to last.
A freshly confident and resolute Eve is working for a private-security firm and partnered personally and professionally with Yusuf (Robert Gilbert). She remains intent on tracking down the members of the covert organisation known as The Twelve,which had employed Villanelle and Konstantin and was responsible for a number of grisly murders,including that of Eve’s boss and her husband.