Killing Eve Season 3 Review

Look, ma’am/sir, I’m very thankful you brought her in so we could identify what the problem is, but there’s just nothing we can do. I’m sorry: Killing Eve is dying. No, no, the BBC hasn't cancelled her just yet. But she’s just not what she once was. Let’s talk through her symptoms, shall we?

I should start by saying that the first season of Killing Eve, showrun by Fleabag’s Phoebe Waller-Bridge, is one of my favorite seasons of television, point blank. It’s a dramatic, hilarious, and altogether delicious cocktail of an assassin story, and I’ll never tire of it. Every line out of Villanelle’s mouth is deviously crisp and on-point, and the crossroad between Eve Polastri’s morbid fascinations and moral scruples makes her even more interesting a character. The plot is relatively simple, which gives the show the room it needs to explore its characters and the dynamics between them, which is really essential in a show like Killing Eve, wherein the relationship between Eve and Villanelle is itself the story engine. Showrunner Emerald Fennell’s season two, while it stumbled quite a bit, being much more plot-centric and much more Villanelle-centric, was still enjoyable to watch. Showrunner Suzanne Heathcote’s season three, though, is a stab in the chest to a once-great show, now bleeding out.

Entirely enveloped in plot while also stuffing new characters down the audience’s throat, season three is a truly exceptional and disastrous case study in why showrunners (ie. the head writers of a show who oversee every stage of the show’s production) should not vary too heavily season-to-season. Another new showrunner, Laura Neal, has already begun work on the show’s fourth season, and while I have a sliver of hope she’ll be able to revive this mess of a now government agency thriller as opposed to the dark assassin comedy it originally served as, it’s also very likely Neal’s differing perspective from Heathcote, Fennell before her, and Waller-Bridge before her, will lead to the season feeling jarringly inordinate. Disney’s Star Wars sequel trilogy is a great example of this principle. By giving Rian Johnson a film in the middle of two JJ Abramses and not having the foresight and good sense to map out the larger story of the trilogy, 2017’s The Last Jedi and 2019’s The Rise of Skywalker felt like direct, sloppy rebukes of their respective antecedents. Suzanne Heathcote has infamously said that there’s so much material to work with in Killing Eve that if Eve and Villanelle were to kill each other, the show could go on without them. This sparked outrage amongst fans of the show, not just because of their love of Eve and Villanelle’s characters and character dynamic, but because it’s a Freudian (or shall I say, Johnsonian) slip that reveals something key to understanding Heathcote’s approach to show and why it feels so heavy-handed: Heathcote does not see Killing Eve as a show about a hitwoman and an MI6 agent, she sees it as a show about a network of hitwomen and the MI6.

Beyond the increased emphasis on Carolyn, with her and her uninteresting government going-ons and equally uninteresting daughter becoming central to the plot, introduction of a new half-baked cast of characters including the insufferable Dasha, and general misplaced sensibilities, especially plot-wise and tonally, Heathcote’s idea of what the show’s story engine is also leads season three of Killing Eve to commit what I feel is its most grievous sin: Eve has been cast to the sidelines. Yes, Eve Polastri, the titular character portrayed by Sandra Oh, the show’s top-billed cast member, now plays second fiddle to, gets half the screen time of, and gets a quarter of the character development as Villanelle, who, though she is one of the show’s two leads, is not the protagonist of the story, culminating most egregiously in an episode where Eve, the main character, does not appear once. Apart from how graceless this move is in all senses, it’s another Johnsonian slip in the worst way -- moving spotlight and care away from characters of color and primarily towards white characters, a move which, since the second season, has very much been in motion. I don’t believe it’s an intentionally malicious move on behalf of Killing Eve’s writing room, but I will say that the show has always placed emphasis on having women behind the scenes, especially in the writer’s room, because this a very distinctly female story and women will always have more interesting things to say about women than men will. Why then, does Killing Eve not apply the same perspective on the front that its main character is Asian-American? This in mind, you can surely understand why the Killing Eve Twitter posting a screenshot of a Zoom call between its all-white writing team would get backlash.

So, ma’am/sir, she’s in pretty bad shape. We’ll have Dr. Neal operate, but there are no guarantees it'll be successful. It’s her first day on the job with a show like this and as we’ve just gone over, she and her team don’t have exactly the right tools to fix Killing Eve. Still, let’s pray she’ll be able to bring her back to health.