SPOILER WARNING: This story contains details from the series finale of BBC America’s Killing Eve.
TV finals are an incredibly tough beast – just ask the team behind The Sopranos or Lost.
The finale of BBC America’s Killing Eve also drew criticism from fans who were disappointed with how the series fared in its final episode, which aired earlier this month, in which Villanelle is gunned down and killed.
However, the author of the original material, Luke Jennings, hoped to ease fan dissatisfaction by stating that “Villanelle is alive,” at least on paper.
“I learned the outcome of the last episode in advance and rightly suspected that fans would be upset. But to these fans I would say this: Villanelle is alive. And on the page, if not on the screen, she will be back,” he wrote in the Guardian.
Jennings added that he felt the fourth-season finale “bend to convention,” saying that he believed a “truly subversive plot would have defied the trope that sees same-sex lovers in television dramas as only the most fleeting of relationships.” before any of them are allowed to be killed.”
“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 ‘fame’: her subversiveness, her ferocious power, her insistence on the beautiful Things; matters. This is the Villanelle I wrote that turned Phoebe into a screen character and that Jodie walked so beautifully with,” he added.
Earlier this month, Killing Eve executive producer Sally Gentle told Deadline that they knew what was going to happen in the final episode “pretty early on” and that it “never really changed.”
“Considering that Villanelle has always worked in a high-risk industry, it was kind of inevitable. We were very excited about the arc for this season, feeling like Villanelle had embraced humanity. Her selfless pushing of Eve over the side of the boat was something we felt connected to where she started in episode one, trying to prove to other people that she could be a good person,” Gentle said. “It also felt right that Eve should survive as some kind of extraordinary woman, that she should be reborn from the kind of extraordinary accomplishments and adventures that she’s had.”