#also love that everyone refers to eve and villanelle as girlfriends | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

starring-movies · 4 years ago

Text

Killing Eve: Episode Analysis

*SPOILERS*

Season 3, Episode 7 - Beautiful Monster

We begin the episode with Villanelle, who is waiting to meet with Hélène, after the sloppy kill in Romania. As she’s waiting, we get some close-up shots of Villanelle and a suit of armour, which she tells Hélène “was really staring at me”. The close-up shots are repeated from S2E5, where they portrayed the ‘watcher’ and the one ‘being watched’. In S2E5, Villanelle was the one who was ‘the watcher’ (i.e. the one with the power and in control); whereas in this scene, Villanelle has now become the one ‘being watched’ (she has now lost the control in her life and job that she previously had).

As we see Villanelle waiting for Hélène, within the shot of Villanelle we can see 8 swords behind her, the imagery of which invokes the tarot card, the ‘Eight of Swords’. After looking it up here, the ‘Eight of Swords’ card is “a symbol of the limiting thoughts, beliefs and mindset that prevent her from moving forward in her life. However, look closer: if the woman removed her blindfold, she would quickly realise that she can escape her predicament by letting go of her limiting beliefs and establishing a new, more empowered mindset. The water pooled at her feet suggests that her intuition might see what her eyes cannot”.

This imagery is very apt for Villanelle’s current situation; as she’s feeling the limitations due to the lack of freedom that she’s realised she has, together with her entrapment in working for The Twelve. The spears are also positioned to look like they’re coming out of Villanelle, which illustrates to us how she’s on the mental offence and trying to protect her current vulnerabilities and fragility from what happened in Russia, from Hélène.

A song (most likely an unreleased Unloved song) with the repeated lyrics, “into the fire”, is used in this scene. Paired with the suits of armour and weaponry in the scene’s shot, we are shown how Villanelle is metaphorically going “into the fire” and beginning a battle against The Twelve for her freedom.

When Villanelle goes in for her meeting with Hélène, there are more swords and suits of armour around the room and behind Villanelle, further emphasising the entrapment she’s in. A Dutch tilt angle is also briefly used, and it’s only used on Villanelle. The Dutch tilt was last used for Villanelle in S3E2, to show her disorientation and shock after finding out that Eve was alive. However, it’s used in this scene to reflect Villanelle’s unease at having to attend this meeting with Hélène.

We also get a call back to S1E7 in this scene with Hélène. Hélène commandingly tells Villanelle to “sit down”, just as Anton repeatedly did back in S1E7. With Anton, Villanelle refused to sit down and disobeyed his orders; however with Hélène, Villanelle knows that she is outmatched, and so reluctantly has to comply with the command.

Hélène then proceeds to press on the wound on Villanelle’s arm, but then quickly embraces her. This is Hélène’s attempt both at a power play and at manipulating Villanelle. She does this as an act, to show Villanelle that she’s more powerful than her and can easily hurt her if she wants to; but also wants to give the impression that she can provide the ‘motherly’ protection and care that she knows Villanelle is in search for.

Villanelle responds to this act in typical Villanelle fashion, by appearing like she was going to reveal what happened (“I did something bad to my mother”), but then deflecting (“I took a shit in her shoe when I was three, a really big one”). She does the exact same thing as this with the psychologist fromThe Twelve in S1E2, when she is confronted with a picture of ‘Anna’ she says it’s not Anna but her mother, but then says she was joking because her mother had “really thin, shitty hair”; and she also does it in S1E5 when Eve asks her what happened and she agrees saying “okay”, but again diverting by saying “can we get one thing clear before we go on with this? Is that a sweater attached to a shirt?”.

Villanelle uses her comment to Hélène, where she thanks her “for the inappropriate touching” and tells her “god, you’re sexy”, to try to maintain her facade to Hélène that nothing’s wrong with her and also that she saw through her ‘caring mother’ act.

This is the second episode of Season 3, the other being S3E2, where different title cards are used. In S3E2, the title cards were on a red background (the colour of Villanelle’s outfit in Rome), but this time they’re on a green background (the colour of Eve’s outfit in Rome). The red colour for Villanelle was used in S3E2, as that episode was the liminal one for her character development. It was in that episode where she began to try to climb the ladder to becoming a Keeper in The Twelve, subsequently becomes discontented from the realisation that she’s been tricked and also that she doesn’t have the freedom she thought she had. Whereas it’s this episode that is the liminal moment for Eve, where she finally fully accepts and embraces her “monster”.

The title cards are also emblematic in showing us the progress of Eve and Villanelle’s journey to becoming “the same” as each other. From S3E2 to S3E7, the black circle with Sandra Oh’s [Eve] name in it becomes slightly larger, symbolising Eve’s “darkness” becoming more prominent. From S3E2 to S3E7, the black splodge with Jodie Comer’s [Villanelle] name in it becomes significantly smaller, symbolising her growing humanity and her receding “darkness”. In S3E7, the black circles with Sandra Oh and Jodie Comer’s names in them have also become the same size as each other, indicating that Eve and Villanelle have finally come to a point where they are “the same” and managed to reach an equilibrium.

The song ‘Look What You Made Me Do’ by Jack Leopards & The Dolphin Club (thought to be an alias for Taylor Swift to righty release the song under her own ownership), is played during the title cards. The lyrics we hear are:

“I don’t like your little games,

I don’t like your tilted stage,

I don’t like you,

I got smarter, I got harder, in the nick of time,

Honey rose up from the dead,

I do it all the time,

Look what you made me do,

Look what you just made me do,

Look what you made me do,

No, I don’t like you”

The song is appropriate for Villanelle, as it emphasises her feelings and struggle against The Twelve. She doesn’t like the “little games” they’re playing with her and she “got smarter” in realising how she was being manipulating by them.

In the next scene we see Eve having a meting with Carolyn to discuss their progress with finding out what happened to Kenny. As usual Eve brings the focus back around to Villanelle and Carolyn retorts that Eve should “do well to remember heroes only get the girl in Hollywood”. It’s clear that everyone else can see Eve’s obsession and attraction to Villanelle, except Eve herself. Kenny calls Villanelle “your girlfriend” to Eve in S1E8 and Hugo picks up on it, asking Eve “what’s the deal with you and Villanelle... why is it? Do you like watching her, or do you like being watched?”.

We then get a scene of Eve, Bear and Jamie in the Bitter Pill office, as they try to track down Villanelle. Eve starts speaking to the bakery that Villanelle ordered the bus cake from, to try to get her personal information. Before Bear tells Eve he’s found the information that she was looking for, she was about to use Niko’s pitchforking to pity the bakery worker into giving her the information. This shows us how, although Eve does have love Niko, he has always been disposable and able to be pushed aside in Eve’s life, in favour of the things she values as more important (like her job or in this case, Villanelle). It also shows us how Eve just uses Niko, she was using him before to maintain her facade of having a normal life and now she’s using his tragic maiming to find Villanelle. This additionally shows us Eve’s relentlessness and how she has no moral boundaries for what she is willing to say or do to try to track down Villanelle.

When Villanelle and Dasha are in the hotel in Aberdeen, they have a conversation in the hotel lift. Just like Hélène did at the beginning of the episode, Dasha presses on Villanelle’s wound, as a power play. However, unlike with Hélène, Villanelle knows that she can ‘one-up’ Dasha and they start trying to take digs at one another.

Villanelle tells Dasha - who we know, from her tracksuits, her necklace with a ‘D’ on it, and the fact that she refers to herself in the third person, that she is incredibly self centred - that Russia has changed since she lived there and that there will no one waiting for her to return home, but she will only be greeted by “indifference”. Hélène told Dasha in S3E4 that “people would be dancing in the street and chanting your name, ‘Dasha, Dasha, Dasha’”; so Villanelle telling her that people will be indifferent about her returning to Russia would dent her ego a little bit.

In response to this, Dasha bites back by saying that she doesn’t care about a “hero’s welcome” and if she wants stroganoff, she says “my son can make it”. We then suddenly get extreme close-up shots of Villanelle and Dasha, because Villanelle “didn’t know [Dasha] had a son”. The extreme close-ups continue as Dasha continues to push the knife in further, by saying that she will die with her feet up and holding her son’s hand, but that Villanelle will die alone because she destroyed her family.

Although Villanelle and Dasha don’t get along (and Dasha tried to kill Villanelle once), Villanelle still most likely views Dasha as a mother figure of sorts. Dasha mentioned that Villanelle was “dumped” on her when she had “mosquito bites for breasts”, which tells us that they’ve known each other for a very long time and that Dasha (just like Konstantin) would have had a part in raising Villanelle. In S3E4, Dasha starts cleaning up Villanelle’s things telling her “you don’t deserve nice things if you don’t look after them”, just as a mother would. Also in S3E1 Dasha also makes a big deal about how proud she is of Villanelle, saying “you’re so talented, you’re the best I ever trained, you’re destined for greatness”; and telling Eve in S3E6 how “I created her, I took raw shit and moulded it into steel, I broke her back, I give her wings”.

Villanelle will be aware that she’s like Dasha’s prodigy. So for Villanelle to suddenly find out that Dasha has a son, and she’s not like the child that Dasha never had, it’s yet another disappointment and loss of a maternal figure and/or family for Villanelle. The sudden use of the extreme close-ups just accentuates and draws our attention to Villanelle’s emotional reaction to this realisation and Dasha’s enjoyment in her suffering.

However, Villanelle hides any hint that she’s been effected by what Dasha has told her and instead comments, unfazed, about Dasha’s halitosis (which is bad breath) - again another remark that knocks Dasha’s ego.

We then see Villanelle and Dasha on the golf course in Aberdeen, observing the target they’ve been sent to kill. Villanelle is wearing the green hairy outfit, literally embodying the “beautiful monster” that Hélène said she was. However, although Villanelle fulfils the role of the “beautiful monster” on the outside; by deciding to not kill the target and letting him run away instead, she doesn’t actually end up fulfilling the role of being the “monster” that Hélène said she was.

Dasha also comments to Villanelle about how she will miss “that feeling you get when you snuff out a life, when you can see your own eyes reflected in dilated pupils, when you can count the number of breaths they have left on one hand”. This is something that we’ve seen Villanelle enjoy a number of times: the Greco kill in Tuscany S1E1, the Carla De Mann kill in Paris in S1E2 and the Fat Panda kill in Berlin in S1E3.

When Eve finds Dasha on the golf course while in pursuit of Villanelle, Dasha makes a comment about Niko’s moustache being “like Stalin”, which prompts Eve to kill Dasha by crushing her chest. We see the same expression from Eve, which we saw from Villanelle at the Tuscany kill in S1E1, as she revels in “that feeling you get when you snuff out a life” that dAsha was describing. Similarly, we also see Dasha’s enjoyment as she watches Eve and vicariously feels her experience “that feeling”, from killing her.

After Villanelle hit Dasha with the golf club and is waiting for Konstantin to pick her up, the song ‘Watch Your Back’ by The Coathangers. The lyrics:

“I’m stuck here,

No way out,

Back, you can never go back,

You can never go back,

No, no, no”

The lyrics of the song demonstrate how Villanelle now has “no way out” and “can never go back”. By ‘killing’ Dasha she’s now made her choice and will never be able to return to working for The Twelve and has to find a way to move forward now instead.

The song also relates to Eve, who similarly “can never go back”, after having a hand in killing Dasha and finding enjoyment in the act of doing so (unlike when she killed Raymond). Once Eve has fully released and embraced her “monster”, she can never return to the life of normalcy she once had.

Just like how Eve was about to use Niko’s pitchforking to get the information she wants, she also does it again when the American target tries to get help from her. The American man asks for help to escape from Villanelle, but Eve just repeatedly asks him what the girl looked like, and then proceeds to push him out of the car so that she can peruse Villanelle. It shows us Eve’s frenzy and focus on trying to find Villanelle and not caring about anything, or anyone else, at all.

‘I See Darkness’ by Red Mecca also starts to play as Eve crushes Dasha’s chest. The lyrics we hear are:

“Just as time,

Wonder why,

I see darkness in you,

Lose my breath,

Alone with you,

I see shadows of you”

The last time this song was used, was for Villanelle’s mother in S3E5. The song is used in this instance, to again show how Eve has come to a turning point and a point where her “darkness” is fully rearing it’s head. As the song is used for Eve’s darkness while she kills Dasha, the use of the song for Villanelle’s mother to connect the two scenes, supports the thought that Tatiana may have also been a killer (and most likely killed Villanelle’s father).

When Villanelle and Eve narrowly miss each other at the train station in Scotland after Konstantin had his heart attack; an unreleased song, presumably by Unloved is played over the scene. The lyrics we can hear are:

“I once had a love,

Or did love have me,

It set me free,

It set me free”

The song encapsulates Villanelle and Eve’s relationship: do they love each other or are they at the whim of Love, being consumed and controlled by it? Whatever the answer may be, they can both say that the love they have for one another put them on a journey that has “set [them] free”. Eve has come to accept her “monster” and Villanelle’s eyes have been opened to the lack of freedom she has in her life.

In the final scene of the episode, at Liverpool Street train station in London, Eve gets a phone call from Villanelle. We get a wide shot of Eve as the camera pans away from her, which is a shot that is repeated with Villanelle in the tea dance scene in S3E8. The wide shots are used to highlight Eve and Villanelle’s isolation when they’re not together; when Villanelle and Eve aren’t together, they have no-one else who is there for them. The shots are also used to illustrate to us how everything else in the work pales into insignificance when they’re together; there can be so many other people around and so many other things happening, but their sole focus is on one another - the rest of the world continues to turn but their worlds’ stop when they’re without the other.

You can read my previous Killing Eve posts here:-

First Introduction to Villanelle

First Introduction to Eve

S1, E1 - Nice Face

S1, E2 - I’ll Deal With Him Later

S1, E3 - Don’t I Know You?

S1, E4 - Sorry Baby

S1, E5 - I Have a Thing about Bathrooms

S1, E6 - Take Me to the Hole!

S1, E7 - I Don’t Want to Be Free

S1, E8 - God, I’m Tired

S2, E1 - Do You Know How to Dispose of a Body?

S2, E2 - Nice and Neat

S2, E3 - The Hungry Caterpillar

S2, E4 - Desperate Times

S2, E5 - Smell Ya Later

S2, E6 - I Hope You Like Missionary!

S2, E7 - Wide Awake

S2, E8 - You’re Mine

S3, E1 - Slowly Slowly Catchy Monkey

S3, E2 - Management Sucks

S3, E3 - Meetings Have Biscuits

S3, E4 - Still Got It

S3, E5 - Are You From Pinner? [Part 1]

S3, E5 - Are You From Pinner? [Part 2]

S3, E6 - End of Game

S3, E8 - Are You Leading or Am I? [Part 1]

——————————————————————————

28 notes · View notes

starring-movies · 4 years ago

Text

Killing Eve: Episode Analysis

*SPOILERS*

Season 3, Episode 1 - Slowly Slowly Catchy Monkey

The first episode of Season 3 begins about 6 months after the events in Rome, from the end of the last season, and starts with Villanelle getting married to a woman named Maria - now Villanelle doesn’t have a job, she needs a way to support herself financially so she does this via Maria.

During her wedding speech, Villanelle refers to Eve as “my ex”. In S2E1 when she was speaking to Gabriel in the hospital, she also referred to Eve as “my girlfriend”. Both of these instances show us how Villanelle has considered that she and Eve were in a ‘relationship’ of some sort for all this time.

When Villanelle finds that Dasha has turned up to her “special day”, the same shots are repeated from S2E3. Villanelle runs up to Dasha and then tackles her to the ground, which is shot in the same way as when Villanelle runs up to Konstantin and then hugs him in S2E3. The choice to repeat the same shots is implemented to emphasise the difference in Villanelle’s relationship with Konstantin and Dasha (both people who had a big impact on Villanele while she was growing up) - after being separated from Konstantin, Villanelle fondly hugs him; but after being apart from Dasha for so long, Villanelle feels nothing but anger towards her.

When Villanelle is reunited with Dasha, after Dasha crashed Villanelle’s wedding, she keeps calling Villanelle “Oksana” and so Villanelle tells her “you call me, Villanelle”. This is small but clever little detail. Through just this act of Dasha calling Villanelle the wrong name, we are told that Dasha, like Anna, (who also calls her Oksana) is obviously someone who Villanelle knew a long time ago in her past, before she adopted the name ‘Villanelle’.

We are then reintroduced to Eve, who is doing her shopping in a Korean supermarket in New Malden, London. Not only is Eve buying junk food to stress eat, like she did with the sweets in S2E1, but the convenience food also has a deeper significance. When Eve was with Niko he was always the one who cooked, but now that they’ve separated, Eve doesn’t have anyone to cook for her, so she has to buy things like instant noodles because her lifestyle has changed.

While Eve is paying for her groceries, the woman at the checkout of the Korean supermarket is having a conversation with her friend, where she says “nothing says Romance like Rome” and that she wants to eat “spaghetti” the whole time she’s there. “Spaghetti” is what Eve told Villanelle she’d like her to cook for dinner in S2E8, and the comment that “nothing says Romance like Rome” could have been true for Villanelle and Eve, but for them Rome means tragedy and heartbreak instead.

We also find out that Eve has taken a job in a Korean restaurant. She’s decided to recoil back into the comfort of her culture, where people speak her mother language and eat food that she’s familiar with (and probably associates with home and family). In the restaurant her job is making the dumplings, which is a repetitive, mindless task, just like when we saw Eve chopping the vegetables for the roast chicken in S2E1.

Eve copes with her trauma in the same way as she did in S2E1, after she shot Villanelle. Not only does she do the repetitive tasks, but she also watches “It’s Not Just Shopping”, which is a teleshopping programme, just like how she listened to Armando trying (and succeeding) to sell her some “really expensive windows”.

However, although she is coping with the two situations in the same way, there is also a big difference between the Eve we see in the beginning of Season 2, and the Eve we see in the beginning of Season 3. In Season 2 Eve allowed herself, and was eager, to be sucked back into chasing after Villanelle when Carolyn recruited her again; whereas in Season 3, Eve is stronger and has a certain defiance in her actions. In Season 3 Eve tells her boss she doesn’t want to work in the front of the restaurant, but wants to remain in the kitchen, even though that means less money and more work. Eve also tells Carolyn, when she comes to see her at the restaurant, that she has no interest in Villanelle and trying to find her again, and it is only to investigate Kenny’s death that she decides to return to working with her.

In the office of the boss of the Korean restaurant, a Korean programme where a man gets shot in the head by a woman in playing on the TV behind her. When Eve is on the bus, there is also someone reading a book called “Vixen’s Bite”, with a woman with a gun on the front cover - Eve cannot seem to escape being reminded of Villanelle and of being shot by her.

We are then reintroduced to Kenny, at his new job being an investigative journalist at the ‘Bitter Pill’. Kenny has a conversation with Bear, where he says “well, remind me not to rely on you for anything”; which turns out not to be true, as in S3E8 Bear is the one who finds out Konstantin came to visit Kenny on the day he died.

When Eve is at home, she sends a message to Kenny of a picture of a loo roll. This is a call back to S1E2 when Kenny shows Eve to the toilets at the Trafalgar Office and tells her “it’s best that you bring in your own [loo roll] or it just disappears, how many sheets do you need?”.

After receiving Eve’s message, Kenny goes over to Eve’s apartment and during their conversation he asks her “are you still in touch with, er...” (meaning Niko), and Eve immediately thought Kenny was referring to Villanelle. Eve’s trying to convince herself (and everyone else) that she’s over Villanelle, not interested in her and not thinking about her; but the fact that Eve immediately jumps to thinking that Kenny is referring to Villanelle, and not her husband, shows that this is definitely not the case.

In this scene, she is also wearing the grey T-shirt with birds on it that belonged to Niko, he is seen wearing it in S1E1. However, we only see Eve wearing it when she wants comfort; like after Bill’s death in S1E4, and now in this episode when she’s recovering from what happened to her in Rome.

Later on, when Eve goes to visit Niko at the psychiatric facility, she brings him a bag of fruit pastels, but tells him that she already “ate the green ones for you”. Although Eve probably did this as a caring gesture (since Eve ate them, it’s implied Niko doesn’t like the green ones), it emphasises how Niko still can’t manage to gain control over his own life. Niko wasn’t given the opportunity to try the “green ones” (he may have changed his mind and started to like them) or leave them in the bag himself, Eve had already made the executive decision for him and he wasn’t given the choice to eat the bag of sweets how he wanted to eat them.

Eve eating the green fruit pastels for Niko could also be an indication that this was something that she used to do for him when they were first married/more happily married. If you take this view, then it could be that Eve is trying to simulate how things were previously, or she is being presumptuous that Niko wants things to go back to how they were - but he goes to Poland without telling Eve, so we can see he wants a new start.

Whilst working in the Korean restaurant’s kitchen, there are two men working behind Eve, who’s conversation mirrors Eve’s relationship with Villanelle. One of the men initially says to the other man, “first it was infatuation, this is love”. This definitely reflects how Villanelle’s relationship with Eve was portrayed; it began as Villanelle’s obsession with Eve because she had hair like Anna, but by the end of Season 2 she claims that it has gone beyond “infatuation” and that she does truly love Eve. This was probably also true for Eve, also beginning as an “infatuation” in Villanelle because she is an assassin, but then developing into a deeper sense of love; but at the end of Season 2, Eve was not ready to come to terms with her feelings, and Villanelle hadn’t reached the point of realising what loving Eve really is.

The next time the two men are having a conversation, Eve interjects by telling the man “you’re not even crying because of her, you’re crying because... because you feel stupid, because you were stupid”. This is obviously how Eve feels about what happened with her and Villanelle - she’s not upset because of Villanelle necessarily, but more because she feels that she was stupid. The same thing most likely applies to Villanelle as well, she probably feels stupid for loving Eve, and admitting to loving Eve, when she thought that she was someone “special”.