Is it possible to tell when a television programme has been masterminded by a woman? And if so, what is it that gives you the clue? There can be no hard-and-fast rules, of course, but if you had to put money on it, how would you know? Sometimes the subject matter gives you an inkling, or the characterisation. Sometimes it’s woven into the set design – a packet of Canesten in a woman’s bathroom, perhaps – but sometimes the clue comes from the dialogue itself, particularly when women are talking to each other. In a scene from the penultimate episode of Killing Eve, Eve is offered a piece of cake by another middle-aged woman. The woman, Anna, offers it not by asking “do you want some cake”, but “do you eat cake?”, a subtle difference but one heavy with the sad reality of the relationship that society encourages women to have with food. Details like this are everywhere in Killing Eve, like footprints on a forest floor. Ah, yes: a woman has been here.
Killing Eve is the latest series from Phoebe Waller-Bridge, whose debut show Fleabag thrilled viewers with its scratchy and complicated central character, also played by the creator. This time, Waller-Bridge is adapting a novella series called Codename Villanelle by Luke Jenning’s, and is only behind the camera. Instead our protagonist is Eve (Sandra Oh), an MI5 officer who finds herself on the trail of an elusive assassin known as Villanelle. As she closes in on her, Eve becomes increasingly obsessed with her target, and Villanelle with her in turn.
The genius of Killing Eve is that its central scenario, the cat-and-mouse police procedural, consistently sets you up to expect certain tropes that it then curtly declines to provide. Let’s look at Eve to begin with. Sandra Oh is a Canadian-Asian woman in her mid-forties: improbable vitals for a protagonist on today’s television screens. At first we think we have the measure of Eve. She is appealingly unpolished, cramming emergency croissant into her mouth during an important meeting and juggling the humdrum demands of her life both in the workplace and in the home. But as the series goes on, we see that she doesn’t fit in any existing mould for this kind of character. It’s Eve’s husband, not Eve, who feels left behind by his wife’s exciting job, he who nourishes her with food: makes a stew, makes a shepherd’s pie, suggests a curry to smooth things over. She is unprofessional, obsessive, and frequently cold. Strikingly, given that Eve is not a mother, it is never explained why she isn’t, or implied that she ought to be at her age.
Eve’s intuition that the assassin they are looking for is a woman kick-starts the entire investigation. And Villanelle uses the gendered way people perceive her to her own advantage. An elderly Tuscan target mistakes her for a sex worker he’s expecting. She gets into a bathroom to kill a French politician by telling a male member of staff that she has been instructed to bring ‘madame’ a tampon. Villanelle plays up her femininity to throw people off her scent, wearing a hot-pink chiffon meringue of a dress to a psychological assessment. Then there is Carolyn Marten, head of the Russia Section at MI6, played in a stone-cold deadpan by Fiona Shaw. Much of the series’s humour comes from Carolyn, who subverts the idea of the hard-nosed spymaster by coming out with quietly absurd observations, such as that she once saw a rat drinking a can of Coke in the street outside the office “with two hands”.
Eve and Villanelle each have a man close to them in a professional context: for Eve it is her co-worker Bill, for Villanelle her handler Konstantin. What first looks like a potentially sexist and casually abrasive relationship between Eve and Bill, in which he is uncomfortable working below a woman, softens and expands into one of believable support. Bill is, in fact, not a misogynist but a queer working father whom we see carrying his baby during a “childcare emergency”, seemingly a routine part of his life. Villanelle has the upper hand in her relationship with Konstantin, whom she manipulates by infantilising herself in order to control his sympathies. Both these relationships are explicitly non-sexual, which is important, because all of the sexual tension in Killing Eve is between women.
A number of Villanelle’s past and present women partners appear in the series, and the attraction between Eve and the woman she’s hunting is unquestionably the focus of the show, making the old 007 trope – glamorous bombshell falls in lust with dashing spy – seem deeply uninteresting. On Twitter, Emily Nussbaum argued that Villanelle might be uncomfortably close to the clichéd figure of the lesbian psycho/killer, à la Basic Instinct. Yes, there’s undeniably a link drawn between her sexuality and her drive to kill – she murdered a lover’s male ex by cutting off his penis. But, as elsewhere in Killing Eve, things are more nuanced than they first appear. Eve is not a helpless straight women being hunted by a lesbian predator; she is as willing a participant in the sexual frisson between them as Villanelle is. Many of the characters, as it happens, are queer; sexuality, Killing Eve points out, can have little to do with the way a person behaves or presents themselves. Nadia, Eve and Villanelle are all straight-passing.
The development of Villanelle and Eve’s relationship is carefully plotted. At the beginning, the two women seem to represent opposing poles of high glamour and profound ordinariness. As the episodes progress, we see the two women dancing around each other, developing a mutual obsession and therefore blurring these boundaries: we see Villanelle in Eve’s chaotic kitchen, Eve in Villanelle’s stylish apartment. At first this seems like a classic case of the “opposites attract” rule, but as they grow closer to understanding each other their identities begin to overlap. We notice this first at a surface level: Eve starts to wear the perfume and clothes that Villanelle has given her, Villanelle gives Eve’s name at the hospital, and steals her suitcase. With time, though, their behaviour starts to betray this overlap too: Eve begins to show some of Villanelle’s ruthlessness, and Villanelle some of Eve’s humanity. Their growing interest in each other is sexual, but it is also an expression of two women’s growing self-respect. Eve realises this work is her calling and that she is good at it. Villanelle realises she wants autonomy from her handlers.
But as in Fleabag, no character’s motivations are resolved too easily. Why is Fleabag the way she is? Why is Villanelle? The assassin’s psychopathic proclivities are not explained away by cod psychology. We find out that she’s an orphan with a history of violence and rocky relationships, but these aren’t offered as solutions to her as a problem. We never feel that we have pinned her down: fitting, for a character who spends the eight episodes evading capture. Waller-Bridge shows us again that there doesn’t have to be a neat chain of events, a past trauma, an unresolved issue. Real women, real people, are more complicated than that.
