Cat and Mouse
By: Megha Biswas
Tags: Killing Eve, Morality

Villanelle and Eve, one of the many moments of sexual tension.

Cat and Mouse

It is a remarkable time indeed when a high fashion-loving psychopathic assassin (Jodie Comer’s Villanelle) and a happily-married MI5 operative (Sandra Oh’s Eve Polastri) are considered an OTP, or one true pairing. Yet, that is exactly what Phoebe Waller-Bridge achieves as a head writer on Amazon Prime Video’s Killing Eve. The show, centred on two fiercely intelligent women who are inexplicably obsessed with each other, is championed by its continuous pushing of boundaries to the dual end of creating a complex narrative in between the blurred lines of morality and transgression and viewers ultimately rooting for the unlikely match.

While Waller-Bridge is no stranger to transgression (hello, Hot Priest), in Killing Eve, it is less blasphemy and more the social shock from Villanelle’s character being front and centre in the narrative. As the episodes progress, the viewers get more and more comfortable with her cold-bloodedness and utter lack of empathy. The masterful writing of the show allows an investigative look at her psyche and has viewers suspending regimented ideas of good and evil. We laugh with her, are almost endeared when she attempts to show affection in her unconventional ways and very importantly, are angry at society for taking advantage of her and making this monster out of someone that needed community care. A character one would expect to inspire fear and moral repulsion is represented so as to be accepted by the audience — not through normalising murder itself but through insights into her interior complexity.

Villanelle, in the context of one of her killing assignments.

At another level, I suppose, all LGBTQ+ narratives in contemporary art inherently challenge the conventional conservative morality of “heterosexual is good”. In Killing Eve however, the mutual obsession, which is quick to turn into a constantly-hanging-in-air sexual tension, is not just conservatively immoral but also difficult to accept seeing as “an ordinary person” being attracted to someone like Villanelle is a shock to our imagination. While the obsessive nature is perhaps expected of Villanelle, Eve’s character holds up a mirror for the audience. She is held taut by the invisible strings of fidelity to her husband Niko and her thus far normal life and the almost-seductive will to explore the darkness that doubtless resides within her. Caught in this gray, Eve is constantly toeing the line between morality and transgression. Villanelle is Eve’s gateway to exploring her uncharted darkness and with every step towards the former, she strengthens a sexual and social conflict within herself. Even her boldest transgression — basically one way phone sex, — has her holding onto some part of her heterosexual orientation as she gets in the act with a male colleague Hugo while listening to Villanelle by way of an earpiece (“Wide Awake” 35:16–36:36).

Moments before Eve stabs Villanelle.

Despite Eve’s steady dance with her side that is excited by transgression, there is a stark moment of truth when she stabs Villanelle and subsequently believes her to be dead. Her meltdown over the inability to come to terms with her actions is a break in the illusion of the show which has Villanelle actually killing in far more horrifyingly creative ways. That said, Villanelle too has her moments of moral consciousness, they are just adapted to a psychopath’s context of emotional capacity. For an assassin who does not flinch at the body count she leaves in her wake, the closest we get to witnessing raw human emotion from her is when she hesitates before killing her mother. The acknowledgement that her mother is to blame for ingraining the belief that Villanelle has “darkness in her” and dropping her off at an orphanage as a child prompts the readers’ sympathetic eye for a character whose kind we are highly unlikely to have encountered in person. In the scene with her mother, morality and transgression then occur together as despite the mental struggle, she does eventually kill her in order to bring them to justice in her scheme of things (“Are You From Pinner” 34:37–38:40).

Another noteworthy immorality is in the implied fluidity of state and international criminal organisations. While MI6 in the Bond movies is depicted to be on the side of righteousness and preserving national security, in Killing Eve, the prime state organisation is in bed with The Twelve, for which Villanelle works. The inability to get out/stay out of this twisted nexus is evidenced by Villanelle, her handler Konstantin and Eve at some point trying to extricate themselves from their complex and dangerous line of work with great difficulty. This desire in them all is a moral break, a realisation of their normalised reality actually being far from normal.

Eve and Kenny. Alternatively, Eve as viewers upon his rude death.

Finally, at the level of the show too, there is a decided suspension of sentimentality, a transgression from the implied norm of maintaining some regard for sentiment both within the show and outside of it in terms of audience engagement. The former, needless to say, is evident throughout the three seasons but there is indication of no mercy for the viewers’ sake even early on with the death of Bill, Eve’s superior and trusted friend, who is really the first symbol of morality in the show. Kenny (member of the secret MI6 unit Eve is recruited into) is the following moral character whose death is even more painful due to his longer stay in the narrative and the character’s generally likeable creation. Niko Polastri, the only moral character to not have died yet, suffered from PTSD owing to Villanelle and was literally impaled with a pitchfork. The treatment of these characters may thus be read as a rejection of morality in the narrative.

In a nutshell, Killing Eve is a thrilling watch in the truest sense, but as evidenced by poor Niko, the costs of trying to hold onto a semblance of morality in the Killing Eve world are far too high to look inviting. In a plotline that constantly entices viewers to transgress, morality is best left at the door.