All these tantalizing bits of backstory leave us wondering: When will Killing Eve give us more of Villanelle’s history?
Each week on Killing Eve, we see Eve and Villanelle circling closer to one another. (Heck, at the end of the latest episode, they’re within mere feet of each other!) Their cat-and-mouse dance feels carefully planned and choreographed, to keep us glued to our screens until the last possible moment.
But that’s not the only story that Killing Eve is taking its sweet time telling. Each week the show also gives us a little more information about exactly who Villanelle is. Well, sort of, anyway. Sure, we still don’t know where she’s from, or who she works for, or how she fell into a life of professional murder. We’re not even sure if Villanelle is her real name. (It doesn’t seem like it.)
Yet, Killing Eve has still told us plenty about this woman, all without ever sitting us all down for an hour-long exposition dump. We know she loves designer clothes and luxe fabrics. She speaks several languages fluently. She has an exceptionally dark sense of humor if her idea of what passes for jokes (fake suicide attempts) and birthday parties (veiled threats) between her and her handler is anything to go by. And her string of exes and romantic conquests mean that terrifying bisexual lady assassin is most definitely now a thing.
But where did this woman come from? The series’ first four episodes are deftly put together to provide us with lots of small details about Villanelle and her history, and also leave us wanting more at the same time. Her history with Nadia is only hinted at, never fully explained. Her interest in Eve is framed as both professional competition and a kind of sexual tension, and the show doesn’t pick a side either way. (Nor does it tell us whether that frizzy-haired drawing is of Eve, or some mysterious person from the past that Eve reminds Villanelle of.)
There’s just so much we don’t know. Which, admittedly, is part of the fun. But, hey, this first season only has eight episodes, and there are some things that we just need to find out before this show heads off on what will doubtless be at least a year-long hiatus. Like who Villanelle’s employer is? And how she got into this whole killing business in the first place? Or even just any real background at all.
Killing Eve clearly respects its audience. The show isn’t spelling out Villanelle’s history for us. Rather, we must piece it together from context clues and random conversations as best we can. It’s intriguing, for sure.
And a big part of the character’s appeal is the fact that Villanelle doesn’t need a complicated reason for her behavior. She’s just a psychopath who likes killing people. On the other hand, it’s hard not to wonder where she came from, and how she became the person she is now. It’s really hard not to want to know all those answers, precisely because Villanelle is so different from most other characters on television right now. We’d all like to know how she got that way.
Will we? Probably not. Or, at least, probably not as much as we’d like. The show clearly has a plan. But how much will that plan explain Villanelle’s history, rather than just ask us to accept the fact of her?
Next: Killing Eve season 1 episode 4 review: Sorry Baby
Killing Eve airs Sundays at 8 p.m. ET on BBC America.