Jodie Comer shines in Killing Eve season 3’s “Are You From Pinner?”, a bottle episode that takes us to Russia – and ignores Eve completely.
You heard it here first: Jodie Comer deserves to win another Emmy for the fifth episode of Killing Eve season 3.
“Are You From Pinner?” is a showcase for one of television’s most compelling, frightening and complex characters, as we journey back to her homeland to meet the family that she barely remembers. (Or never knew, in some cases.)
And Comer doesn’t disappoint. Her performance in this episode is truly a wonder to behold, running the gamut from angry to anxious, charming to caustic. Any interaction between Villanelle and the mother that largely abandoned her was always going to be fraught, but I suspect none of us were ready for how truly heartbreaking and disturbing this all was.
Nor, I suspect, were we ready for an episode that completely ignores Eve. “Are You From Pinner?” is essentially a bottle episode in Russia, which keeps the focus exclusively on Villanelle’s journey to see her family. The series’ other major characters do not appear. Dangling plot threads from last week, such as Nico’s murder and Dasha’s involvement in it, are not mentioned.
Instead, it’s an hour purely devoted to character development, for the character whose interior life we know the least about. Which, naturally, makes this the most personal hour Killing Eve has put forth to date, and one that it’s utterly impossible to look away from.
And there’s so much to enjoy about this installment. From the silly to the serious, from the sublime to the ridiculous, there’s something amazing in almost every frame.
From Villanelle’s younger half-brother and his Elton John obsession (“Crocodile Rock” forever!), to her older brother who remembers her as a mean child but loves her anyway and is so glad she’s not dead, to her bizarre conspiracy loving stepbrother and his dead-eyedshot girlfriend. I could watch an entire series that’s just about Villanelle visiting her family, and the truly bizarre things that apparently happen in tiny, deadbeat Russian towns.
The entire sequence at the town harvest festival is gold. A dung throwing competition! Fans as major prizes! Whatever that weird dance performance was! It’s all the sort of wild, messy trappings of family and home as a sense of place that Villanelle has never experienced. And watching her open up to the experience is fascinating.
Killing Eve has, in the past, largely simply accepted Villanelle as read – a psychotic killer who takes a certain amount of joy in her work, but the show doesn’t look too closely at the reasons behind her chosen profession. Why is Villanelle the way she is? How evil is she, really? These are things that the show feels comfortable leaving in the background – always present enough so that we can’t forget them, but not explored in any real depth.
That changes here.
The most shocking thing about this story isn’t that Villanelle kills her own mother. I think that’s something we were all expecting from jump. It’s that she hesitates. That she seems to want, so badly, for things to be different – for her mother to be different – than they are. But she’s not. And Villanelle’s not. And here we are.
The other notable moment about this, though, is the fact that Villanelle’s mother dies offscreen. Killing Eve is a show that’s revealed in showing us every ridiculous kind of kill our favorite assassin has pulled off over the years – from death by hairpin to a semi-public flaying. Yet this, somehow, is something personal, and private. It’s something that, apparently needs to happen, although with no small amount of difficulty. And it’s something we don’t get to see.
Instead, we see the after effect – Villanelle on a train back west, listening to what we all assume is Elton, and wearing the truly hideous denim jumpsuit that used to belong to her mother. Devastation is left in her wake – she blows up the house her family inhabited and kills almost all of them. Almost.
She leaves her two brothers Bor’ka and Pyotr alive, with an envelope of cash and instructions to take the trip to see Elton John’s farewell tour that young Bor’ka has always dreamed of. And on some level? That feels like growth.
This is Villanelle we’re talking about, after all.
Killing Eve continues next Sunday on BBC America.