These Drinks Is Vicious: The Killing Eve Thread

I think the 12 being so faceless for so long has been a detriment to the show.

still enjoying it but the show does seem rudderless and weird?

they change the rudder every season so

meanwhile the Phoebe Waller-Bridge exec-produced thriller-comedy series that actually has Phoebe Waller-Bridge involved wrapped its first season last night, and was both fun and left off at a point where the second season's story can either start up the next week, or in a year or two, depending on how long pandemic production pauses last.

Run, I assume? I should probably try a second ep.

Yeah, it's enjoyably unpretentious. And short!

short is highly underrated these days imo

Run was really good but it ended so abruptly.

The ending of this week's episode was good, but honestly, I'm completely lost as to how characters relate to each other at this point. These are people who wanted to kill and/or capture each other in the first season; they pal around now. This is not necessarily the show's fault--I just don't have the level of concentration required to sort out complicated dynamics like the ones on this show.

I think a lot of the relationships and associations are deliberately cloudy. In that way, the show is in the John le Carré (rather than James Bond) tradition, though obviously there is a lot more going in the series besides that.

I liked the ending as well. Oddly hopeful. This season ended up working for me once I started thinking about it in terms of trauma--Eve's, Villanelle's, Theo's, even Carolyn's (though honestly, I'm starting to think that Carolyn may be more of a sociopath than Villanelle). It was still uneven in a way that the previous two seasons were not, but I'm kind of looking forward to more now.

feel like it’s a metaphor for how sexual desire and longing for a person’s annihilation aren’t so far off from each other

i am very curious where this show goes with a) brexit b) pandemic and related travel restrictions c) increased suspicion of law enforcement all hanging over the world

Hard to get my head around how returning shows set in the present will (if they do) incorporate the last few months. Killing Eve, because of its tone (breezy and chic?), presents a real challenge. Ozark is so unapologetically crazy, they're probably well equipped to concoct some outlandish scenario.

I really fucking hope most tv shows ignore it and we don’t have to live in a post-lockdown (or lockdown #4 or whatever) world where every tv show has a lockdown series about how boring lockdown is or how to be a spy from yr living room or whatever

I don't think there was a show I watched with regularity in 2001--Seinfeld was finished, I caught up with The Sopranos much later--but that might be a guide as to how shows will handle COVID. Maybe; there are so many differences. Agree that I hope COVID subplots or episodes don't become de rigueur.

It's not like a show like Killing Eve dealt with current events at all, I also hope it doesn't become a thing unless they're actually filming under quarantine conditions.

Would certainly work on a medical show, if TV still has those.

This happened to me with Ozark, too: I sat down tonight to watch the next episode, not even realizing the last one was the season finale.

this episode was really weird to me. most of the season I've felt like I missed something but I'm quite certain I didn't. It's like...suddenly they're meeting at a dance hall? Suddenly villanelle is just wandering about into office spaces? Why's she meeting with Carolyn? I really have no clue wtf is going on here any longer. I'll probably watch next season though.

did they show when they found the bug?

Just watched all 3 seasons. Both very fun and increasing frustrating series. The show has such fresh characters, great acting and beautiful visuals - but feels like the writers didn’t really know what to do with them over time. Like Villanelle kills tons of people and no one checks fingerprints or security cameras? And the 12 who seem to have unlimited resources and info allow the main characters to kinda do whatever they want. And they pulled the “important character looks like they were killed but surprise! they didn’t die” trick about 5-6 times in 24 episodes. But for all that I’m in to see what they can cook up for season 4.

For the first time, the showrunner on season 4 is someone who wrote on a previous season, so it's fair to expect more of the style & tone of S3.

Forgive the thread spam, but I wanted to note that this show's 2020 season is nominated in the 2020 ILX TV poll:

ILX's Best Television of 2020 Poll / VOTING AND CAMPAIGNING THREAD / Voting Ends After January 29, 2021

If you like this show and you'd like to see it have a good showing in the poll (running in February) all you need to do is submit a ballot including it and your other favorites (3 minimum, 25 maximum, ranked by your favorite to least favorite) to forksclovetofu at gmail. It'll take five minutes; get to it!

The fourth/final season starts Feb. 27 (or at least where I am). All I remember from S3 is Villanelle's family dancing to "Crocodile Rock"...I'm compelled to finish, even though this has been a straight line down.

If it wasn't the last season, I'd probably skip it, but this is their chance to do something other than wheel-spinning, like the previous season was

That's what I'm hoping, that they manage to get back to the intrigue and occasionally sinister feel of S1. Something a lot less jokey.

I mean, the humour was there from the start--I mention it in my opening post--but as everyone got progressively more chummy, there was no more menace to balance that. If the last couple of seasons had been shot in front of a live audience, they'd be cheering every Villanelle entrance like she's Fonzie in 1977.

Yeah from the beginning it was always gonna struggle with the issue of maintaining the tension between the leads. I would have preferred a major shake-up last season, even if it meant it being the final season, but I'll take it a season late. Anything to prevent another Dexter

First episode wasn't bad--"Jesus" was funny--second was worse. This guardian angel (or whatever) of Villanelle's is ridiculous.

Part of me wants to watch this for closure, a bigger part of me can't be arsed.

(See also Peaky Blinders which is spinning plates it could easily have taken off the pole last series.)

So far, Season 4 has kinda been a whole lot of nothing.

I can't even remember if watched the first two episodes or just the first--that was right after it started. Just haven't gone back, and I have two others on the go now (and finished Succession between). I will.

Don't much care about The 12, so planning on just watching the finale to see how Villanelle and Eve resolve.

This is like watching a game of musical chairs, only the number of chairs isn't reducing.

series finale this sunday!

has this been worth watching? I kind of gave up hope because the plot was getting incomprehensible in the last season.

The series finale was actually the strongest episode of the season by far--there were two soundtrack choices that made me quite happy, for one thing--but it feels like too little, too late. Getting Eve and Villanelle together only highlights how much stronger the season would have been if they'd been given more screen time together. And for a show has consistently handled queerness without the usual bullshit, it was really disappointing to see the series conclude with two particularly musty homophobic tropes: the psychotically obsessed lesbian (Gunn), and the bury-your-gays conclusion.

Watching the finale made me feel confident that quitting after season 1 was the right decision. Performers are still good but the writing seems like active sabotage.

I don’t know what the other writers were like on the first season, but every season since has seemed like… stuff just happened and characters seem to care, but maybe not? It might be my reading of it, but the ongoing events just seem ephemeral and I’d have to attempt to remember what happened when I started the next.

If I binged it, maybe it’d have been more connected? I can reduce an entire season’s plot summary to five bullet points or less, which is fine if there’s a lot of internal character work, but I didn’t get that.

Conceding that I haven't gone any farther than I noted above--first couple of episodes into this season (looking forward to those musical cues crypto mentions)--with both this and The Handmaid's Tale (and Mr. Robot to an extent, and probably lots of shows), it just feels like they weren't meant to go beyond a couple of seasons. But they caught on immediately because of strong first seasons, which cornered them into an extended stay--I'm sure it's hard to walk away after all that flurry of attention and awards.

The opposite of Mindhunter, which should have kept going but left so much hanging.

When the tv series started it was a Phoebe Waller Bridge writing project based on a successful book series. Then she dropped away from writing and became a producer I think. I enjoyed it for the most part but do wonder how it would have fared if she had remained writer.

somewhere around the end of season 2 I started to just find the actual plot machinations incomprehensible.

The machinations were not a problem for me until the show started caring more about the incomprehensible plot than the characters (so, Season 4).

I'll analogize a point I've made before in this thread. The biggest mistake was trying, bit by bit, to make Villanelle more likeable...I'll stop short of saying they tried to "humanize" her, but they did methodically soften the nasty edge. It reminds me of what they did with Carroll O'Connor on All in the Family (and especially moving into his spin-off show): they tried to make him lovable. Early on, the character's racism was front and center, and you had to gauge how you felt about the rest of him in relation to that.

Alf Garnett was a working class icon apparently. I think it was said that he became far more popular and was taken more seriously or at least sympathised with much more than intended. People taking his political stance as something to copy etc. So not sure to what extent he was rewritten in transatlantic translation.
I have read that one has to make even the worst character sympathetic to some extent or one will just not care what happens to them. Not sure how much control one has over audience interpretation.
Archie Bunker just being the same character in US remake of the show etc.

So reception must have been different , though I thought Bunker had similar unintended support for what was intended asa satirical character. Buut why you would need to sweeten him for public consumption I don't know,.
I do remember an American I was talking to in the late 80s bewailing the addition of unconvincing happy endings as a Hollywood trope around then which is presumably years later. Can't have the audience feeling bad after all.

My impression was that neither character seemed much different from where PWB left them at the end of Season 1. And that they can both act their socks off, but don't have much chemistry together because their relationship doesn't make much sense + Eve's "messiness" seems like a convenient way to lampshade a motiveless character

I want to read the source novels to see if that makes any more sense there. & see what has changed.

Jeez this final season was bad. I agree with cryptosicko that the finale was the best episode of this bunch but mostly made me wish Eve and Villanelle had been working together all season. Instead we got a whirlwind of underdeveloped, confusing plotlines and characters. Feel like the writers threw in every idea they could so that you didn't think too hard about the show having no purpose anymore

the dancing / killing montage was the best thing all season, everything else was just background tv

but generally i'm just glad i don't have to watch it any more

I watched this as a conpletist, but series 4 was at least 6, probably 7 episodes too long. There were fun bits, like the Jesus stuff, but they didn't contribute to the plot. Even the whole Pam thread, which went on forever, was entirely superfluous and could have been resolved in less than 10 minutes of screen time using existing characters.