‘Killing Eve’: “Villanelle Lives,” Says Author Of Original Novels In Response To Fan Criticism Over Finale
deadline.comTelevision finales are an incredibly tough beast – just ask the team behind The Sopranos or Lost.The finale of BBC America’s Killing Eve has also received its share of criticism from fans, disappointed with the way that [SPOILER ALERT] Villanelle is gunned down and killed.However, the author of the original material, Luke Jennings has hoped to assuage fans’ unhappiness by declaring that “Villanelle lives”, at least on paper.“I learned the outcome of the final episode in advance, and suspected, rightly, that fans would be upset.
But to those fans, I would say this: Villanelle lives. And on the page, if not on the screen, she will be back,” he wrote in the Guardian.Jennings added that he felt the season four final was “bowing to convention” and said that he believed a “truly subversive storyline would have defied the trope which sees same-sex lovers in TV dramas permitted only the most fleeting of relationships before one of them is killed off”.“When Phoebe Waller-Bridge and I first discussed Villanelle’s character five years ago, we agreed that she was defined by what Phoebe called her “glory”: her subversiveness, her savage power, her insistence on lovely things.
That’s the Villanelle that I wrote, that Phoebe turned into a screen character, and that Jodie ran with so gloriously,” he added.Earlier this month, Killing Eve exec produer Sally Gentle told Deadline that they knew what was going to happen in the final episode “quite early on” and it “never really changed”.“When you consider that Villanelle has always worked in a high-risk industry, there was a degree of inevitability about it.
We were keen, in terms of the arc for this season, was a sense that Villanelle had embraced humanity. Her selfless shoving of Eve over
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