SG Showrunners 25: Killing Eve 3 – Ep. 6 – End of Game

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When the 3rd season is over, we’ll have a summary episode where we talk about the 6 core questions and release our foolscap.

Reminder: Please watch the TV-Series Killing Eve Season 3 Episode 6 before you listen to the following episode. We not only give away spoilers, but we talk about the global story and it’s just more valuable for you if you know what we are talking about because we reference a lot.

Initial Observations

Mel – Very unexpected, and not believable beginning, and then the characters became unreal for me, too.

Parul – I like many scenes, glad the investigation is back on track, but I’m worried about the global story

Randy – No way!

Recap: What happened in the previous episodes: 

• Villanelle goes home, sees her family, wins the dung throwing contest at the local fair, kills her mom, and blows up her family’s house

5 commandments for Eve

1. Inciting Incident: Niko is alive in London hospital (What?) 
2. Turning Point: Eve discovers a hiccup in the theory that Villanelle attacked Niko
3. Crisis: Does Eve Find and confront Dasha or not? Stakes – endanger herself and Niko more, get to the truth; don’t find Niko’s attacker, live in fear
4. Climax: Confronts Dasha (turns out Eve can bowl)
5. Resolution: Eve suspects that Villanelle didn’t attack Niko. Niko continues to ignore her.

5 commandments for Villanelle: 

1. Inciting Incident: Helene tells Villanelle that she has become a keeper
2. Turning Point: Villanelle realizes that a keeper is just a higher-paid assassin, no different than what she did
3. Crisis: Does Villanelle continue to kill and live the good life, or turn the job down
4. Climax: She approaches Konstantin to run away with him as he asked before
5. Resolution: Villanelle goofs up the kill in Romania, gets stabbed, and admits to Dasha that she wants out

Parul:

What about Carolyn and Konstantin, how do their storylines add to the story? 

I would suggest that their parts are complications in the wider story of who the 12 really are (and therefore complications for both Eve & Villanelle) 

Their storylines tell us that

1. Konstantin & Carolyn are more closely linked than we thought and that
2. That Paul, MI6 man, is working with the twelve,
3.  Konstantin stole the money and will soon be in trouble with the 12, which could be a problem for Villanelle who wants to run away with him.

Thriller

Randall: Speech in Praise of the Villain – not much still, no more information on Kenny’s killer or the 12; I suspect that Dasha might have killed Kenny at this point

This remains the weakness, Helene has not shown us her teeth – I expected her to be more frightening than any Konstantin & Villanelle but she doesn’t seem it. 

Parul: Also, Dasha, who is supposed to be a master killer came off looking weak next to Eve. It’s clear that Eve is a bee in their bonnet, why haven’t they killed her?

Randall: 2 more episodes to see the hero at the mercy of the villain, whoever that is.

False ending?  Overdone, but someone is seriously hurt and might die – Eve or Villanelle, or maybe both this time?

No clock

No Macguffin

No tension

Do the viewers care?

Morality Genre

We’ve waited for one entire episode of a documentary about Russia wanting to see how Eve will deal with her loss, but Niko is still alive. How? He was pitchforked in the throat. Eve didn’t go and help him. She just collapsed. And added to that they were somewhere in Poland, I don’t know how remote. And they could still save Niko?

Well, let’s look at Eve’s morality story.

So maybe that was not Eve’s all is lost moment, probably not. Because hitting that moment would mean stay in the mess, or change your approach and thinking, to climb out of it again. But Eve falls back into her old self. 

Eve should have been much more aware of the threat her work poses on Niko, and even that she couldn’t know that Niko would be in danger, she still could have shown more empathy for his situation. But she falls back to doing the first thing she’s used to: investigating, even though she knows that’s the reason why everything happened and why Niko tells her to piss off.

So she hasn’t learned anything from it all. She just keeps following her WANT no matter what, and what she wants is to continue investigating.

Thoughts about the Global Story

Randy: The Middle Build is supposed to be all about the villain.  If Villanelle is the villain of this story (which it is looking less and less that she is) then this is successful, except that she isn’t really a threat to the hero Eve.  No other villain has risen – we have the 12, Paul, Kenny’s killer, and Dasha.

Mel: Villanelle hits her lowest low much quicker than I had expected. I suspected that she would follow a disillusionment internal story – that means something she has believed in with all her heart turns out false and knocks her off her feet. And we’ve seen her hit the bottom in this episode. She thought as a Keeper for the 12 she could give orders, instead they want her to continue as their assassin. 

And that’s what devastates Villanelle so much that she’s looking for a way out. Suddenly she wants to give it all up. She’s depressed, whining on the bathroom floor. I didn’t recognize Villanelle anymore, and even though they prepared this by showing that Villanelle acted differently by suddenly wanting to search for her family, I feel like I’ve missed some crucial incident that led to her being like this. Maybe it was the time she had to shoot Eve and now she’s trying to cling to her old life, but she doesn’t find meaning anymore. And that’s what keeps her off her feet.

Parul: One of my worries from the last episode was how they would enable Eve & Villanelle to reconcile given that we thought that the twelve had ordered a hit on Niko and framed Villanelle. But it seems that Niko is alive and has rejected Eve, allowing her to potentially fall back into the frightening and addictive love pattern. Both Eve & Villanelle are disillusioned with their jobs & lives (compare this to Season 1 where they were both on a high).

The big glaring problem, for me, was that I don’t see enough to make me care about the 12.

How do the 12 not know that Konstantin took the money? I thought they knew everything.

Spotlight on: Creating believable Character Twists & keeping it real with your characters. 

As already mentioned, some characters didn’t seem like the persons we’ve watched over the last three seasons of Killing Eve.

Villanelle is completely out of character in this episode. And Eve is either a mess or she gets her shit together and investigates.

On top of that, Irina, Konstantin’s daughter, not only hits the boyfriend of her mom with a car, but she also runs over him. Which I thought was completely surreal and unnecessary.

How can you keep your characters in character and believable throughout your story?

Randall: Outline a character arc you have in mind for your characters that get them from their want to their need and keep that close for reference as your story progresses.

Mel: Internal Genre – Know how the character starts, what his hardest challenge will be that will shift how he is perceived by others or what he thinks of himself, and how it will all turn out. Who will that person become and why?

How we might have written this differently:

Randall: I would have made the 12 more powerful.  I still think they are the villain, or they should be.  Villanelle doesn’t seem like the villain to Eve’s hero.  We still don’t know who killed Kenny, who the 12 sent to kill Kenny.  The 12 were initially shown as a mystery, shadowy group – possibly all-knowing, having people everywhere – and that is evident in this episode when we see Paul meet with Konstantin, showing that they have reached someone of the highest points of MI6. But it’s not enough.  We don’t see any world controlling plan.  They seem like some hacks right now.  They offered Villanelle a job, but she’s out.  And Konstantin is out.  The 12 from the first season wouldn’t allow that.  I might have even put a little scene in each episode showing the 12 watching what is going on with Villanelle, having their eyes on her.

Mel: In this season, we’ve seen Villanelle on edge – especially because of Eve, less because of her family. And we know she wanted to be a keeper – a dream that didn’t come true as she wanted. But I would have put in more complications in her way instead of just one revelation that drives her over the edge. 

Parul: I would have given Villanelle a glimpse into the Kingdom of the 12 when she visited Helene, something to keep us and her on her toes. I would consider allowing some contact between Eve & V – maybe Villanelle finds out that Niko was attacked and tries to get in contact with Eve.

What can we expect in the next episodes?

Parul: The two will have to meet, surely? Konstantin will be on the run?

Randy: Maybe we’ll see who the real villain is finally?

Mel: Villanelle and Eve plot against Dasha? I’m so confused by the characters’ actions and the plot that I’ve no idea about what they will do next.

What was your favorite scene?

Randy: Eve kicking Dasha’s ass in bowling.

Mel: The strange motherly talk between Carolyne and her daughter Geraldine, which was painfully honest, but completely in character.

Parul: Villanelle asking Helene if she is trying to seduce her. That wonderful lack of tact, she says what she thinks!

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