Divorcing Eve: Nasty surprises abound in episodes 4-6 of ‘Killing Eve’ season 4
My oh my, Eve. You are full of surprises.
Characters in “Killing Eve” — Villanelle (Jodie Comer), Carolyn (Fiona Shaw), or maybe even her late husband Niko (Owen McDonnell) — have long had cause to say that. There always seems to come a point when Eve (Sandra Oh) makes her way even further down the rabbit hole — down what, over four seasons, has marked a steep descent for the former MI6 agent. But, episode six brings her worst digression from morality yet.
Eve killed Lars Meier (Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson), a founding member of the Twelve. There’s not a way around it. The specifics, which the camera does not save viewers from, are a shot through the shoulder, then, with a moment’s hesitation, the head. Perhaps she has done worse. She endangered her husband. That was bad. She left a man on the floor to die. That was also quite bad.
But this stain on her reputation is a color she hasn’t encountered before. Episodes four through six of season four of “Killing Eve” follow a number of characters tracking down Lars, each on their own complicated path. Carolyn, however, got there first, on the hunt for the name of whoever killed her son, Kenny (Sean Delaney). This is why Carolyn was in the room when Eve stormed in and shot Lars, who had not given up the name.
Carolyn had a bit of a headstart on Eve, as she always seems to have. Why is that? Why is it that Carolyn’s everywhere? She seems to know every new character to be abreast of every development. In episode four, she knew — to Villanelle’s surprise — that Villanelle was getting chummy with a group of Christians at the start of this season, which she reveals when she and Villanelle strike up a game of Truth or Dare in a Havana bar. This is the opposite of what Villanelle should be doing: killing Carolyn, on assignment from Helene (Camille Cottin). That’s also where Carolyn discovers Lars is, contrary to what she believed, alive and well.
The two of them have history. That’s revealed in episode five’s sepia-toned flashbacks to Carolyn’s past in Berlin — one of those spill-all episodes. She got her start there, infiltrating a young, nameless group of anarchists for MI6. It was Carolyn who coined the name “The Twelve,” an homage to Beethoven’s “Symphony No. 3.” It was also Carolyn who pushed Lars into a lake, then beat him over the head with a canoe oar until he stopped coming up for air. Though, it was her mistake not to make sure he didn’t slink away in the deep.
In actuality, she didn’t do that last bit by herself, and she wasn’t the only spy infiltrating the newly minted Twelve. A young, dashing Konstantin (Kim Bodnia) was there that day to sink Lars, who had walked in on the two spies arguing about spycraft, and which he mistook for a love affair.
The three of them — Carolyn, Konstantin and Lars — all have a target on their back from Helene, who has been trying to discover and destroy, the members of the Twelve. Carolyn tells Lars he’s on the chopping block to bargain for the name of Kenny’s killer. Helene, however, does not make it to Lars. She’s killed by Villanelle, who was nearly murdered at the end of episode five by bow and arrow, at Helene’s orders.
For a time, the players were all under Helene’s thumb. With episode six, that’s all changed. Helene is, of course, no more, but she delivered a particularly devastating line to Eve in episode five: Eve, she explained, was a bird-watcher who wanted to fly. Does Lars’ murder mean Eve has joined the swans? She’s long maintained that she doesn’t want to play the game; she’s here, for some nebulous reason, for Villanelle. She’s here to bring down the Twelve, who inflicted so much pain on her. But to do that, she has to play the game, and as “Killing Eve” nears its finale, it seems like she’s playing it too well — it may ruin her.
Dominic Marziali covers television. Contact him at dmarziali@dailycal.org.