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Within hours of the Killing Eve finale on Sunday night, the internet had gotten to work fixing it. On Tumblr and the fanfic repository Archive of Our Own, fans sprung into action to rewrite the ending that saw Jodie Comer’s Villanelle and Sandra Oh’s Eve in a romantic embrace—only for Villanelle to be shot and killed. The reimagined stories—all of which, like the final book in Luke Jennings’s original trilogy, allowed Villanelle and Eve to build a happy life together—were clear in their message: Villanelle deserved better, and they were going to give it to her.
While it started off as one of the most excitingly unique and mesmerizing shows on television, Killing Eve ended its four-season run infuriating many of the fans who had stuck with it all along. The show spent years bringing its two protagonists together, as the assassin Villanelle embraced her vulnerability and Eve embraced her own dark side. For a few short moments, they got to work together as a team, as carefree lovers crazy about each other. And then it was taken away in a way that wasn’t just cruel, but stereotypical and exhausting. While exploring the complex nature of their humanity, it just as swiftly tore them apart. Both women were ultimately able to accept the qualities they fought against for so long: Villanelle, her vulnerability, and Eve, her dark side. However, that all seemed to be for nothing in the end.
The “bury your gays” trope is well documented and all too familiar to members of the LGBTQIA+ community who become attached to queer characters, only to have them killed off. (Lest we forget The 100’s Lexa and Tara on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, just to name a few.) On a show like Killing Eve, where every season came with a high body count, it was somewhat expected that Villanelle, Eve, or both would ultimately die for their multitude of sins. But showrunner Laura Neal killed off Villanelle so seemingly carelessly, after dangling the carrot of a fully realized and happy (if not somewhat dysfunctional) lesbian relationship in viewers’ faces. It didn’t just feel like sloppy storytelling—it felt personal.
But it could also be a basic lack of understanding of the characters. In an interview that followed the finale, Neal suggested that Villanelle’s death would be a “rebirth” for Eve, as if she would simply move on to something bigger and better. Killing Eve has changed showrunners with every season, and each one has had a slightly different approach to the characters and how they might behave—but Neal’s has certainly felt the most detached, even if unintentionally. The first several episodes of the season saw Villanelle having hallucinations of herself as Jesus Christ while Eve carried on a juvenile affair with a random former military intelligence officer who’d been introduced out of nowhere, completely ignoring everything that happened in the season three finale. It was a perplexing choice that left many fans wondering what the hell had happened. And while the show eventually inched toward a reunion between Villanelle and Eve come the finale, it almost seemed to be too little, too late—not to mention a half-hearted attempt at finally giving fans what they wanted before yanking it away again.
Meanwhile, on Tumblr, fans were disappointed but not despondent, reblogging GIFs and videos of the kiss between Eve and Villanelle, as well as other memorable scenes between the women, and ignoring the death altogether. Many expressed frustration at how deliberately obtuse the ending seemed, with one writing, “The writers not only betrayed the audience, but also the characters.… They deserved so much better. We deserved so much better.” Another added: “There’s certainly nothing new or fresh or clever about giving queer characters the tragic ending they were always ‘destined’ to have, yet again. But whatever.”
There’s also no shortage of rewrites of that final scene, with nearly 100 fanfics popping up on Archive of Our Own, all of which keep Villanelle alive and in domestic bliss with Eve. “I can not get over the atrocious ending to the most beautiful complicated lovely character I’ve ever seen on my screen and she deserves nothing but happiness so that is what she is going to get,” one author noted in the intro to their take on the episode.
The disappointed Killing Eve fans were, much to their dismay, joining a well-established TV community. Fans who remembered the likes of Lexa, Tara, and Arrow’s Sara Lance—to name a few—commiserated over how common killing off LGBTQ characters remains on TV. Others refused to believe that Villanelle had died at all, suggesting that she had faked her death. While it seems pretty clear that Villanelle really did die, accepting it is a whole other story.
As TV has expanded to include new voices over the past decade, queer representation has improved dramatically, from HBO’s 19th-century historical drama Gentleman Jack to the multiple queer cops who populated the precinct in the sitcom Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Killing Eve had its place in that canon until the ending placed it in another category entirely. When stories are mishandled in the hands of straight writers, it’s up to queer fans who have often spent years investing in those stories to right those wrongs and to give the characters the treatment we feel they deserve. We become protective over them, largely because we feel we understand them in ways that many others don’t. Because of this, when we see them treated unfairly or without the respect and consideration they deserve, the only way we can fix things is by ignoring canon and creating our own stories.
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