Killing Eve

When it came to thinking about what careers to do as the end of my education approached, there was one line of work that nobody appeared to be pushing: assassinations.  Given their predominance as the subject matter for various programmes, films and video games (not to mention their recent return to fashion as a Muscovite approach to dealing with awkward political characters), you’d think we would know of them more often in our daily lives.  Friends say they’re in property or banking or medicine, but nobody ever rocks up at birthday drinks telling tales of the various murders they’ve committed while the rest of us were deleting emails without reading them or hiding from senior office bods in order to eschew their yet-to-be-delegated tasks.  (I’m of course excluding the deaths our actions lead to through inadvertent pursuits: that homeless person you stepped over on a freezing day or that Third World miner that perished sourcing a bit of metal for your iPhone etc.)  As such, Killing Eve was, for me, as sort of induction video into a new employment possibility, but did it make me want to swap my status calls for sniper rifles and update my LinkedIn to say “a seasoned, cold-blooded murderer, stimulated by new challenges, with a solutions-orientated approach to others’ deaths via contract killings”?  Let’s read on and find out.

The assassin at the heart of Killing Eve is Villanelle.  Her background and training in order to break into the industry, as the series uncovers, were both bleak.  I think I’m guilty of preferring my Cub-Scouting childhood in suburban Surrey over Soviet prisons and brutalisation.  But maybe I have the character traits.  Villanelle is known for her dark sense of humour, takes almost nothing that seriously and takes time to be playful with every task she undertakes.  This could be me all over.  I’ve talked of my need for silliness in my post on Miranda, so maybe Villanelle and I could be work BFFs (especially as most of mine have left me over the years).  But, according to Phoebe Waller-Bridge, human goddess and creator of Fleabag, who adapted Killing Eve from the Codename Villanelle novella series, our hero assassin’s genesis lies in the ethos “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?”  So that rules me out.  Now older, my fear of my own mortality shocks me every time I cross a busy road, and if someone barges in front of me on the Tube, I spend the rest of the day obsessing about it.

But maybe all the foreign travel would be a boon.  Villanelle jets around Europe as only someone who’s smugly parted with £4.99 for Speedy Boarding really can.  Her multilingualism knows no bounds (though her Mandarin needs work).  Does that mean I’m a shoe-in?  Again, doubt besets me.  Any travelling I undertake with work is met with groaning and a mad panic about saving my M&S receipts for all my train treats in order to expense a week’s worth of high-value cashew nuts.  I don’t even like the journey to the office (see previous comment about Tube barging repercussions).  As for languages, I might have paid off the £24k of debt my French and German degree cost me, but I could barely compose an email to a colleague in our Hamburg office because it went beyond the GCSE fare of telling someone how many brothers and sister I have (eine Schwester) but I have at least brain-retained all the four-digit codes you need to make the diacritics appear (the little dots and such you can have on a ü) so it wasn’t a complete waste of money.

Finally, there’s the actual killing of humans.  On purpose.  In person.  Villanelle feels nothing with each life she extinguishes, cashing her pay to return to the lap of luxury her beautiful apartment and fridge full of Champagne offer her.  I just don’t think I could do it.  I once ran over a squirrel when learning to drive and it took years for that horrific crunch of tiny bones to stop haunting me.  I then cycled over a toad near a beach in Germany, struggling to steer my bike (one of those European jobbies where you have to pedal backwards to break), and unlocked a whole new spiral of shame.  I would be really good at quipping witty remarks after a spot of fisticuffs, but squeezing the trigger while my victim begged for mercy would see my annual appraisals at the assassin company descend into performance management.  Success as a contract killer, then, must be fairly binary.

Right, I’ll stick to media as a career, with an unpopular blog as my side hustle.  Instead, Killing Eve can be a window into another job I’m never going to do, just like Line Of Duty is into being a bent copper or Narcos is into, er, being a narco.  Besides, Villanelle is pretty good at it, just as Jodie Comer is pretty good at acting.  And by pretty good, I mean outstanding.  I completely buy her as a confused, psychopathic girl who just doesn’t want to be lonely anymore.  And then there’s this Eve that she’s trying to kill, played by Sandra Oh.  I’ve never seen Grey’s Anatomy so my only real exposure to her has been a Family Guy joke about the size of her face.  So yeah, she has a lot of face, and a lot of hair, but she can have as much of anything as she likes, because she’s wonderful: the perfect vehicle for our burning curiosity in solving the mysteries of Villanelle.  Oh calls bullsh*t, has a voice I can’t get enough of (a bit like Sarah Koenig from the podcast Serial) and delivers excruciating British awkwardness like no other American – watching her microwave shepherd’s pie and serve it out of Tupperware is a delight.  And third in our trinity of strong women is poise herself: Fiona Shaw.  As Eve’s MI6 boss, Shaw relishes every moment where she gets to steal the best line.  Which is all of the moments.  Also, special mention for the addition of David Haig as Bill, who, thanks to his role in The Thin Blue Line in 1995 I keep expecting to erupt about people fannying about.

So, watch Killing Eve.  It is murderous joy, with moments of darkness so unnecessary you’d expect it to disappear up its own arse.  But you’d be wrong, as it’s been Waller-Bridged.  We have humour throughout, with characters as equally capable of tracking an assassin across Europe as they are of squabbling over sharing croissants.  A bassline of banality allows its farfetchedness to seem more plausible, while the tension and the action will glue you to seat with the affirmation that you’re going to watch just one more episode (sure).  For me, it falls down as a prospectus for careers in assassination, but maybe series two, now airing in the US, will finally do the trick and persuade me.  You have been warned.