Killing Eve has found increasingly inventive, often brutal ways to dispatch beloved characters, but this week’s episode makes stabbing MI6 agents in the club, and spearing bodies like you’d poke holes in the plastic film over a TV dinner before popping it into the microwave, look like mere child’s play.
“Still Got It” gives us another two-for-one murder special, and while watching Villanelle play a game with her prey before suffocating a poor widow with a hose from her own greenhouse was a delightful romp — or as delightful and premeditated murder can be — award for most memorable attack goes to her mentor, Dasha (Dame Harriet Walter).
Let’s revisit one of the bloodiest kills of the season so far.
The Pitchfork Surprise
Here’s Niko (Owen McDonnell), Eve’s estranged husband, at the beginning of the episode. He’s in Poland, delivering bread to village women, filling up his social calendar, and taking generic nature selfies. He’s the Eastern European version of a basic white b*tch, and honestly, good for him. He’s escaped the insanity of his wife’s job and relationship with a psychotic assassin, and he seems to have gotten a handle on his PTSD over Gemma’s death last season. Niko is experiencing what we in the biz call “growth.”
Which means that Niko is not long for this world.
No spoilers dammit!
Cut to Villanelle. She’s baking cakes, still hung up on her sexually-charged encounter with Eve on London’s public transit system. Dasha tries to curb her obsessive tendencies when it comes to the former MI6 agent by teasing a meeting with the Twelve. Looks like someone might be getting a promotion.
Or not. It seems a secret international organization of highly trained assassins and ex-government agents isn’t too forgiving when one of their own goes off-book, which is exactly what Villanelle did with that whole “Smell me, Eve” bit. Even the scent of a Roman gladiator can’t protect her, or Dasha, from their ire. A representative for the Twelve comes to warn Dasha that her dream of returning to Mother Russia won’t happen if she can’t temper her protege’s more dangerous impulses, suggesting that Dasha drive a wedge between the two women in an imaginative way.
She also comments on Dasha’s hat hair and insults Eve’s proclivity for turtlenecks so really, f*ck this woman.
Still, while Villanelle’s doing a job as a favor to Konstantin in exchange for information on her family, Dasha is jetting off to Poland to put her master plan into action. She stalks Niko, pretending to be an elderly village woman who enjoys pub culture in order to steal his phone and text Eve his whereabouts. For a moment, it looks like Dasha might be planning to kill Eve, despite the Twelve ordering her not to.
But no, she’s got something even crueler in mind. As Eve prepares to reunite with Niko, Dasha spears his neck like a stalk of cooked broccoli with a pitchfork. Her timing? Impeccable.
She also leaves a note, a calling card meant more for Villanelle than Eve herself.
The line harks back to a conversation the two female assassins had earlier this season about their respective legacies.
We’re left with a broken Eve, still in shock over witnessing her husband’s grisly murder, but we’re also left with plenty of questions. It seems strange that Dasha would leave a clue for Villanelle, linking her to Niko’s murder. Perhaps she intended for Eve to believe Villanelle is the one who sent her husband to his grave, but it’s unlikely that plan would work once Eve recovers from her emotional breakdown over Niko’s death. Eve knows Villanelle, her style of killing, her handwriting. She also knows Villanelle has had plenty of chances to off her husband and she chose not to because Villanelle has assumed Eve would never forgive her for that.
So, if this kill doesn’t drive a wedge between the two, but instead, pits Dasha against Villanelle … what was the point? Perhaps Dasha, knowing how fickle the Twelve have been when it comes to her retirement, plans to unite Eve and Villanelle together against the group so that she’ll finally be free of them? Or maybe her ego just got the best of her and she’s inadvertently signed her own death warrant. Who knows?
BBC America’s ‘Killing Eve’ airs on Sundays at 9:00 PM EST with simulcasting on AMC.