It all comes back to the Cold War. That was certainly the case on this week’s Killing Eve, which delved deep into Carolyn’s ‘70s backstory with her father, Konstantin, and The Twelve through a series of black and white flashbacks scattered throughout the episode.
We learn that Carolyn, undercover as a woman named Janice, was one of the founding members of The Twelve, which began in 1979 as a group of socialists and anarchists in Berlin. Other prominent members include Janice’s boyfriend Johan, a man named Karl, and Karl’s girlfriend Karolina. Carolyn/Janice takes an interest in Karl, whom she begins sleeping with. One day, she decides to bring everyone to her father’s house for a party, at which she discovers his assassinated body.
Carolyn breaks into Karl’s house, where she discovers his Soviet passport. He’s revealed to be a KGB agent named Konstantin Vasiliev, and right as Carolyn is about to make a deal with him, a jealous Johan shows up and threatens to kill them. Carolyn and Konstantin beat him up with oars and push him into the water, where they leave him for dead. Turns out, Johan is still alive and now goes by the name of Lars – the same Lars that Eve and Helene are hunting down.
In the present, Carolyn too is looking for Lars, and in finding him she locates Karolina, who seems to be living a normal life with her children. She doesn’t know anything, so Carolyn reaches out to Konstantin, and she wonders if she could’ve had a normal life with him. Before she can speculate on it for too long, she hangs up and he texts her the address of a cabin owned by Karolina’s father. Carolyn finds Johan/Lars at the cabin, setting up next week’s episode to be at least partially occupied by their reunion after several decades.
However, quite a few major plot points happened in the present as well. In an attempt to squeeze more information out of Helene, Eve kidnaps her daughter after tennis practice. She takes her along on her meeting with the photographer whose photos identified Lars. The photographer, now a professor of Classics, lectures on the story of Cupid and Psyche, whose fated love forced Psyche to endure much pain – the look on Eve’s face reveals that it’s an allegory for her twisted romance with Villanelle. After the lecture, she’s able to recover a tape from the professor that depicts one of the early hangouts among Twelve members, including a young Carolyn.
Helene, still angry about her daughter’s kidnapping, lures Eve into her car under the promise that she’s found Lars. At the same time, Villanelle reunites with Konstantin in Margate hoping to track down and kill some members of The Twelve. After they have one of their signature hugs, she walks out the door that Lars was supposed to walk out of for Eve to see. Helene enacts her revenge as Villanelle is shot with an arrow, a nod to the Cupid story from earlier, and collapses to the ground. The episode ends as Eve embraces Villanelle’s unconscious body, tricked by the villainous Helene. At this point, it’s unclear whether Villanelle is alive or dead. While she doesn’t appear in the trailer for next week’s episode, it seems too soon in the season to kill her off for good. That said, she did just take an arrow to the chest.
This week was a fantastic one for Killing Eve. The show was able to finally tie the loose end of Carolyn’s 70s superspy backstory that it had been teasing for three seasons. We saw Eve lose herself in hubris that potentially killed Villanelle. We saw the original anti-establishment, anti-bourgeoisie motives that defined The Twelve juxtaposed with the opulence and unchecked power of Helene’s modern iteration of it. We saw the origins of the deeply convoluted romance between Carolyn and Konstantin, and its parallels to their modern counterparts Eve and Villanelle. It felt like exactly the sort of postmodern feminist take on 70s spy thrillers that it’s supposed to be. Killing Eve is always best when its characters are so physically close to each other but just miss each other, and that’s the tension that defined this week’s episode. As they veer off on different paths once more, let’s hope the show can keep up the intrigue.
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Emmy is a big fan of all things TV and movies. Among her current favorites are The Matrix, Midsommar, Titane, and Fleabag. Catch her on Letterboxd @ewenstrup !
