Sandra Oh had a different ending in mind for the final season of Killing Eve, but it was still pretty, uh, killer.
While the final outing of the BBC series saw Villanelle (Jodie Comer) meet her death—an ending that angered fans, to say the least—Oh originally thought that they'd take the season four finale in a much different direction. She recalls telling season four show writer Laura Neal that it should end with Eve dying, explaining to Deadline, "I thought that would be the strongest and the most interesting."
After all, the show is called Killing Eve and Oh felt that was the path Eve was going down at the end of season three. "Eve was starting to get into, like, a nihilistic place," she explained, "and we're like, ‘Let's just continue that line and go straight into it.'"
However, Oh and Neal's conversation took place before the pandemic prompted a shutdown on production, vastly changing the writers' thoughts on how the story should end. "They came to me, and they said, ‘We can't do it. We need to change it… Eve needs to live,'" adding that the writers realized her character is "the everywoman."
And with all the tragedy in the world, the writers felt it would be "kind of really super depressing if she dies," noted Oh. So they chose to kill Villanelle, a decision she said that Comer was "very much onboard for."
The fans, on the other hand, were less than thrilled, with some pointing out how hard they were rooting for the two characters to find happiness together. "Killing Eve never questioned the age gap or the fact they were women attracted to each other, it was normalised in every way," one Twitter user wrote. "It was a bright, funny, clever, new, & a breath of fresh air. The last 2 minutes eroded that & all that history was wiped out. We've were robbed."
Even the author whose book inspired the series was upset to see how it all came to an end: "The season four ending was a bowing to convention," Luke Jennings wrote for The Guardian. "A punishing of Villanelle and Eve for the bloody, erotically impelled chaos they have caused."
Jennings imagined the series concluding with Villanelle and Eve walking "off into the sunset together," an ending that many fans would've preferred.
But Oh remains steadfast in her assertion that Villanelle had to die, previously stating, "I think one of the special things about the show is—hopefully," she said, "how satisfying it is to not get what you want, tied neatly in a bow."
Looks like we're going to have to agree to disagree on this one.
Killing Eve is streaming now on AMC+.