“We wanted to see what would happen when they were legitimately together because so much of what makes up obsession is the fantasy of it,” showrunner Emerald Fennell tells The Hollywood Reporter.
Killing Eve’s second season spent its first four episodes with the two women at its core separated and struggling to come to terms with their new status quo. But in Sunday’s outing, Smell Ya Later, Eve (Sandra Oh) and Villanelle (Jodie Comer) are finally reunited in a darkly romantic moment that leads to an unexpected twist that changes everything for the pair.
Showrunner Emerald Fennell spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about building up to the surprising team-up, the love affair at the center of the show and the necessity to challenge the pair’s mounting mutual obsession by “making it official.”
Eve’s and Villanelle’s paths have been on a collision course ever since the season one finale — when Eve stabbed Villanelle in an ornate Paris apartment — and Smell Ya Later makes good on the promise of the chase, with their cat-and-mouse game coming to a head. Fennell said it was vital that the inevitable moment came naturally: “After the stabbing and being in the proximity of each other, they needed time to recover, they needed time to just feel out what their lives are like apart. But I think the truth of it is that these women are like water going down a plug hole. They’re being sucked down and there’s no way that they’re going to stay apart.”
It was Eve’s ever-growing desperation to see Villanelle that set their paths in motion. She concocts a harebrained scheme that involves paying for a hit on herself, banking on the fact that the woman she stabbed wouldn’t repay the favor. In a scene that reflected the pair’s first meeting in season one, Villanelle appears in Eve’s kitchen in a twisted mockery of domestic bliss, where they share a (possibly poisoned) drink during a physical and psychological interaction drenched in sexual tension.
The nature of the pair’s relationship has long been a topic of conversation, but for Fennel there is no doubt that love is involved. “Villanelle overtly loves Eve, she is obsessed,” she said.
But for the other half of that pairing it’s far more complex. “Eve is still in that phase of an affair, to liken it to something more mundane, where you say to your friends, ‘Oh, my God, I hate so and so, they’re so pathetic’ and they sort of go, ‘Well, you’re talking about how you hate them an awful lot.’ Everyone else can see what’s happening, but she can’t admit it to herself. It would be too horrible for her, too awful to admit her true motives. But Villanelle is undeniably sexy, and the tension between them is undeniable. So it’s just a matter of how long it can be denied.”
The series has always played as a subversion of the obsessive detective stories that make up so much of the crime-thriller genre. In an unsettling turn, this episode tips the show over the edge into the territory of killer-detective team-up stories like Hannibal and La Mante as Eve enlists Villanelle to help her on a case, a route that Fennell and the writers decided on exploring quite early.
– Courtesy: The Hollywood Reporter
