EPISODE 711: KILLING EVE SO THAT SHE MAY LIVE
Can a Bear drive a hovercraft?
POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW
Big news in TV streaming week. Discovery finally finished its purchase of WarnerMedia, which is the company that owns Warner Brothers, HBOMax, DC Comics and a million other things. Right away a whole bunch of executives from Warner quit/were fired, including CEO Jason Kilar.
Kilar did an interview this week with Vulture about the future of streaming , which I think is definitely worth reading if you’re into that kind of stuff. His take is that there are too many streaming platforms, and eventually there’s probably going to be just three—Warner (of course), Netflix and Disney.
I think we’re reaching the point where there are definitely too many services out there. But as long as some of them are as cheap as they are, I’m not sure we’re quite yet at the point where people will begin to write them off, even if they’re not producing a ton of compelling content. Apple TV and Peacock have a monthly fee which is the cost of a cup of coffee. AMC+ had a deal a couple months ago for $2 a month; even HBO Max did 6 months for $8/month (which they’ve now extended to a year).
They do all add up. But I wonder if they don’t slip under the radar a bit more than an Amazon, Hulu, Disney, Paramount Plus, HBO and Netflix, which are all more costly. And once you get to those, I don’t know. I think Hulu tends to have pretty strong content, but it doesn’t necessarily get the same attention as the others. Amazon’s shows are far more hit and miss—also, where Hulu or Netflix asks a monthly rate and then you get all their content, on Amazon tons of stuff requires an additional payment. But does it matter? How many people are doing Amazon Prime just for their shows, I wonder, and not primarily for their free shipping and quick deliveries?
Kilar thinks Paramount will eventually go back to being a studio that produces content. But to me they are the Little Network that Could. They have two high quality, live action Star Trek shows on right now, a third about to start, and two other successful animated shows; they also have Yellowstone and its prequel 1883, Evil and The Good Fight. These are all shows that win awards, that critics like and that people love. Does Netflix have that many successes right now? They have Bridgerton, Squid Game…but then what? Midnight Mass was a miniseries. Ozark is about to end. Stranger Things comes back what, every 2 years?
And they have this distribution model of releasing everything at once, which tends to mean that the buzz around the show surges and then dies within a couple weeks. Squid Game and Midnight Mass are the very rare Netflix shows right now that stuck around for a while. Even Bridgerton—it came out less than a month ago. Are people really still talking about it? And it’s crazy that they’re not, because the show is absolutely built around episode ending twists and cliff hangers. If that show were on every week people would be going crazy. (By the way, if you haven’t seen the new season yet, Simone Ashley as Kate Sharma is a fantastic addition to the Bridgerton universe; in many ways she steals the whole thing.)
Ten years ago streaming was barely a thing. So it’s quite possible that ten years from now the landscape will be almost unrecognizable again. But what could that even mean? The death of free-to-air TV? Some sort of streaming bundling where instead of a bunch of networks you pay for a bunch of shows? Or a sort of return to the 70s and 80s where we had just three and then four networks, except now it’s three or four streamers that own everything else?
And if that’s the case, I have to say, Amazon, Disney and Warner all seem too big too fail (or in Amazon’s case maybe not important enough to the overall business?). Netflix’s catalog and international reach would seem to suggest a similar untouchability, but I think it might be more fragile than it seems. The others are all part of much bigger conglomerates; Netflix is just a streaming service. I wonder if in the longer term Apple TV, another service connected to a much larger organization, is more likely to survive, maybe even to buy Netflix’s catalog.
I just finished the series finale of Killing Eve. If you haven’t seen it yet, I don’t think I’m going to ruin what happens at the very end, but also, you know, buyer beware. (NOTE: as I wrote this it got more and more spoiler-y. I have lots of warnings as I go, but basically, if you haven’t seen the finale and want to I would not read this.)
Somewhere in the finale, it hit me that this show—which, if you don’t know it, has been about a female analyst for MI-6 who becomes obsessed with hunting down a female assassin that only she believes is real—has always been a metaphor for the experience of discovering and dealing with the fact that you’re queer. The series begins with a married woman who has this feeling that there is this incredible woman out there who is just astonishing in every way, and can’t help but hunt her down, no matter what. And that hunt burns down everything in her life, but at the end she’s alive in a whole new way.
Even the idea of that woman she’s hunting as being the world’s greatest assassin is so deliberate to the metaphor. What could better capture the danger of falling in love with a woman for a middle-aged woman who thought she was straight and is bored in her marriage? Whether anyone actually dies is beside the point; the existence of Villanelle represents death for Eve. And finally in the finale—okay, so this is a spoiler—she embraces that fully, finally giving herself over to Villanelle. And to me it’s fascinating that the two of them kiss in the middle of a road, with curves in the road close enough on either side that they could very well be run over. That, too, fits Eve’s broader arc—accepting her feelings, who she is does not end the danger that they represent. But now the main danger is the wider world, as represented by Carolyn, who says in the finale that feelings are dangerous and to be ignored. She was Eve’s hero in the first season, and maybe every season on some level. But in the end she represents the opposite pole from Villanelle. Villanelle is nothing but feeling and passion. Carolyn is where feelings go to die. Also she’s seemingly straight, but come on, that character is queer as hell.
The show ends—yeah, I’m definitely giving almost everything away now, sorry—on a boat where Eve unexpectedly has to do the wedding of a gay couple, while Villanelle finally destroys the Twelve and frees herself. And both sides of that equation are really telling. In finally accepting her feelings Eve becomes a wisdom figure for the queer community, someone who can say truthfully, I have been down this road and have learned things that may be important for others.
Meanwhile Villanelle is destroying the last trace of self-hatred that the world has taught her and weaponized for its own benefit. In some ways I think of Villanelle as more mythological, the fantasy embodiment of Eve’s truth, right down to the fact that she kills mostly men, including Eve’s husband, father figure and this season a sort of lover. But the character has been so compelling in her own right, it’s impossible to leave her at that. In fact her desire and need are so much more palpable and painful than Eve’s.
The fact that –
SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER –
--she gets killed by Carolyn at the end… man, I don’t know. I guess the show is saying that in this world that they’re all living in, betrayal and death are unavoidable. And I think I like the idea from the standpoint of saying, accepting who you are does not make everything okay. The world is still a train wreck and liable to murder you for who you are. But I don’t know that it fits the arcs of the characters. To have the series cut to “The End” from Eve screaming, alone in the Thames—It’s so strange. It almost feels like they forgot the actual story they were telling was not about spies at all.
(Although can I say, man is the spy genre a perfect vehicle for a story about homosexuality. The idea of having to wear disguises, of betrayal and codes and the danger all match up so well.)
Processing out loud here. I was actually not that interested in going back to the show when it came back on the air. (Is it me or is three seasons pretty much enough of any drama at this point?) But it went in such unexpected directions, including introducing three absolutely fantastic new characters, plus Villanelle first hallucinating herself as Jesus, then assassinating that Jesus (while Jesus-Her laughs and cheers her on). Top notch.
Now thinking about how Villanelle Jesus also fits into this metaphor. She wants to stop being who she is, and looks to Jesus as the way to do so. But that’s just repression. It’s fitting that she would look to Jesus as the best possible version of that repression, the nice version of what the institution wants her to be. But it’s also very fitting that in the end Jesus is laughing as she murders Him/Her. Killing this version of H/H is an act of liberation, which is what Jesus ultimately came here for in the first place.
As well as maybe popcorn?
Now thinking about the fact that the main character’s name is “Eve”, who Christianity has so frequently interpreted as the source of all sin because she gave in to temptation. And the temptation? To eat from a tree whose fruit was knowledge…
It’s a story that has never made any sense. Knowledge is not bad. And in this case, given the shame Adam and Eve feel afterward, the knowledge gained has always seemed deeply connected to sexuality or physicality.
Killing Eve…it’s got so many layers!
Speaking of sex, Jason Isaacs talking about Daniel Craig’s comfort with nudity is definitely wild.
I love whoever came up with the idea for this. I think it really demonstrates how easily and effectively sign could be incorporated into any story. It is so dramatic!
THREE TWEETS FOR HOLY WEEK
I really liked that last tweet. Someone else on Twitter today was pointing out, this is a week where anti-Semitism tends to rise, as Christians hear the stories of “Jews killing Jesus” and decide to “get even,” I guess?
It’s nuts, but also, is it? Should Christians really be shocked to hear that people might get the wrong idea from readings during our highest holy days that blame “the Jews” for Jesus’ death?
Why do we even continue to describe his persecutors like that, when in fact he was a Jew himself, and so were most of his followers? Is it really so hard to say Sanhedrin or Pharisees instead, or “the chief priest and some of his advisors?” It wasn’t like there was a poll of all the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem, or Israel for that matter.
Chrissy Stroop is a writer whose work on Twitter I really like. She did a thread this weekend on how Christianity has been bad for other peoples. At the end she retweeted something she’d written a couple months ago. It’s dead on.
I hope you all have a wonderful week. (And if you’re Christian, Happy Easter; if you’re Jewish, Happy Passover!)
Next Sunday is Easter. I’m going to take the week off, but I’ll be back on April 25th! May your holiday be filled with Cadbury eggs and that green plastic grass!