‘Killing Eve’ Series Finale: Showrunner Laura Neal Breaks Down the Deadly — and Romantic — Moments

After four seasons, that’s a wrap on Killing Eve. Spoilers for the series finale “Hello, Losers”, past this point, but after finally kissing (for real), teaming up and wiping out villainous organization The Twelve, the show had one more card left to play. Specifically Carolyn Martens (Fiona Shaw) gave up Villanelle (Jodie Comer) and Eve’s (Sandra Oh) location, and called out a hit. Villanelle was shot, with Eve as collateral damage, and Villanelle died as Eve watched. And then: THE END flashed on screen, as Eve floated in the Thames and screamed.

“We spoke about that moment of Eve bursting out from the water and screaming really early on in discussions about the ending, and really early on with Sandra,” showrunner Laura Neal told Decider. “It felt really important to us, that moment, because it signals Eve’s rebirth, and we really wanted a sense of her washing off everything that had happened in the past four seasons and being able to begin again, but take everything that she has learnt and everything that Villanelle has given her into a new life.”

Before the show decided not to go with the title and instead kill Villanelle, though, the duo went on a road trip towards their destiny, staying with an in-love couple in a cabin, sharing a sleeping bag, pissing on the side of the road, arguing over fries, and generally exploring what their relationship could have been like, if they had a real relationship.

But destiny did call, and the two headed to a wedding cruise which secretly hid a meeting of The Twelve. While Eve stalled by officiating the wedding, Villanelle slaughtered the organization, effectively ending the over-arching plot of the series, and freeing both of them from the threat that has been hanging over their necks since the series began.

So why did Carolyn have Villanelle — and potentially Eve — killed, in the final minutes? It’s not explicitly stated, and some fans have speculated that Carolyn was the leader of The Twelve the whole time. But more likely, a key line in the finale between Carolyn and her prospective protégé Pam (Anjana Vasan) points to the true answer. After dispatching her rival Hugo (Edward Bluemel), Carolyn and Pam sit on a bench drinking iced coffee and looking over the SIS Building, home to MI6. Carolyn was fired from MI6 in the Season 4 premiere, so Pam turns and asks, “Feeling homesick?” To which Carolyn responds, “Surprisingly, yes. But you don’t go back to MI6 empty-handed.” What do you get the spy organization that has everything? How about public enemy number one, aka the woman who just slaughtered an entire cadre of assassins in the middle of London, aka Villanelle? The show ends before we get confirmation either way, but chances are Carolyn’s path back to the Russia Desk is all but assured.

To find out what went into the decisions to end the show the way it did, Villanelle and Eve’s romantic relationship, and how it all ties back to the missing time between Seasons 3 and 4, read on.

Decider: I want to work backwards, if that’s okay with you. How did you arrive at that final shot, with Eve screaming in the river, the stark “THE END” letters on screen?

Laura Neal: We spoke about that moment of Eve bursting out from the water and screaming really early on in discussions about the ending, and really early on with Sandra. It felt really important to us, that moment, because it signals Eve’s rebirth, and we really wanted a sense of her washing off everything that had happened in the past four seasons and being able to begin again, but take everything that she has learnt and everything that Villanelle has given her into a new life. We really wanted to get that scream right, we wanted it to be a scream of re-entry into the world, rather than a scream of like, just of loss, or anger, or fear, or any of the other things that are in that scream. I think that’s what comes across, and I hope what people take from that is a kind of like, almost like a raw scream of survival rather than of anything else.

Villanelle dies, Eve is left alive. Were there other possibilities you bandied around there, in terms of who would die and who would live?

Yeah. Every combination of who dies, who lives you can imagine we talked about. We talked about both of them dying, we talked about both of them living, we talked about Eve dying and Villanelle surviving and we gave those endings real discussion and real thought and I think I even wrote some of them. But this version of the ending really came from loads of discussion with Sandra and Jodie and the other writers, and this version felt like the most truthful version of an ending that we could come up with. If you look at their trajectory and you look at where Eve and Villanelle began at the start of Season 1, and you look at where they are at the start of Season 4, and you track them through season 4, it felt right to us that Eve survives and Villanelle dies, but dies in a way that feels, I think, triumphant for her, because she achieves something that she wanted to achieve at the very beginning of Season 4 in the moment of her death, which is to do something good.

What about the choice to have Carolyn call the shot there? Why was it important to leave her in this place?

Carolyn becomes so entwined with Eve and Villanelle’s story and she’s become such an important character in the show. It felt really right that she was behind the ending in some way. We love the idea as well of Carolyn being someone you can never quite get to grips with, even when you think you know her, she’ll go and do something that surprises you. So to have her be the one who’s given the order at the end to shoot at Eve and Villanelle felt like a final nod to Carolyn’s unknowability, I suppose, and we just enjoyed the idea as well of her clawing her way back to power and status, and being a cyclical journey for her.

The whole sequence of Eve and Villanelle under the water, them reaching for each other, it looked like these bloody angel wings were radiating out from Villanelle. What went into that choice of images?

I’m so pleased you picked up on that because I was desperate to have a nod to the Villanelle of Episodes 1 and 2. So that was a very deliberate decision to give her those bloody angel wings. That was something I wanted to do because I wanted to have this sense of Villanelle transcending to another realm. So rather than dying, and that being the end of Villanelle, I wanted a sense of like, “Of course Villanelle will continue to exist, just not on this Earthly plane.” We spoke a lot about Villanelle being too big to contain in the Earth, and the only place she can go after this is somewhere more celestial. That was a deliberate attempt to make her death feel transcendent.

One of the things that really stuck with me was the montage of Villanelle killing the Twelve, while Eve is dancing at the wedding. My take was that this was doubling down on that the show, it’s about the two of them… Not even showing the faces of the Twelve means it doesn’t matter who they are, but what they meant. Is that sort of on the right track?

Yep, definitely, 100%. That’s actually one of my favorite moments in the episode, that cutting between Eve and Villanelle. It feels like a moment where both of them are at their happiest. Eve has rediscovered life in that moment, and she’s amongst human beings, people like her, and she’s remembering what the world has to offer, what the normal world has to offer. And then Villanelle is in the place where she feels happiest, which is blood-soaked, steeped in killing. It feels like a really triumphant moment for both of them, and I love the juxtaposition between Eve dancing and Villanelle killing.

This whole thing on the boat takes place at this gay wedding. A lot of the episode, from my interpretation, is about walking them through, “Here’s what our relationship would be like if we had this relationship.” Is this metaphorically their wedding as well?

I think you’re right in terms of, every scene we were trying to link it someway to Eve and Villanelle’s relationship. The wedding is no different. Certainly, when Eve is doing her wedding speech, really she’s talking about her and Villanelle. So no, that’s an entirely accurate reading of that scene, and of the episode as a whole. And we like the idea of them toying with different versions of their future. So when they’re in the van together, they’re kind of like, “this is what a sort of mundane future would like for us, can we do the domestic? Can we be like Maggie and Donnie?” And the answer I think is, “No, we can’t.” It’s almost like they’re testing out what their relationship is destined for — and whether it’s destined for a happy ending, or whether it’s destined to explode in a kind of blaze of glory. We obviously go towards the latter.

Jumping way back to the middle of the episode where Villanelle and Eve finally kiss for real, versus the very quick bus kiss from the previous season… There’s a ton of focus on the physical aspect from the fans, and a lot of nervousness leading into the finale. How did you eventually arrive on how these two characters were going to finally physically consummate their relationship?

We discussed loads of versions of it essentially, and loads of different placements of it as well in the episode. That moment has moved around a hell of a lot. The reason that I settled on it there is because it felt subversive, it felt surprising to just have it in that very low-key moment, actually. We kept calling it “the piss kiss” because they just had their piss on the side of the road. So we had the bus kiss, then we had the piss kiss. And it felt really true to the nature of the show, the tone of the show, to have it in this entirely unexpected moment and this entirely unromantic way, just on the side of the road. It was something we really played around with, and Jodie and Sandra played around with, and we didn’t know it was right until we got that take on the day, and that take was so brilliant that that was the moment where I was like, “Ah, we’ve got it now.”

It’s funny hearing you say this, fans are gonna be like “Release all the other takes! Release them online!”

[Laughs] There isn’t, actually! That kiss was a one take kiss. I don’t think there’s loads of takes of the piss kiss. But there’s definitely scripts where there are other kisses in other places.

Before that we get several sequences which I’ll describe as almost straight out of fanfic in terms of, they’re caught in the rain, they’re forced to share a cabin, there’s only one bed and they have to share the sleeping bag together. Why go this route? What inspired that particular sequence of events?

We were playing around with it a little bit. We were like, we wanted to tease the audience, we wanted to tease ourselves as writers, we wanted to tease these characters, we wanted to see them put in those kind of awkward situations and stress test their chemistry and how long it would take them to break, and what’s the ingredient for quiet to see them finally come together. So really, it was just about playing, I suppose. I really wanted to have fun in the final episode. It’s so tempting to go heavy because you know it’s the end of these two’s relationship, but I really wanted to find the joy as well in the two of them, and the way they interact before we say goodbye to them for good.

It’s already up on AMC+ as we’re speaking, but people on broadcast are going to be seeing Episode 7 for the first time tonight, where Konstantin is killed by Pam. Why take him off the board before the finale?

We didn’t know we were going to kill him. Konstantin wasn’t always fated to die, but we felt, when we were talking about how to end his story, he was always someone who manages to wriggle out of situations he’s put himself in, or he finds himself in, and we wanted to find him a situation where he can’t wriggle out anymore… That felt really interesting to us, and really sad. And then we got excited by the idea of, how we can make a death fitting Konstantin’s humor and his warmth, so that’s where the pizza cutter death came from. Part of the reason we wanted to do it in Episode 7 is that we wanted to have this focus on Eve and Villanelle in Episode 8, so it was a way of allowing us to zoom in on the Eve and Villanelle relationship, in that final episode.

Taking a step way, way back, I’ve seen a lot of fans talk about how you had the time dash past the bridge scene at the end of Season 3. You don’t exactly return to it, but their final scene is in front of the bridge, so is that you eventually looping back to, if they had continued the scene, that’s what would’ve happened in some form?

It’s the same bridge, so that’s a definite, deliberate reference point to the end of Season 3, and when we were trying to find a location for the very final scene, we went through a few before we came up with Tower Bridge. And then when we built that Tower Bridge, it just felt really right. In terms of the time jump between end of Season 3 and start of Season 4, for me it just felt exciting to hit the ground running. I liked the idea of not knowing what had happened in the interim and finding these two characters in different emotional places and having to play catch up as an audience member. I think you can see the thread between the end of Season 3 and the start of Season 4, like Villanelle says she wants it all to stop on the bridge, and then she’s found herself in an entirely different place, and she’s moved on emotionally. So that makes sense to me. We started to see Eve descend into a darker, slightly more nihilistic Eve on the bridge, and she continues that at the start of Season 4, as well. So I think the emotional threads are there and I was just excited by jumping forward a little bit and seeing them in unexpected places.

Earlier on this week the news broke that a Carolyn focused spinoff is in the works… Are you involved in that? Or is this your final note with Killing Eve?

I think this is my final note with Killing Eve. And I don’t know anything about that spinoff, I’m afraid.

You’ve very publicly talked about how you were a fan of Killing Eve, and now here you are finalizing the show. What has this overall experience been like for you?

It’s been emotional, it’s been exciting, it’s been incredibly personally fulfilling. It’s been hard at times. But it’s also been thrilling. I run out of adjectives to describe it, it’s been a rollercoaster and I’m just absolutely delighted to have been able to end my favorite TV show. What fan can say that, really?

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Where to watch Killing Eve