'Killing Eve' Season 2 Finale Recap: "You're Mine"
Killing Eve ends much like it began, with Eve and Villanelle once again at odds, but this time, everything else has changed too.
Eve: Why are you in Rome?
Carolyn: I'm not, I'm at home with a bad cold, tucked up in bed watching 'Homes Under The Hammer.'
Last week's episode ended with Villanelle and Aaron having a heart to heart moment as only psychopaths can, staring out into the middle distance from either end of the couch. However, caught up in the obsessive moment, fans might have missed a critical detail, which is that Aaron reveals why he's obsessed with Billie. It turns out it's not being hit on the nose with a book, or their shared social creepiness. The answer is far more simple: He knows she's not Billie. Where Kenny would have made that watertight social media presence, Hugo did not, and the holes in her story are fascinating to Peel.
This is important, since last week Aaron also saw Villanelle mic up, and knows she's working for someone. Now, it seems he's figured out at least who she is, if not why she's here. When he asks if she'd like to see today's potential buyer, the photo he shows her is of her handler from earlier this season, Raymond. To Villanelle's credit, she doesn't flinch, but she panics enough to use the safe word. "What an interesting gentleman!"
Eve is very lucky Villanelle does this because it gives her just enough warning before the gunshots fire outside the hotel door. The entire operation is over. We don't see who it is who enters the room, as Eve is hiding under the bed, but thankfully they get a phone call before finding her and leave the room. Hugo, meanwhile, is bleeding out on the floor. Eve has no time for that now, or to call in the cavalry to get him fixed up. All she can think about getting to Villanelle and rescuing her before Aaron kills her, even if it means promising a man who is part of the assassination team that she'll meet him for a date when she "gets off her shift at the hotel" at 6 p.m.
That running assumption by white men that an Asian lady is The Help was the Ghost's M.O. Now Eve takes it up as her own, using it to get inside Aaron's place, before freaking out completely and blowing Villanelle's cover once and for all in front of their quarry. Not that Villanelle is all that worried. Despite an initial pretense that she would kill Eve for Aaron, she has no plans to do anything of the sort. Eve, after all, dropped everything and rescued her. It's everything Villanelle ever wanted. She's so pleased, she kills Aaron, and lets him watch himself die. It's the first glimpse of something catching his interest viewers have ever seen, or ever will.
Villanelle is ready to roll out with Eve and escape, but Eve, foolish as ever, insists on going back to the hotel for the recordings of Aaron and his attempted sales. She seems to believe this will somehow clear Villanelle for having killed Aaron, or make the MI-6 happy. Villanelle rolls her eyes but eventually agrees to let Eve go back, only for Eve to find everything is gone. Hugo, the tapes, her stuff, everything, cleared out.
It's not the mysterious Twelve who took it either. Carolyn is already here, and upon learning Aaron is dead, sighs and shrugs. Well, if one will hire serial killers to go undercover, bodies will happen. Eve sits there with the slowly dawning realization this was the result Carolyn always wanted. Jess, Martin, and Kenny warned her all season that none of this added up. It turns out Kenny knew this was the expected outcome; his new job is on the clean-up crew, who planned for this before they ever left for Rome. The point was, has been, and continues to be using Eve to do the dirty work of the MI-6 with maximum plausible deniability. Now it's done, and Carolyn expects Eve will once again be brought to heel, forced into good behavior over her guilt for "screwing things up" until the next time Carolyn needs to use her again.
Eve is horrified, but she's just as much enraged to discover Carolyn has used her like this. Carolyn sighs. If that's how Eve is going to be, she will cut her loose too. Turns out that's because Raymond is waiting in the wings to do in Villanelle, and if Carolyn's package to Konstantin holds what viewers think it does, Eve is next on the list.
Villanelle has already figured the former part out. After cutting Konstantin loose, she was ready to take off with Eve, until she found Raymond. Unsurprisingly, that's not going well. Eve comes out of the hotel room to see in horror that Villanelle is being strangled. Having just chosen running with Villanelle over returning with MI-6, Eve has no choice but to save her life, using the only tool available: An axe. For a first kill, it's a messy one. Eve spends the next hour in shock, as Villanelle leads her away, cooing at Eve the whole time at how proud she is, her girl did it! She killed someone! Now they are in this together! Partners! Lovers! Friends! Villanelle will kill people for money, and Eve can be there with her! It's not until Villanelle pulls out a gun she has casually hidden in her pocket that Eve's brain finally clears.
If Villanelle had a gun, why didn't she shoot Raymond? Because, like Carolyn, she was trying to get Eve to perform. And like with Carolyn, Eve fell for it. She murdered a man with an axe because that's what Villanelle wanted, just like she led Villanelle to kill Aaron because that's what Carolyn wanted. It's all too much. Eve starts backing away, realizing she's suddenly out in the middle of the ocean and the shores of sanity are gone. She's face to face with a beautiful crazy person who is screaming at her, "You're mine!"
Eve tries to run, but Villanelle isn't having it. She points and shoots, and Eve falls. As a bookend to Season 1's finale stabbing of Villanelle by Eve, it's an escalation for sure.
