‘Killing Eve’ Finally Brought Villanelle Home, and it was Wild

Killing Eve Season 3 Episode 5 takes us inside the heart of Villanelle (Jodie Comer). The bottle episode, following the brilliant assassin as she confronts the mother who abandoned her years ago, is an offbeat entry to the series that slides from the absurd to the hopeful to the utterly bleak. After reuniting with her family, “Oksana” starts to feel like she might really belong somewhere until she and her mother have a harrowingly dark conversation that reveals that Villanelle’s darkness might have been not only inherited from her mother, but inadvertently nurtured.

Killing Eve follows MI6 officer Eve Polastri as she chases Villanelle, a dangerous — and seductive — assassin, across Europe. From the beginning of the series the two share an intense obsession with each other, but at the end of Season 2, Eve rejects Villanelle’s declaration of love. Now, in Season 3, Villanelle is trying to figure out why she is the way she is. This journey takes her home, to Russia, where in Episode 5, “Are You From Pinner?”, she is reunited with her family.

When Villanelle arrives at her family’s new home, she is surprised to learn that her mother Tatiana (Evgenia Dodina) has remarried and adopted a stepson. She’s also had another son by this husband, a sweet boy named Bor’ka (Temi Blaev) who is obsessed with Elton John. Through conversations with this long-last family, including her brother Pytor (Rob Feldman), Villanelle begins to realize that her mother might be the source of toxicity in her life. When Villanelle finally confronts Tatiana about this — and about why she abandoned her to an orphanage, and continues to crush the souls of her brothers — it results in a pitch black conversation.

Tatiana tells Villanelle she must leave, saying, “You are not bringing your darkness into this house.”

Villanelle counters: “You are the darkness. You have always been the darkness.”

In the end, Villanelle decides she will kill this woman who literally created her and won’t take credit for it. She murders her mother and blows up the house, sparing only her brothers Pytor and Bor’ka. She leaves them both a fortune, imploring Bor’ka to “GO SEE ELTON!”

Killing Eve showrunner Suzanne Heathcote told Decider that she knew from the beginning that the season had to have an episode all about Villanelle. “I really felt like this season we earned seeing more of what makes her tick. We’ve obviously seen her at home, alone, with Constantine. But we’ve really not, up to this point, seen anything deeper than that in terms of her background,” Heathcote said.

The episode also begs a question. Who is right? Was Tatiana right to reject her murderous daughter, or did Tatiana lack the love necessary to be a good mother to all three of her children?

“Yeah, the relationship with her mother is so darkly complex,” Heathcote said. “It really is that sort of nature/nurture question mark. Villanelle obviously has her own sort of dark psychology, and was it the mother’s fear of her daughter or is it that Villanelle has inherited something from her mother, that her mother sees in her daughter and that’s why she’s so scared?”

“I definitely felt that her mother, there was a darkness in her mother that you see by the end of the episode. That it’s not just Villanelle’s interpretation,” Heathcote said.

Indeed, one of the best revelations of the episode is the tender love Villanelle seems to really feel for her brothers. She wants to protect them both, particularly Bor’ka, whom she can already see her mother poisoning with cruelty.

“I think that’s also why the relationship with her brothers is [what it is] because she understands what it is to have been raised by this women,” Heathcote said. “She’s super-duper smart, Villanelle, and that intelligence. she can’t help but see and understand. She just understands the manipulations of the mother better than anyone.”

“Because she has some of those qualities herself,” Heathcote said.

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