Killing Eve Review: Beautiful Monster (Season 3 Episode 7)
Helene’s speech about chaos on Killing Eve Season 3 Episode 7, “Beautiful Monster,” is an appropriate opening for an episode that’s definitely the most chaotic of the season — and possibly of the entire series.
Between the desperate final stage of Villanelle and Konstantin’s escape plan, Eve’s quest to track down Villanelle, and Carolyn’s dawning realization that she may be next on The Twelve’s hit list, there’s a lot of plot packed into this hour of television.
It’s fast-paced and eventful, but very little is actually resolved. By the time the credits roll, “Beautiful Monster” feels more like a prologue to the coming finale than a satisfying episode in its own right.
That’s not to say the episode isn’t enjoyable. In fact, it has everything that makes Killing Eve so rightfully beloved: Eve’s fond obsession with an assassin who has caused her pretty much nothing but grief; Villanelle’s outrageous outfits and biting one-liners; the tantalizing possibility that the two of them might reconnect, hash things out, or at least angrily kiss while throwing punches at one another on public transit.
The central appeal of the show has always been the relationship between these two characters. It’s not the action sequences or the espionage that make things thrilling, but rather the show’s willingness to examine desire in its most sensual and psychologically transgressive forms.
Throughout the series Villanelle has written her desire for Eve on the bodies of her victims, leaving mutilations behind like love letters. In receiving them, Eve is torn between disgust and reciprocity.
She wavers between her own violent impulses and her messianic conviction that she’s supposed to save the world from Villanelle — or, as in Season 3, a burgeoning sense that perhaps it’s Villanelle she needs to save from the world
At times, “Beautiful Monster” manages to hone in on that dynamic in a way that has been sorely lacking through the rest of the season.
After a long digression into investigating Kenny’s murder, Eve is back on Villanelle’s trail. We finally get to see how her relationship with Villanelle has changed her, or perhaps simply accelerated her progress down a dark road she was always bound to walk eventually.
When she finds Dasha lying half-dead in the forest, Eve is ready to kill her without compunction. The feral glint in her eyes as she steps on Dasha’s chest, increasing pressure until she hears ribs start to crack, is the same look Villanelle used to have as she watched the life drain from her latest victim.
It’s terrifying, horrific, and undeniably powerful, much like the connection between these two characters.
Desire has opened a door for Eve, or rather a door inside of her, and she seems to have made peace with what she found on the other side.
As we saw in Killing Eve Season 3 Episode 6, “End of Game,” Villanelle has also changed: she is softer and more earnest in ways that complement Eve’s darker transformation.
The way they finally reconnect in “Beautiful Monster,” with a longing stare and a gentle wave, emphasizes how the nature of their desire for one another has likewise taken on a new dimension.
In past seasons that desire was possessive and destructive, fueling a mutual compulsion to find and trap and tear each other open to see what came pouring out.
Having now exhausted those impulses, the heady, sexually-charged tension between them has dissipated and been replaced by something softer but no less potent: a longing for a sense of refuge and acceptance, which they seem uniquely suited to provide for one another.
When Killing Eve focuses on these two characters and their parallel, inverted narratives, it still feels thrilling and singular, a story unlike any other on television.
But when it becomes too plot-heavy, laden with details the audience can barely follow and dots that don’t quite connect, the show loses momentum. As a detective procedural, it’s average at best.
Eve asks a question at the beginning of the episode that feels crucial, not just for the characters but for the show’s story as a whole:
Eve: Why did we start this? Any of it?
Carolyn: Information, intelligence-gathering. To compile a comprehensive Filofax of despots, maniacs, and extremists, in case we want to throw a Christmas bash. That’s what we do, isn’t it?
Eve: It might have been, once, but not now, after everything that’s happened. After everything we’ve lost.
When Killing Eve disappoints, it’s because the lack of narrative purpose has become difficult to ignore. But with characters as original and compelling as Eve and Villanelle at the center, it’s certainly never boring.
What did you think of this episode of Killing Eve? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
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Killing Eve airs Sundays at 9/8c on BBC America and AMC.
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Ariel Udel
Ariel fell in love with storytelling on the night Flight 815 crashed on a mysterious island, and has been blogging about television ever since. She has an affinity for messy female anti-heroes and an enduring love of Battlestar Galactica, Xena: Warrior Princess, Lost, and Halt and Catch Fire.